Sugarcane fields reveal devastating long-term impact of north Queensland floods

Australia Broadcast Center

a day ago

In the early hours of February 3, it was hard to get back to sleep in Ingham.
As floodwaters surged, the wind drove rain hard against the windows, keeping residents awake and uneasy through the night.
Months later, the impact and devastation of that week are still felt across the community and wider farming regions.
From counting crop losses and calculating the financial cost of restoring land, to managing their mental health, the difficult times for cane growers are only just beginning.
The once-in-a-century flood left the area completely inundated and cut off from the outside world.
Cane grower Ian Kemp has lived and worked on his Ingham farm, about halfway between Cairns and Townsville, for more than 60 years.
While Ingham is no stranger to floods and residents generally know what to expect, he said this year was anything but ordinary.
"I personally have about, I'd say 2,000 tonne I've lost.
"It's going to take me about three to four years to recover ... to pick those paddocks up and get them back to full production again."
At John Board's cane farm it was a similar story.
Looking down the barrel of an expensive clean-up, his battle with debris, washout and damage to the cane is ongoing.
"The actual damage to the crop itself, and then infrastructure damage as well, has been massive," he said.
"There's no way I could cut cane on this headland here yet."
The Queensland government is providing disaster recovery assistance to affected primary producers.
While grateful for the assistance, Mr Board said the system had some challenges.
"The way it works is, you've actually got to fork it out up front and then claim it back," he said.
"This one headland alone here is probably $34,000 worth of just material and I don't have $34,000 in my bank account.
"I've actually got to cut cane on a different part of the property to get some cash coming in to fix this headland."
Across the district, the crop yield will be down substantially, which means less income for farmers and harvesters like Brian Mombelli.
For him, that shortfall is worth $450,000.
"It's cost us about $350,000 just to put machinery back on the paddock," he said.
"We're already out of pocket and after such big floods, it's just another hit to the small business owners really."
While the water is gone, he says danger still lurks in the paddocks, and harvesters will need to take extra care this year.
"We could come across trees, rims, tyres, gas bottles, one tonne pods to pretty much everything, even shipping containers," he said.
"The biggest cost that is going to affect us as business owners is trying to find the money to fix everything up."
Mr Kemp said farmers were not the only people bearing a mental load.
"People in town are struggling."
About 100 kilometres north of Ingham is Tully, Australia's wettest town.
Parts of the town also experienced flooding early this year and, while not as severe as in Ingham, successive disasters have taken their toll.
Last year, Tully was smashed with rain from Tropical Cyclone Jasper and the community is feeling the compounding effects of back-to-back extreme wet seasons.
Roy Butcher is manager of a Tully farm that lost about 30 hectares of cane to the flood, after 50 hectares were wiped out the year before.
"Here, our major contributor factor … this year was from a levy bank collapsing up the river," he said.
"It brought a wall of water through the farm.
Mr Butcher said he was still finding trash in the cane fields from last season, which had mixed with mud from this year.
At the sugar mill in town, the crush is underway.
Tully Sugar sane productivity and development manager Greg Shannon said this season was better than the previous, but not by much.
He expected farmers would produce three-to-four tonnes per hectare more than last year.
"We got flooded, but not quite as bad and we've had a bit more sunlight, so it's an improvement on last year," he said.
Ian Speziali, the electrical engineering manager at Tully Sugar, said water did come through the mill.
"Being Tully, flooding isn't unusual but, like any site, we are impacted mainly by water inundation of pumps and motors," he said.
"External to the factory itself, there's been damage to the rail infrastructure and those sorts of things, and obviously the farm properties in the district as well."
Overall, he said spirits were high this year in Tully, as the 100th sugar crush for the mill is underway.