Farmers across the country’s south-east are coming to grips with the fallout from last month’s unseasonally cold overnight temperatures, with some calling for the event to be treated as a natural disaster in order to trigger urgent government assistance.
Barossa Valley vigneron Michael Kies, 66, said he had never experienced a frost event so severe in all of his 55 vintages.
“I would sum it up as devastating,” he said.
“It’s devastating not only for us but everybody else, and so it is a very, very hard time to go through to have a look at the damage, and it’s just all gone.”
Mr Kies says he had never experienced a frost event so severe as the one September. (ABC News: Stephen Opie)
The fifth-generation grower said the frost had destroyed at least 80 per cent of his vineyard.
“It freezes the moisture in the shoots and then it’s just like a blowtorch coming along and burning it off,” he said.
“If you’re doing a job somewhere and have a bad day, you just have a bad day and it’s gone, but this is our crop, this is our livelihood gone.”
The frost was just the latest blow for the wine industry which has been grappling with trade, oversupply and farmgate price issues.
Growers have reported losses of, in some cases, more than 80 per cent of their crop. (ABC News)
It struck at an especially crucial time, when buds on vines had started growing early due to dry conditions.
Mr Kies is hopeful that he might still be able to yield a smaller crop, but he is not out of the woods, with frost known to occur up until the end of November.
“We may get one bunch on that secondary bud instead of two, so we might get a crop that is 30 to 40 per cent of a normal crop,” he said.
“That is what we’re hoping and praying for.”
‘Nail in the coffin’
For growers like Jim Giahgias, who supply their grapes, waiting for secondary buds may not be viable unless wineries release their prices early.
“They need to come out and say, ‘Listen, we believe that we can pay X amount of dollars knowing what their markets are, and we believe that if you’ve got a crop try to grow it or if you haven’t got a crop that’s big enough you might as well mothball it, because it’s going to cost you more money to try to grow it and give it to us for peanuts’,” Mr Giahgias said.
“Without the growers, they won’t have a winery.
“We’ve just come off of three really bad years and this was just another nail in the coffin.”
Riverland grape grower Jim Giahgas says urgent government assistance is needed. (ABC News)
Mr Giahgas described the frost event as a “national disaster” and believed governments needed to provide assistance “quite urgently”.
“I’ve witnessed two or three different frost occasions, but never anything like this,” he said.
“It’s going to have a major effect and they need to support growers who actually at the end of the day support communities.
“This is a disaster and it’s actually pretty well a national disaster.”
Adelaide Plains grain grower Nathan Parker said the frost wiped out the majority of his barley, wheat and lentil crops after what had already been his driest season on record.
“We’re sitting at about 150ml for the whole year and we’re about 350ml average for the year so it’s been a very tough year,” he said.
Mr Parker says the frost wiped out the bulk of his barley, wheat and lentil crops. (ABC News: Stephen Opie)
With a strong harvest looking unlikely, Mr Parker said he had to make the difficult decision to cut his wheat paddocks for hay.
“We aren’t hay growers, we don’t normally do hay, so we don’t actually have the gear to do hay or the storage for it,” he said.
“There’s a lot of costs getting contracts in to do that and then finding markets when you don’t normally have a market for it.”
He said it was “surprising how good the crops were still looking” given how dry it had been.
“We probably would’ve at least covered our costs with the grain if we didn’t get frosted,” he said.
“Whereas with the hay, it’s just trying to recover some costs, and we’ll sort of just see how it washes out. We won’t really know how much we’ll get for it.”
Calls for urgent assistance
Governments have historically provided financial assistance in the wake of natural disasters, including in South Australia when grants were offered after hailstorms in 2020-21 and the River Murray floods a year later.
SA Primary Industries Minister Clare Scriven said she understood that frost did not fall under federal disaster management requirements.
“There’s a number of different thresholds that need to be met and different types of assistance under the federal disaster,” she said.
“I guess there’s always an opportunity to look at that again but, at this stage, it’s not covered.”
Primary Industries Minister Clare Scriven says the department undertaking satellite imagery to assess the damage. (ABC Rural: Eliza Berlage)
Liberal MP Tim Whetsone said he also believed the frost event should be recognised as a natural disaster.
“The government could only show some level of empathy [for] the damage caused by the frost,” he said.
“This is a large weather event that is going to impact the state’s economy by billions of dollars. Not just thousands, not millions, but billions.”
The industry had already been grappling with trade, oversupply and farmgate price issues. (ABC News)
Ms Scriven said she had tasked her department to undertake satellite imagery across South Australia in order to assess the damage.
“The full extent of that impact is not fully known,” she said.
“To be able to gather more data will be really key — not only now to be able to understand what the impacts are, but also for any future conversations.”
Ms Scriven said there was some support to growers already available, including grants of up to $1,500 for red grape growers and a free family and business mentors service which aims to help primary producers during difficult times.
She said the satellite imagery being conducted would take “a number of weeks” before it was complete.
Mr Kies says the frost impact is taking a “very hard mental toll”. (ABC News: Brant Cumming)
In the meantime, producers like Mr Kies are urging consumers to be patient and to show their support by visiting local winemakers.
“We’ve just paid for the pruning, we’ve just paid for all sorts of things and vineyards are quite expensive to run and we’ve had no offer of support from the government at all,” he said.
“It’s a very hard mental toll to take but all I’d say is, there is going to be something good come out of all of this somewhere, somehow, some way.
“I know there is going to be something good come out of this.”
