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the official magazine of australia's sugarcane industry
COUNTING THE COST BY RENEE CLUFF Record-breaking floodwaters from ex Tropical Cyclone Jasper have left a trail of destruction on cane farms between Ingham and Mossman. Matt Watson’s description of this summer’s weather in Far North Queensland sums up the situation he and many other growers have experienced. “It’s been a full-on wet season,” he succinctly said. The CANEGROWERS Mossman Chairman is still trying to properly assess the damage, after the deluge from ex Tropical Cyclone Jasper was closely followed by a very active monsoon trough. “There are plenty of banks washed out, trees down over headlands. I’m trying to fix roads so I can get in and out of the farm. I’m trying to repair tractors that went under water but with the monsoon now here, it’s too wet to get out to do any farm work. “There are some really big chunks of the crop that are a total write-off and there are holes big enough to fit a harvester in, but the cane that’s not too close to the river is actually looking pretty good. “Higher up the Daintree River, it looks like a bomb’s gone off. There are massive trees that have been washed down, big sections of bank and rainforest completely washed away. “It was the first time water has been through the mill in the 130 years it’s been there and it was 400mm deep, so switchboards have had water through them. There’s a skeleton crew working
tirelessly to do what they can. The rail infrastructure is also in shambles.” While Mossman District copped the brunt of the December deluge, parts of the Cairns and Innisfail regions also received seven-day rainfall totals above two metres, while the Tully and Herbert River regions had flooding, too. Don Reghenzani farms in the Cairns District on the Mulgrave River at Fishery Falls. He described the situation as ‘the perfect storm’, after losing several blocks of both plant and ratooning cane. “It was a very wet planting season, so planting was late and some of it got flooded and then it was really dry, so everything lined up to keep the cane smaller,” he explained. “Then the wet season came too early. “It was a bloody disaster. A lot of the plant cane and ratoons were just sitting in water too long. “Drains got filled in by the wash and had to be cleaned out, there was a lot of erosion on headlands and collapses on banks.” At Brendan Calleja’s farm in South Johnstone near Innisfail, rushing water gouged out paddocks while dumping tonnes of sand in paddocks. “The South Johnstone River here was the highest it’s been in 50-odd years or more,” he said. “It jumped the banks and came through one of the blocks and started swirling. It made more or less two big canyons, probably eight to ten feet deep and 50 metres long. Where it didn’t physically gouge it out, the flooding deposited a fair bit of silt,
