Flood anniversary has farmers on edge

Kai Iwi farmer David Cotton has been keeping rainfall records for 25 years and he's getting a tad nervous as the anniversary of last June's flood looms.

As the anniversary of the 2015 June 20 floods in Whanganui looms, farmers' nerves are beginning to fray and even stock markets are reacting.

Whanganui livestock commentator and Kai Iwi farmer David Cotton says his weather records have revealed some interesting statistics over the past 12 months.

"I have kept a rain gauge at our Kai Iwi property for more than 25 years. We seem to always receive 1100-1300mm of rain a year, but what has changed in recent years is the distribution of that rain," Mr Cotton said.

"In the period September 2014 to March 2015, we averaged 55mm a month, then in April 2015 had a whopping 303mm followed by 133mm in May and then 192mm in June.

A total of 176mm of that fell in one weekend in June [20 and 21], which in turn gave us the biggest flood recorded in Whanganui history and the second biggest recorded in the North Island - 5150 cubic metres of water per second.

"Looking at those numbers you will see we received over 50per cent of our rain for the year in just 10 weeks, so you can understand how nervous I was in early May when similar weather started.

"We averaged 58mm of rain at our farm in Kai Iwi over the seven-month period October 2015 to April 2016.

Then in early May we had rain every day for more than a fortnight [173mm].

The same pattern was emerging with the ground still open and damaged from last year.

It would not take large volumes of water to have the ground wash away - it's still quite fragile out there and with it all the fences we had replaced along with the tracks we had opened up again, who knows what could happen?"

The weather has also affected the livestock market with the very wet two weeks taking some buyers out of the store lamb market as new grass and green feed crop paddocks were just too wet to restock them.

"The live weight price for a 33kg lamb sat at $2.20-$2.30, but then the sun came out and the average price at last week's Feilding sale shot up to $2.50/kg with some male lambs reported selling at over $2.70/kg live weight," Mr Cotton said.