Widespread damage to winter cereal crops such as wheat, barley and canola is expected as ongoing flooding threatens farms and regional businesses across some of the nation’s major agricultural regions.
But Australian grower representatives said it was still too early to gauge the extent of flood damage on food supply and market prices.
Communications manager at Ausveg, Shaun Lindhe, said the floods were both affecting planted crops – which have been under water – and causing delays to planting schedules for future harvests.
“The reports coming from these floods are devastating, and we know that our farmers and their communities are being severely impacted by these floods,” he said.
Lindhe said the flood-affected regions across New South Wales, Victoria and Tasmania were highly productive fruit and vegetable growing regions, and this impacted large parts of the agriculture industry.
“Growers were already operating in a challenging and unpredictable environment, and this is another blow for hard-working farmers trying to get fresh food to Australian families,” he said.
“It is difficult to predict the extent of the situation at this early stage, but in the short-term we anticipate that this will affect availability of supply and the logistics of moving produce to market.”
On Monday, the agriculture minister, Murray Watt, warned the floods hit “key agricultural districts right across the country” and may have an effect on food supply and grocery prices.
“We’re starting to work through what sort of support will be needed to assist those farmers,” he said.
“But I think we’ve seen already in the floods we had in Queensland and New South Wales earlier in the year, that can have very dramatic effects on food supply and prices. This will be a serious longer-term consequence of these floods.”
Thousands of homes have been inundated or cut off by floods in northern Victoria. SES members have completed more than 650 flood rescues since the flood event began last week and have responded to 6,000 requests for emergency assistance.
Across the border, the Bureau of Meteorology issued a minor to major flood warning for the Murray and Edward Rivers in the southern Riverina region of New South Wales; the Edward River at Deniliquin may reach the moderate flood level (7.20 metres) by late October.
Chairman of the Deni Ute Muster, Russell Tait, said he spent Monday morning moving 200 head of cattle to higher ground before the “big flood” arrives.
His farm is situated 30km out of Deniliquin along the Tuppal Creek, an anabranch connected to the Murray River.
“We’ve also got 500 hectares of the most magnificent wheat crop, probably a million dollars worth of wheat, and it’s all going to go under.”
Tait said it would not be just winter cereal crops such as wheat, canola and barley that will be affected by flooding.
“The other thing that’s being affected is the sowing of rice, because this is the time of year that we sow rice, and that’s been put back and affected.”
Deniliquin had the largest rice mill in the southern hemisphere and the town was a major contributor of rice for both domestic consumption and international exports.
He said the next seven to 10 days would be quite difficult and a lot hinged on the amount of rainfall they receive this week.
“Every week, we seem to get 20 or 30 or 50mm of rain and as soon as it starts to get a bit dry it’s wet again.”
According to Lindhe, the damage would not just be limited to production loses on-farm, but also infrastructure, fencing, machinery, loss of topsoil and time and investment in preparing paddocks for future crops.
“The floods are having flow-on effects throughout the broader supply chain, such as road closures and disruptions to a wide range of businesses, as well as power outages, which can affect cold store facilities, picking and packing.”
Also the managing director of Deniliquin Freighters, Tait said flooding had caused major delays for food delivery trucks, which had travelled an extra 200km to get to Melbourne due to road closures.
“It’s probably an essential service this week,” he said. “But there’s some big detours happening and it may get worse before it gets better.”
Tait said the supermarket in Moama, on the Victorian border, was closed at lunchtime on Sunday because of panic buying and staffing issues, which resulted in people travelling to Deniliquin and emptying shelves in the local supermarkets there as well.
“It’s human nature, people panic and they want to stock up on everything,” he said.
Tait said the combination of the floods, road closures and farmers who can’t get their livestock to market or have lost their crops will all have an impact on food prices. But it will also depend on the overall supply and demand.
