Last year tropical cyclone jasper left the crops of many fruit and vegetable farmers in far north Queensland decimated. Now they're trying to rebuild, but it's a mammoth effort – as landline's Halina Baczkowski has found out.
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00:00 The McLaughlin family was hit very hard.
00:13 The result of the cyclone has seen production cut by over 60%.
00:17 Staff have also suffered.
00:19 The farm can employ up to 130 people, made up of travellers and locals.
00:25 The transit staff have been let go and they have scaled back from five full-time picking
00:29 teams down to two.
00:32 Wow.
00:33 Wow, Mark, this really does show the power of the water, right?
00:39 Yeah, that's right.
00:40 So this is one of many jobs on the repair list for 2024.
00:45 We were more worried about, you know, the main picking areas of the farm and it took
00:49 us three or four days to actually stumble across what had happened just here on the
00:52 edge of our headland, or what used to be a headland.
00:56 And so what did happen?
00:57 I mean, this is quite remarkable and I assume this wasn't here before.
01:01 No, it wasn't.
01:02 So I think when Jasper was hovering stationary for that three, four day period, the first
01:07 three days was nice, gentle soaking rain.
01:09 And then the 250 mils plus we got on the Sunday, none of our catchments or systems could keep
01:15 up with that sort of volume.
01:16 And that's what happened here.
01:18 So we've got a dam just above here and the overflow pipe and spillway just couldn't keep
01:22 up.
01:23 So water being water has found a new course and taken quite a lot of earth with it.
01:27 And it's kind of lucky that this happened here because just behind us here, you've got
01:31 a whole block of papaya.
01:33 Yes.
01:34 So that's one thing we need.
01:35 And with papaya, we need access every single week into every block that is currently being
01:40 picked.
01:41 One of the biggest challenges for the wet season as land becomes repetitively soaked, then
01:45 you start having bog tractors, bog trailers, herbicide tractors, foliar spraying.
01:49 It's just unfortunate that we need so much access during such a wet time of the year.
01:56 Can you recover from this?
01:57 I mean, it's been a huge amount of losses.
01:59 Yeah, it is.
02:01 It's going to take a huge dent in the war chest to rebuild and to restructure back to
02:05 the numbers that we were doing post cyclone.
02:07 But we've, this is far north Queensland, and we've been through other events, cyclonic
02:12 disease, pest before.
02:15 So this is what we know and this is what we'll do.
02:18 Yeah.
02:18 [BLANK_AUDIO]