Community BBQ supports storm-affected farmers

More than 100 farmers, lifestyle block owners and supporters attended a community barbecue, organised by a rural collaboration group, in support of flood-ravaged farmers at Kaipara Flats Sports Club on Monday, February 27. Coordinator Mike Borrie from Fonterra in Whangarei said this was one of several throughout the north designed to get affected farmers together and to put them in contact with support providers and agencies at a difficult time. Members of the collaboration group include Federated Farmers, Beef + Lamb NZ, DairyNZ, Fonterra, FMG, Ballance, MPI, NZ Police, Rural Support Trust and others. Meat companies AFFCO, Silver Fern Farms and Greenlea are providing meat for the events. The horrific damage caused in different North Island regions by the cyclones and heavy rain events since the beginning of the year has led people to focus mostly on West Auckland, Northland and more recently Hawkes Bay and Tairawhiti. But it has been less appreciated just how badly North Auckland has been hit by massive slips, road closures and damage to properties between Tauhoa and Puhoi, covering the area between SH16 in the west and SH1 in the east. The Puhoi Store and Pub were also flooded. The area has seen more than a metre of rain over the first two months of this year.

Many of the farms have suffered hundreds of thousands of dollars’ damage and face several years of remediation work. Kaipara Hills farmer and AFFCO meat buyer Brett Innes described the path of the late January downpour, which caused the most damage, although Cyclone Gabrielle and the subsequent February storms worsened an already bad situation, with more slips, washouts and destruction of fencing. The January rain event which produced 350mm of rain followed a path from Tauhoa, over Kaipara Hills, across the river and beyond and also flooded Auckland’s west coast beaches and airport. According to Innes, the sudden downpour started at Wayne Mason’s farm and continued on its way through farms owned by Danny and Charmaine Lewis at Tauhoa, Scott and

Brett Innes, then across the Hoteo River to properties belonging to Steven and Richard Dill, Peter Anich and Tony Rodgers and others, before heading towards the back of Warkworth and south to Puhoi.

The impact on some of these farms was enormous; even before Gabrielle, Steven Dill said he couldn’t yet get his head round the damage or begin to assess just how many thousands of dollars it would take to repair.

Tony Rodgers’ yards were partly destroyed with slips over a metre deep and part of his woolshed taken out. Peter Anich is one of the few to have insured his fences, but access points, crossings and culverts are all blocked, while he had started to repair one of the culverts only for the Friday downpour to undo his work; riparian planting and wetlands have all been destroyed. He is only able to take a short-term approach, until the weather improves and he can reach inaccessible parts of his farm.

At the other end of Woodcocks Road, Peter Scott farms 200 acres where he finishes bulls and lambs. He reckons he got away quite lightly as he lost no stock, having sent everything he could to the works three days earlier, but all his fences were destroyed by huge amounts of forestry slash from Moir Hill swept down the Kourawhero Stream, which he described as a torrent more like the Waikato River. He reckons this year is the worst he has seen in 50 years of farming, although he is optimistic a bit of good weather will see the grass still grow before winter.

Closer to town between Kaipara Flats Road and Woodcocks Road, the Blythens have lost eight hay paddocks where the grass has died, although they still have two left that they hope will dry out so they can make a small amount of winter feed. They lost 40 sheep during the worst of the flooding, but access to parts of their property because of the sheer amount of tree branches and silt makes it hard to repair all the broken fencing.

Summer 2022/3 is now officially over before it even arrived, but for this part of the world, as for several others in the North Island, it will go down in the record books for all the wrong reasons. Local farmers are faced with years of work and financial impact to recover from it.

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