RECOVERY grants are now available for farmers in the Shires of Lake Grace, Ravensthorpe and Swan severely affected by this year’s summer flooding.
More than 300 millimetres of rain fell in four days in parts of the State in February, damaging infrastructure, roads and productive land.
Standard recovery grants of up to $10,000 are now available for primary producers in the hardest hit areas of Ravensthorpe and Lake Grace, while those in the City of Swan are eligible for Exceptional Circumstances recovery grants of up to $25,000.
The funding will be provided through WA Natural Relief and Recovery Arrangements (WANDRRA) to cover immediate restoration and clean-up costs.
Ravensthorpe Shire chief executive Ian Fitzgerald said while he welcomed the funding, he was disappointed farmers in his area weren’t eligible for the same level of assistance as those in Perth’s east.
He said the estimated damage bill for farmers within the Ravensthorpe Shire would exceed $18 million.
“It’s a little bit disappointing from my point of view that our guys who are broadacre farmers get $10,000 and then those in Swan get $25,000,” Mr Fitzgerald said.
“All due respect to the guys in Swan, but $10,000 is not going to go very far down here compared to $20,000 up there I would have thought.
“It will give our farmers a bit of a boost, but I’ve heard of up to $500,000 worth of damage on one particular farm.
“Fencing and roads are washed out internally and things like that, so when you look at that sort of scale, $10,000 doesn’t go very far.”
Owen Grahame’s 9000 hectare property falls in both the Lake Grace and Ravensthorpe shires.
His mixed cropping and sheep farm was hit with a 300mm downpour in February, washing away valuable topsoil, knocking down fences and creating gullies in paddocks.
Mr Grahame said the initial cost of the flood exceeded $100,000, but the ongoing indirect effects would be far greater.
“We’ve had to clean up all of the erosion and there’s a lot of the fencing,” Mr Grahame said.
“The gullies, some of them are up to 100 metres wide and a couple of feet deep and hundreds of thousands of tonnes of topsoil are all down in the dams, and all down the bottom of the hill.
“From when we had flood damage in 2000 – which did nowhere near this amount of damage but it did a similar sort of thing just on lesser of a scale – it probably took 10 years to actually get those parts of the paddock back to producing reasonable crop again.”
Mr Grahame said excessive damage to crops and tracks had forced him to reduce his cropping program by 500ha this year.
“We’ve still got sheep so it’s not too bad in that regard for us, but if you were just cropping you would have just had to have found a way to get it all done and get it all croppable.
“We’re only just finishing seeding now, normally we’re finished weeks ago but it has just taken so long to get every paddock back to be able to seed it.”
Dunn Rock grower Darren Wiech received 230mm on his 4000ha mixed cropping and sheep farm over four days in February, and the impact is still being felt.
Mr Wiech said the initial damage bill on his property – which falls in the Ravensthorpe Shire – was at least $70,000, and the recovery grant would assist in covering the cost of 10 kilometres of fence reparations.
“I spent $30,000 on fencing and I spent $15,000 to push up gravel and to help fill in tracks,” he said.
“Basically it has just cost us so much time, the workman has been on the machinery just filling in gullies and stuff like that, just so we could physically seed paddocks.
“We’ve been organising and putting in posts and organising fencing machinery and all of that, so in the middle of seeding we had to knock off for a couple of days so we could fix some bad paddocks of gullies, just so we could physically get the air seeder through.”
Mr Wiech said approximately eight per cent of his cropping program had been compromised, but the impact would have been far greater had he not received assistance from volunteer-based organisation BlazeAid.
BlazeAid works across regional Australia, helping repair fences and infrastructure damaged in natural disasters.
“Before BlazeAid came around it would have been 30pc that we were going to have to change, because as a farmer you physically can’t do all of your fencing in a couple of months but they’ve been a big help really,” Mr Wiech said.
