STAFF WRITER
When agricultural drains are blocked, floodwaters sit on low lying farmland for too long, destroying crops, degrading soil, and stalling food production.
A new $5 million recovery program aims to tackle this problem and fix damaged agricultural drainage systems across 25 council areas.
In Richmond Valley that includes clearing flood debris, thick vegetation, and heavy sediment from the 1120-metre Rattle Gully agricultural drain in Broadwater.
In Ballina Shire and Rous County, the program will target the resetting of several floodgate drainage outlets and piping at Pimlico, Empire Vale, and Wardell to allow unobstructed runoff into the river systems.
The Tropical Cyclone Alfred Agricultural Drainage Reset Program program is jointly funded by federal and state governments under the Disaster Recovery Funding Arrangements.
Minister for Recovery and State MP Janelle Saffin said local primary producers needed this sort of recovery and resilience support.
“Their resolve has been well and truly tested over the past decade following fires, floods, storms, covid, war in the Middle East and a myriad of other disruptions but they have come up even more resilient,” Ms Saffin said.
“I am a strong advocate for this program because we’ve already proven it works. During the earlier Northern Rivers reset, clearing 77 drainage sites made a massive difference on the ground. To get them done we also had to get over farmers having to go through a myriad of permissions to do so.
“Now that is cracked, it is my intention to have permission procedures like these built into the disaster adaptation plans so that farmers can continue to keep the maintenance up to date themselves.”
The program is being rolled out by the NSW Reconstruction Authority in partnership with the NSW Soil Conservation Service.
There is more funding to come to the program – this is the first round.