Floods hit production of dairy farm home-grown feed

About 800 dairy farms across Victoria, Tasmania and NSW have been hit by floods in the past three weeks.

Farmers have been forced to dump milk while processors have been affected by power outages and road closures.

The cost is expected to rise steeply in coming months with ongoing feed shortages and animal health issues to continue to hit farm production and profitability.

Farmers also face enormous costs to clean up and restore infrastructure damaged in the floods.

And the disaster is far from over with flood waters continuing to spread across northern Victoria and fresh threats in central and southern NSW.

The Bureau of Meteorology is forecasting the wet conditions to continue well into summer with the La Nina system persisting until February.

READ MORE: Floods, pandemics, wars and market forces: what's driving up the price of milk

Dairy Australia issues manager Ashlee Hammond is co-ordinating the dairy industry's national response to the flood crisis.

She said the northern Victorian region was the hardest hit.

The 600 dairy farms in the Goulburn Murray Irrigation District were all impacted in some way.

This ranged from farms that had been inundated and infrastructure damaged to those affected by road closures or where waterlogged paddocks were hampering home-grown feed production.

The full extent of the damage in that region was still not known as farms were continuing to go under water as the floods moved north west.

In Gippsland about 30 farms had been impacted by floods, primarily along the Snowy River near Orbost, Vic.

In NSW last week about 13 farms between Forbes and Cowra in the central west of the state were severely impacted by flooding along the Lachlan River, while two dairy farms around Wagga were impacted by the Murrumbidgee River flooding, including one that had water in their dairy.

Central and north-western Tasmanian farms were hit by floods in mid-October, primarily along the Meander, Mercy and Leven rivers.

About 150 Tasmanian farms were impacted with about 50 suffering severe impacts, including damage to fences, pumps and laneways.

Ms Hammond said ongoing availability of home-grown feed would be the biggest challenge in all regions affected by flooding.

"The top three issues are fodder, fodder, fodder," she said.

The impact was not just from the direct loss of fodder stored on farm or paddocks being under water, but that there were next-to-no opportunities now to make silage or hay across most of northern Victoria and southern NSW.

The window to plant summer crops was also narrowing with farmers hamstrung by waterlogged paddocks that could not yet be accessed by machinery.

The wet winter and spring had already delayed forage harvest on many farms.

The floods had severely degraded the quality of fodder - so even if silage or hay could be harvested, it would be of lower quality.

Ms Hammond said this impact would be more severe than felt after the devastating 2011 and 2016 floods.

The timing of these floods was particularly bad - coming when many farms were hitting peak spring production and before most had harvested fodder.

The feed challenge for farms was likely to continue through until autumn.

Herd health issues were also an ongoing concern for farmers.

Farms were reporting increased mastitis, lameness and pneumonia in their animals, Ms Hammond said.

"There is growing concerns around the current state of the stress of animals, so ... there is a bit of a concern that joining rates won't be as high," she said.

Vets were also facing issues operating in the flooded regions - including difficulties getting on to farms and shortages of some products as a result of supply chain disruptions.

Ms Hammond said farmer mental health was a major concern as people dealt with the floods.

Many dairy farmers were already fatigued as they managed ongoing labour shortages in the industry.

The labour shortage was going to create additional challenges in having sufficient staff to undertake clean up and repairs on farm.

READ MORE: Norco introduces phone mental health support for dairy farmers

Processors in flooded areas, particularly northern Victoria, were continuing to deal with issues.

The slow-moving flood waters continue to lead to road closures that were forcing milk tankers to take longer routes to pick up milk.

Road and bridge damage continued to create access issues for tankers.

Ms Hammond said processors were continuing to work together to try to overcome some of these challenges, including having one tanker collect milk from neighbouring farms, rather than have several tankers from different companies drive into each flooded region.

Some processors had been hard hit at the height of the crisis with power outages and staff shortages, as people were unable to travel through floodwaters to get to work.

There had also been some supply chain disruption with some difficulties in getting supplies of inputs such as packaging into processing facilities.

There had also been challenges in getting fresh milk out of northern Victoria into key markets in NSW and Queensland.

In 2021-22, about 97 million litres of milk from northern Victoria went to NSW and about 62 million litres went to Queensland, much of this to be bottled for the retail market.

This is about 15 per cent of the total liquid milk consumed in NSW and 11pc of liquid milk consumed in Queensland.

Ms Hammond said Dairy Australia had a dedicated page with resources to help farmers: www.dairyaustralia.com.au/land-water-and-climate/extreme-weather/managing-in-wet-conditions.

It included 40 fact sheets with information ranging from establishing a feed budget to dealing with specific animal health issues.

Its regional development programs in each state were co-ordinating the local flood response.

Taking Stock programs would be available to help farmers plan their recovery.

State and federal government support packages are also available. Information is available at:

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