A whole new system of assessing dangerous fire conditions for harvesting will be brought in by the NSW Rural Fire Service, giving farmers responsibility on farm to decide on fire risks.
The major overhaul, which sees the end of the cease harvest direction that encompassed all of a district, will start after a successful trial in the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area.
RFS assistant commissioner Jason Heffernan said the new system was devised after consultation with NSW Farmers and grain industry bodies and showed the RFS “was listening to farmers”.
He said the cease harvest system never had any legislative backbone, and really was just an advice, although nearly always farmers stopped harvesting in a district to avoid a community backlash.
“The broadscale area it applied to was not working as many farmers in that area were still able to harvest, it was just there was community pressure not to do so if conditions were extreme.”
Farmers can obtain a free RFS sticker from regional RFS offices that explains under what weather conditions they should consider stopping a harvest. The RFS will still issue a “harvest safety alert”`, but not a district ban, that farmers can take into consideration when deciding whether to proceed with harvesting.
The harvest safety alert will be issued if the Grassfire Danger Index is above 35. “It will be a tool for farmers to assess if it is safe to proceed.”
“We all agreed the previous cease harvest system was not working given that it was based on weather stations quite some area apart.”
Farmer Craig Bardney of Yenda, an RFS group captain, said the new system was sensible and he had successfully trialled it, using his own Kestrel weather meter.
Mr Bardney said he’d once been a victim of a district ban, when he knew where he was harvesting it was safe to continue.
“For instance west of Hay, the conditions weren’t good for safe harvesting while near Narrandera they were. It is very area specific,” he said.
“So using your Kestrel you look at the wind, the temperature and the humidity and using the graph on the RFS sticker make a decision if it is safe to continue harvesting.
“For instance the winds might be 20-30km/h at Hay, bit a lot calmer at Narrandera, so it would be safe to keep going.”
Mr Bardney said all fire captains would still be on the phone to talk about conditions anyway, despite the change in the alert system.
He said one issue was insurance and what liability farmers could have if they started a fire and it went into a neighbour’s property. He advised farmers to contact their insurance companies to clarify the matter. He said under the old system if a fire got away when a ban was in place, the farmer probably wouldn’t have been covered for any collateral damage.
John Ellicott
journalist and author
journalist and author
