Soaking rain brings smiles to farmers’ faces as deluge breaks drought and fills dams

“The whole community has got a smile on their face.” That is how Gairdner farmer Jarrod King summed up the impact of the soaking, drought-breaking rain that fell across dusty farms this week. Mr King had about 90mm in the gauge in 48 hours, putting water in all of his dams, and filling some of them to the brim. The relief brought by those rains — not just financial, but mental — cannot be underestimated. “We are out playing in it in the moment,” Mr King said yesterday. “It was getting a bit stressful out here, and things have changed now.” Many farmers have sold livestock over the course of three dry years. Most of WA’s 12 active water deficiency declaration areas are in the Great Southern. Without this week’s deluge, it would have been a dire season. When the Advertiser visited Glen Hall’s property in Gairdner in June, dams were dry and winds were whipping dust into the air. Mr Hall, despite his friendly and resilient attitude, was staring down the barrel of a terrible season. Like others in Gairdner, he had been carting water since January. This week’s showers put more than 100mm in some of his gauges. Now, he said, farmers in his community were “just about running around dancing”. “The paddocks are all turning green, there are sheets of water lying everywhere,” Mr Hall said. “It hasn’t really done any damage because it has been fairly steady. The crops have brightened up and stood up.” In Wellstead, the rainfall total was closer to 150mm. Wellstead farmer Shane Davy said the rain had settled farms after a big wind event blew dust all over the district last week. “The main thing is the water in dams, not having to worry about that,” he said. “Basically every night I’d go to bed thinking ‘what dam do I need to fill up tomorrow?’, or ‘where am I going to have problems?’.” Even in Manypeaks, 30 minutes out of Albany, the rains were met with sighs of relief. In one of the more joyous scenes to emerge this week, Robert Potter used a boat to check stock on the family farm in Manypeaks. The rain caused dams to overflow into paddocks — the same dams that were all but dry when the Advertiser visited in February. “I was thinking about hooking my surfboard up tomorrow so we’ll have to see how we go,” Mr Potter said. “We were really worried about how we were going to cope without water over summer. We don’t need to worry any more.”