Drought creates feed shortage for winter

Flocks and herds have been reduced and cows dried off. Photo / Northern Advocate

The drought hitting Northland farmers could not get much more serious, says Federated Farmers Far North, Whangarei and Kaipara Districts president Denis Anderson.

"The drought's gone on far too long and right now we're looking at the situation where there's no real feed on farms and winter's only two months away," Anderson said.

"At the best we're going to start growing grass as soon as we get rain and we're still going to be reasonably short going into winter."

Farmers needed to revise budgets to ensure they had sufficient feed.

"But just how much they need will depend very much on whether we get substantial rain in the next week," he said. "If we don't every week is a week closer to winter and things become more difficult."

Anderson's dairy farm near Whangarei had had a couple of good rain falls "which made quite a bit of a difference to our situation but other farmers have missed out on that".

Niwa agricultural climatologist Alan Porteous said the really dry areas were centred around northern and southern Northland, but it was also very dry through Auckland and into northern Waikato.

"Generally the North Island is drier than normal and much of the South Island is drier than normal, particularly Marlborough, Canterbury and Otago," Porteous said.

MetService weather ambassador Bob McDavitt said recent rainfall had been pot luck, with 31.4mm falling in Kaikohe between Sunday and midday yesterday while Kerikeri got 1.2mm.

Northland could expect more showers, he said.

This summer's El Nino weather pattern had seen anticyclones lingering in the Tasman Sea with a dry zone over the north of the country and southerlies coming up the east coast giving a reasonable amount of rain, McDavitt said

Sheep and beef farmers had, in many cases, reduced flocks by 50 per cent or more and many dairy farmers had already dried off their stock, which would normally be done about this time of year.

A drought did not only hit the year in which it happened.

Assessing the economic impact of the drought was difficult, said Anderson.

"But suffice to say the impact on Northland will be substantial."