KEY POINTS:
It rained at Andrew and Tania Kerr's farm this week. Hardly remarkable, unless it has been so long since you last saw rain that you have almost forgotten what it looks like.
A week ago, the Kerr's property at Te Pohue - 18km west of Napier - was
desiccated.
Like the majority of properties on the eastern coast, the Parakowhai farm was in the grips of what officials termed a one-in-125-year drought, and no end was in sight.
Tania Kerr, 41, and husband Andrew, 42, have a better idea than most of their fellow farmers when the big dry began. They have an official weather station on Parakowhai, and the rainfall numbers charted a grim and relentless slide towards drought.
In 2004, a dry year, 889ml of rain fell at Parakowhai Farm. In 2005 it was a more usual 1321ml, and 1193.5ml fell last year.
With almost half of this year gone, the property received just 146.5ml. In May, only 1.5ml of rain fell, offering scant relief for the scorched pasture.
National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research figures show this autumn was one of the driest on record, with rainfall less than 50 per cent of average in many places - notably the East Coast, Hawkes Bay and the Wairarapa.
Last Sunday, as they have so often in recent weeks, black clouds gathered over Hawkes Bay. Farmers were used to watching the clouds burn off or blow away but this time they burst into the thing they had been praying for - rain.
"We had about 60ml in the rain gauge at the house, which is not scientific," Tania Kerr said. "It was fabulous, and it was warm and gentle and wet."
In fact, just the sort of rain that breaks droughts. The rest of the country - which for the most part only became aware last week that there was a drought when Agriculture Minister Jim Anderton toured the region accompanied by television cameras - shrugged its shoulders and got on with what it had been doing, assuming the worst was over.
But experienced farmers like the Kerrs - who in 17 years of farming in the area have never seen the land so dry - say rain now is just the end of the beginning.
"The pressure doesn't come off," Tania Kerr said. "All the grass is like baby new grass, and we have to look after that grass. It's a balancing act between putting pressure on our stock, and keeping them off the grass to let the grass recover so you can feed the stock later."
When the Herald visited the Kerrs a week ago, Andrew and Tania were calculating how much money they had spent - and would be forced to continue to spend - on supplementary feeds.
In the five years they and sons Richard, 10 and George, 5, have been on Parakowhai, they have been forced to go to those extremes, and the stresses of wondering whether they were waiting for the end of an autumn drought, or witnessing the start of next summer's drought, were obvious.
"The hardest thing about this is that you are making decisions all the time. Whatever decision you make is a hard decision," Tania said.
"The other thing that's hard and going to get harder, is protecting the family from the stresses that Mum and Dad feel."
Earlier in the week, 600 ewe hoggets were sent to graze in the Manawatu. The remainder of the $50,000 they would normally spend on fertiliser went on maize and palm kernel to feed the remaining 2500 breeding ewes and 105 breeding cows. "On top of that, there's the production losses which are yet to be felt," Andrew said.
"If it carries on, it's going to seriously affect lambing. We've scanned our ewes and the scary thing is that they are going to have a lot of lambs. What do we feed them?"
Now, rain means the Kerrs can plan to fertilise pastures which have a faint tinge of green replacing the jaundiced yellow they were becoming accustomed to.
"We can look forward with certainty, from when it rained," Tania said.
"The hardest thing about a drought is you don't know when it started and you don't know when it ends. You just all of a sudden find yourself in one, and then it's a month or so later that the newspapers and the media say, 'Oh, there's a drought in Hawkes Bay'. But the rain now is fabulous."
The rain arrived just days after Hastings District Mayor Lawrence Yule convened a special mayoral taskforce to co-ordinate drought relief.
Like everyone else, Yule is pleased rain has finally come, but he said the drought has had a profound effect on Hawkes Bay, and the region is not in the clear yet.
"There is snow forecast now, to low levels, and the ground is wet. The rain is wonderful, but the lack of grass - if it gets colder - means there will be a lack of food for a lot of pregnant animals."
While the best-known produce from the Hawkes Bay these days is wine, pastoral farming remains the backbone of the region's economy, Yule said.
The drought has already hit the local economy, and with estimates drought-ridden farms had rid themselves of between 60 and 70 per cent of their stock, productivity next season is likely to be well down on normal.
"We are now dealing with feed management, and human and animal welfare issues," Yule said.
"We still have a lot of very stressed people. The rain has been a significant morale boost for everybody, but the issues for the next few months are significant, as people try to get their animals through.
"July will be a particularly difficult month, especially if it gets cold."
Hawkes Bay Federated Farmers committee member Kevin Mitchell was a worried man last week. Having farmed through four previous droughts, he knew younger and more inexperienced farmers were beginning to buckle under the insidious mental pressure which is the intangible side of drought.
"You can't be taught how to farm through a drought. You've got to experience it and the pain that comes with it," Mitchell said.
"It's nine years since our last drought. A lot of young people have either taken over family farms or bought into farms since then. If you haven't been through one, you can't actually be told what it's like."
Now, Mitchell and the other wiseheads in the district have a different and much more pleasant task - advising farmers how to get their properties back towards being productive again. For now, the region still urgently needs supplementary feed to allow the grass to grow, and needs winter to stay away for a bit longer and warm wet weather to continue.
"We have potential grass growth now, but if it stops growing at this point you stop it developing root reserves and getting some vitality back into it," Mitchell said.
"It hasn't rained a lot, but we're just grateful it's rained at all. It was well past the nick of time, but it's never too late. We do bounce back well here."
