Extreme weather conditions continue to prove a challenge to agricultural industries and the wider community as excessive rain events have shown in the past few weeks.
Some areas in the Southern Mallee received 200mm over three days from 13 to 15 of December, with Birchip receiving 186mm total. This is not the first occurrence in the area after Echuca received their highest daily rainfall at 123mm in a similar extreme weather event between 1 and 3 December in 2017.
Both these events have proven that extreme events can have significant economic consequences not limited to flood damage to property.
For grain producers, extreme rainfall can mean loss of production. As was the experience in the December 2017 event, standing crops were left in boggy, inaccessible paddocks long after ripening.
Sheep are also susceptible in extreme events and can succumb to conditions such as hypothermia particularly after they’ve been recently shorn.
Extreme rainfall is not the only event that can be catastrophic, fire conditions like those experienced on 11 February 2018 in NSW, described as worse than Black Saturday, can have catastrophic effects to livestock, infrastructure, human and soil health.
The recently released ‘State of the Climate’ report produced by Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) and CSIRO it states ‘there has been a long-term increase in extreme fire weather and, in the length of the fire season across large parts of Australia’.
To be defined as an “extreme weather event” it must be ‘unexpected, unusual, unpredictable, severe or unseasonal weather that greatly varies from the historical mean’. One of the challenges with extreme weather events is they are hard to predict even on a daily or weekly basis, let alone months in advance.
Adequate prior warning can assist in better logistical and animal safety practices resulting in better outcomes for livestock health and productivity.
As part of the Rural Research and Development for Profit ‘Forewarned is Forearmed: managing the impacts of extreme climate events’ project managed by Meat and Livestock Australia (MLA), BoM are working to identify how to package and communicate extreme event information to assist in ensuring producers are able to manage their businesses accordingly.
BCG is assisting in this project to provide a producer perspective of what information is needed by the agricultural industry and how this is presented.
More information about the ‘Forewarned is Forearmed’ project visit the Managing Climate Variability website; www.climatekelpie.com.au.
