The lands where cows would normally graze and customers harvested their own fruit during the citrus season are now completely covered in water, and Watkins can barely get out of his front door.
“Our house is on a hill, and we can’t get out of the entrance even right away; it’s so high,” he said.
“I’ve had enough, but I won’t give up.”
Mark Watkins, citrus grower
“When I go down to the farm and see what’s there, I think it will hurt me. I think that will do a lot of harm. “
A year after COVID-19 restrictions during an intense harvest left Watkins with no way to market or distribute hundreds of tons of fruit, successive floods now threaten to derail its recovery.
While he will likely have to spend tens of thousands of dollars replacing damaged equipment and replanting hundreds of trees, the seventh-generation farmer is yet to leave the fertile Hawkesbury River flats.
“I’ve had enough, but I won’t give up,” he said.
In Camden, second-generation producer John Vella should have been harvesting a lettuce and cabbage crop.
Instead, he is looking at a field full of mud and a harvest worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in complete ruins after four meters of flood water crossed and left a “trail of destruction.”
Vella and her brother and business partner Matt supply vegetables to large chains such as Coles, Woolworths and McDonald’s.
The brothers have another property unaffected by the floods, but it would cost about $ 400,000 to re-produce the flooded farm, a cost Vella says they simply cannot afford after four major rain events in two years.
The entire John Vella lettuce and cabbage crop has been lost due to the floods. Credit: Dean Sewell.
“No one expects to receive it once again month after month. We didn’t put it in our budget,” he said.
Dr Rachel Carey, a senior professor of food systems at the University of Melbourne, said the pressure on food prices was caused by a combination of local and global events, but that long-term factors such as fuel costs fossil fuels and climate change will lead to an increase in food. prices are probably here to stay.
“We can certainly say that these pressures that drive up food prices, some of these are long-term trends, and therefore the overall trajectory would seem to be on the rise.”
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Carey said the highly fertile areas close to cities are among the “strategically most important areas of food production we have in a warming climate.”
As farmers like the Old Ones reduce production, he said cities like Sydney are becoming more vulnerable to price and supply shocks.
“What these shocks and tensions affecting the food system have really demonstrated is the vulnerability of food supply chains and the importance of strengthening our local and regional supply,” he said.
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