Kirstin Nicholson, The Koondrook and Barham Bridge Newspaper
Pat and Michelle Quinn’s dairy farm at Mincha West is under real threat of flooding. The 700 head dairy property sits about 3km from Flannery’s flume, and the water coming out of Kow Swamp backs up and flows over the top of the property. They know this well. In 2011, the farm was completely inundated – and Pat is predicting this flood will be the same.
Pat and Michelle no longer live on the farm – it is now run by sons, Kaleb and Gregory – but they are out there every day monitoring the situation and working hard to protect it. With the main access roads now closed, Pat is driving through Pyramid Hill and down, a trip that takes twice as long.
The levee banks that they built are being topped up and may need extending, and with the ground getting higher as they go further west, he said they will keep topping them up as they go. Monday night saw a breach in the levee and excavators have been working to repair it.
The plan is to stay and see it out. “We’ve got nowhere to go, where would you go? There’s no dairy anywhere that we can shift to and even if we did shift to a dairy, how would you feed them? So, we’re going to try and levee bank ourselves in and just stay here if we can, but that’s if we can, we don’t know. It’s become critical.
“We’ve just got to try and bank in, keep the water out and stay. We’ve got to stay put because we haven’t really got an option. I just don’t know. Where do you ship off 700 cows somewhere in a hurry, and then you’ve got to feed them. Yeah, it’s a real issue.”
They have put a bank up around the feed they have on hand, but they’ve done very little spring feed – silage and hay – so feeding them in the coming months is a concern.
“It’s not a good industry to be in with it like this.”
Over the next few days, Pat is hoping the water peaks, they can contain it and it gets away – that’s what they’re hoping for. The farm is set up for irrigation drainage, not flood drainage, so the water sits until it finds its way out through small drains and canals and Pat expects it will be there for a long time.
“We were tracking along what we thought was not too bad, but now, we’re not sure. We thought we’d contain it and keep it within, but we don’t know now, because it’s the unknown, it’s such an unknown. The Pyramid Creek and the Bullock Creek are five kilometres away, so it’s a creeping, slow thing. It’s just so hard to work out, so hard to manage.
“All our water is coming down the Piccanniny, somewhere from towards Bendigo. And it is what it is. And if water like that coincides with the Bullock Creek coming from East Loddon and that way, it just is what it is. But it hadn’t happened for 100 years before 2011. And it’s happened again. It’s just extraordinary.”
Flows have increased down the Bullock Creek and this has put on extra pressure.
While they haven’t called on much help yet, the offers have been overwhelming and Pat praises the community for the support they have been offered.
The houses are well built up and didn’t go under in 2011, so Pat is hopeful they will be okay. Like any farmer though, the livestock is the priority.
“We’ll keep watching it. We won’t go.”
The waiting game continues.
This article appeared in The Koondrook and Barham Bridge Newspaper, 27 October 2022.
