Dairy farmers on the NSW mid-north coast thought the 2021 flood was bad but they took solace in the knowledge that it was classified as a one-in-100-year flood.
Hold tight - we’re checking permissions before loading more content
Just four years later they have had to reconsider what flooding can do to their region.
If the 2021 event was a one-in-100 flood, the 2025 inundation was considered a one-in-500 years catastrophe.
For some, it may be a bridge too far, while others will be counting the costs for years to come.
James Neal, a fifth-generation dairy farmer from Oxley Island near Taree, has seen a lot over his time but says this has been the worst natural disaster by a fair way.
James farms with his wife Katrina and parents Peter and Cheryl Neal, usually milking up to 800 cows all year round, in a predominantly pasture-based system. A former chair of the Dairy NSW Board, he joined Dairy Australia as a director last year.
The family runs a progressive farm, with a 60-unit rotary dairy for the herd primarily based on Holstein genetics, although Jersey bulls are used over the heifers.
Milk is produced all year round, achieved by batch calving. Extended lactations are used to minimise stress on cows and reduce cows culled for infertility.
“Our cows’ wellbeing is our number one priority,” James says, achieving that through high-quality care for newborn calves and ensuring the milking process is a comfortable experience.
The farm is based on highly productive pastures which provide the basis for excellent quality milk and high in-calf rates.
But nothing can prepare for such a devastating natural disaster, which James says was completely beyond comprehension.
“The 2021 flood was one-in-100 years and was a walk in the park compared to this one-in-500 years flood,” James said.
“It has decimated a lot of farmers with the unprecedented high floodwater levels having destroyed hundreds of thousands of dollars of milking plant, farm equipment, fences, livestock and winter pastures.”
James’s farm only lost 80 heifers and two cows to the flood, which was extremely lucky, as the milking yard was already under water and they had nowhere to store them.
“When they were left overnight, they were standing in a foot of flowing water on a previously flood-free ridge. We didn’t know if any would be there in the morning.
“We were probably the largest farm that was this severely affected.
“In March we were milking 800. We fully dried off all our spring calving cows early before the flood because of the extremely wet conditions for the six weeks prior to the flood.
“There’s drought in western Victoria and South Australia and here it just hasn’t stopped raining.
“It wasn’t large amounts but it was raining every day so it was a boggy mess before the flood and then we ended up having 746mm for May, including 600mm in three days.”
The previous highest May rainfall was 407mm, meaning the 2025 deluge almost doubled anything in the past.
“We would have been laughing,” James said.
“Even though it was a bit wet, it was looking like a good season. We had all our feed in and it was coming good but now it’s all gone, which is really demoralising.”
James couldn’t milk for four days due to floodwater staying up for so long, which caused huge problems for cow production and mastitis.
“I’ve lost heaps of stuff but I’m slowly getting everything going again. There’s no pasture and not much silage so I had to sell 250 cows to the abattoir just for cash flow.
“We lost four cars and the house went under and we lost everything in it. In 2021 none of the houses on our farm went under; in this flood five out of nine went under.”
Like many farmers, James had saved hay for a rainy day — or a drought.
“I had three haysheds. I kept a lot as a drought and flood back-up but the sheds all went under so I lost a third of the hay straight away.
“The water went two bales high through the shed and it heats up, so, we had to take hay out to stop the rest from self-combusting and burning the rest of it down.”
On top of this all the winter pastures have died off, leading to a massive feed gap for next few months, requiring hand-feeding in extremely wet and muddy conditions.
This extra workload from extra hand feeding and repairing flood damage is obviously overloading his eight staff. The dramatically reduced income and higher costs make continuing to farm extremely challenging.
“Conservatively, I’ve probably lost nearly a million bucks, by the time everything is totalled up,” James said.
Like many local farmers, flood insurance has become impractical and now James faces a rebuild with reduced income.
“The government gave us $25,000 but that only covers one truckload of feed or for me one fortnight of staff wages,” James said.
“I’ve gone from producing 9000 litres a day to about 1700 litres at the moment.
“I’ve got not much income but I’ve still got the expenses and there’s so much extra work to do for everyone.
“None of us have any spare time as it is but there’s timber, bales, plastic and rubbish caught in fences and there’s dead cows.
“It’s tough. I couldn’t afford the feed costs and when it’s muddy like this, you can’t get on the paddocks at all.
“I had to downsize the herd as it’s impossible to find agistment because there are already cattle in the area because of the drought in south-west Victoria.
“It’s an absolute shit show completely beyond our control.”
James is urging the government to declare the flood zone a Category D disaster, rather than the current Category C.
“Category D funding would give $75,000 to farmers instead of $25,000 so that would help a bit.”
James admits he’s not sure that every farmer in the region will survive this latest blow.
“We’ve had regular adversities over the years. The milk price isn’t as good as it should have been and you get these things and you just don’t have the resilience to bounce back.
“Some farmers are barely making a profit. Even though the milk price is fairly high, because we produce year-round, it’s a lot more expensive to produce.
“There’s a small margin and when you have to do all these replacements with hundreds of thousands of dollars of equipment, it’s tough for everybody.”
DNA writer