Melbourne city is green and lush, but rural Victoria is bone dry and bleached. Farmers are getting scared
Green fields have been bleached beige as drought continues to choke rural Victoria. Now, many of our farmers are even struggling to get enough water to shower and wash their dishes.
Victoria
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While the city may be lush and green, Melburnians have no idea how much rural Victorians are battling.
Many farmers have no water for crops and livestock and some are struggling for enough even to shower or wash their dishes.
Tourello farmer Katherine Meyers told the Herald Sun that the desperate need for water is seeing farmers getting it trucked in, as the dry drags on the waiting time for those trucks to fill empty dams and dwindling tanks gets longer.
“The constant grind is soul destroying, farmers are exhausted,” she said.
“It’s one thing when you can’t afford feed, you can borrow money or find a way but when there isn’t any feed to buy it’s really tough.
“You know, farmers have already dropped their stock numbers.
“If we don’t see conditions change soon, and there are no predictions that they will change, people not living this don’t realise how tough it’s going to become.”
Ms Meyers said her family’s farm, their livelihood, that is usually a sea of green, was “bleached beige” and that's even though they are luckier than most.
“It’s like all the colour has been sucked out of the landscape,” she said. “We’re in an unusually fortunate position in that we have a spring-fed creek that still has the water in it, in one of our paddocks.
“Down where they don’t have reliable groundwater people have been having to buy water on trucks and bring it in and that is an extraordinarily expensive and time-consuming way of watering stock.
“It’s also super stressful, because you’ve got to be checking every single day, if not twice a day, that your stock has still got water and that the water hasn’t run out.
“Even trying to source water at the moment there’s significant delays.
“I know we looked at getting some trucked in as our domestic order was about to run out – we’ve never run out of water before – but it was going to be three weeks before we could get it in.”
Ms Meyers said that her family, when they found out they would have to wait three weeks for water to fill their domestic tanks, were able to get water across from her in-laws property.
But not everyone has been so lucky.
“There’s a lot of people that have had to buy drinking water for households this year,” she said. “Quite a few people in our district are struggling for domestic water and it’ll be the same all through to southwest.”
The flow on effect from a lack of water is a lack of feed, which is becoming another battle for the stricken farming community, and they are now starting to feel the toll, Ms Meyers said.
“People in the district are getting nervous,” she said.
“They kind of know how they’re going to feed stock at the moment but I think if it goes another month….”
It’s a statement that she can’t even finish.
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