2004 for New Zealanders: David Passey

Cattle stranded by the floodwaters did not survive.

Saturday, February 14 was the day the rain began to fall. Not just any rain, but warm out-of-season rain that would become persistent, at times torrential. Over that summer weekend it swept in sheets hard and low across the Manawatu river valley where my family farm. My father remembers it as "strange, brooding weather".

Strange, certainly, in a month known for hot dry weather, when drought, not rainstorms, was usually the prevailing threat. But no one, not even the experts at Niwa, would forecast how strange it was about to get.

By late Sunday afternoon, the river that borders the farm in the Pohangina Valley, under the Ruahine Ranges, was rising dangerously and fast. At dark, my brother, Ian, put on his rain-gear to check the flood risk. His verdict: "We're not looking good."

First light Monday revealed a disaster on a scale that none of us will forget.

The river had exploded over the property. Hectares of land had gone. Hundreds of trees and metre-deep debris and silt were strewn over the farm. Tracks had been swept away; hill faces were covered in slips. The roads were out, the power was down and the river was still rampaging across the property.

"It was a hellish sight," my father, Barrie Passey, would later tell me, visibly strained. "Never have I seen anything like it, hadn't thought it possible. Water was up around the houses. It was coming down the road and through the sheds. Not to put too fine a point on it, everything was a devastating mess."

Overnight the lush and well-established 120-hectare dairy farm that had been in our family four generations and almost 100 years, had been reduced to little more than a quagmire, its future impossible to determine. Dad, at 70, was confronted with tougher decisions and a heavier workload than he had ever known.

Elsewhere, things were worse. Most of the lower North Island had been hit. The one-in-100-year flood had submerged, and was still submerging, tracts of the Manawatu and Wanganui. A state of civil emergency had been declared. Hundreds of homes and farms were under water. Countless livestock lay dead.

The floods of 2004 would rank as one of New Zealand's worst natural disasters.

It was going to be a difficult year at home.

But as the extensive and expensive job of reconstruction began, not even the most pessimistic among us would have predicted what was to follow.

Ten months on, it has been without contest one of the most difficult years in the history of farming. Not only did we face daily the bleak realities of the February flood but a record snowstorm blitzed the valley in August, followed immediately by a second flood. As if nature was exacting some kind of perverse vendetta, the farm was then forced to endure one of the wettest and coldest spring seasons in memory.

I had arrived home from Europe four days after the initial deluge, hindered by weather and cut off by washed-out roads. I had to ford a still-flooding creek barefoot, near home, to be picked up by Ian on the other side. No news footage or even the emotion in Mum's voice over the phone had prepared me for what I would see.

In the evening half-light, the farm looked primeval. "It's like something out of the Jurassic era," I said at the time. All that seemed to be missing were dinosaurs. Hulking giants of trees were stranded on beaches of mud and silt and gravel where pastures had once been. Fences were gone. Gaping holes existed instead of paddocks.

It was as if my childhood memories had been stolen.

What surprised me in those early days was the relative calm that prevailed. Sure, the emotion was there, somewhere. But, in the way of farmers, the mood was one of stoic resolve - matured, perhaps through years of facing down hostile weather. There was a job to done and that was that.

In the weeks and months that followed, an immense salvage operation got under way. Early estimates, later proved correct, were that the cost of bringing the farm back could easily range well into six figures.

I rolled up my sleeves alongside Dad and my brother. Massive earth-moving equipment arrived, first clearing the trees into piles, then the gravel and silt. We spent endless days picking up rubbish on dry, sandy paddocks which looked more like a beach than a farm.

The rural sector mobilised. A farmer turned up from the Bay of Plenty on spec to put in a few days' graft. We were given hay, gratis. The dairy company Fonterra sent teams of men to help with the tough, thankless work of clearing the mess. There were days on the farm when the workforce was 15 people or more.

In the spirit of small communities, baskets of food were delivered to the farm, even while the roads were out. Someone, we still don't know who, crossed the road washouts to deliver the newspaper each day. Even the Government pitched in, offering to cover up to 75 per cent of infrastructure reconstruction costs.

We ate well, but this wasn't a crisis that was going to be resolved fast.

Every day, going to work was like walking into a war zone. We were under pressure to re-sow pastures before the autumn chill set in. Most worryingly, with the river-protection works destroyed, and local governments moving at caterpillar speed to resolve funding confusion, the farm remained at risk. Every heavy rain forecast sounded ominous.

For a while, the weather gave us an even break. Autumn was dry and calm. The grass was sown. Some of the most important river protection works were completed and, even though it was anybody's guess how well we could make the farm work next season, at least for the time being, we were on track.

Then August 18 hit. It was Dad's birthday. It was peak calving season, the most strenuous time on a dairy farm, but the beginning of a new season that, surely, could not be a repeat of the last. We get snow occasionally, but the record fall that day was on a scale that turned the clock back fast.

Between 15cm and 30cm of snow arrived in the valley overnight, causing already unstable hillside areas to slip. Water runoff from the melt flooded places that had never known river flooding. The sheer weight of the snow smashed trees, again rendering a bleak landscape.

And then it began to rain. Incessantly. Newly repaired tracks were out. Slips blocked roads. And then the river flooded, surging again over the farm where the banks were still not protected. Some more land was washed away, areas re-sown in grass were torn up, covered in silt.

With an echo of resignation, Dad began to joke about selling the farm and buying something near Alice Springs. "Sometimes you wonder if the bloody thing's worth it," he said. His lifetime of hard work seemed as if it was being undone at every turn.

It didn't really stop raining for two months after that. It was one of the wettest and coldest springs on record. Small things began to seem like disasters in themselves. My brother's dog died, then he smashed his finger. It had been that kind of year.

NOW the work goes on. The debris has been cleared again, most of the flooded areas resown in grass. Fences are up. Bulldozers are rerouting the river and putting in place banks that will, it is hoped, reduce the risk of flood next time. Everyone is tired, but the farm is at least working.

It still looks raw. I have a picture on my desk of the farm from 1990, a tranquil, fertile and picturesque image in stark contrast to the place I find as I drive home to the valley now. So many trees are gone. Slips still scar hillsides. Areas of the farm look bare and weary. But things are so much better than they were.

"We've come a long way," Dad says, resigned but surprising me with his optimism.

"After a while you learn to care less, you understand the weather is beyond your control and you do what you can. We're in good shape compared to February and, if the summer is good, we can feel positive about next year."

It will take time. Even if all goes well, pastures will take three years to approach their best. Maybe they never will. Some scars will remain forever.

The unanswered, even frightening question, as this year draws to a close, is whether the extreme weather that struck will remain rare, or if this is part of a global shift.

"Where we go from here," as Dad said, "very much depends on what happens next."