SIXTY dairy farmers in drought declared areas of South East Queensland will get a share in $1 million raised after the price of two popular brands of milk was increased 10c a litre.
The grassroots campaign was spearheaded by open letters to the public from dairy farmers, who told of their struggles during the drought.
Among those to get involved was fourth-generation dairy farmer Scott Brown, from Rayglen Farm, Upper Pinelands, near Toowoomba.
”We had hay stored and I thought we had enough, but how much is enough for a drought like this?” he wrote.
Yes, it is full on.
The drought has made things hard financially and you really have to watch the bills coming in.
“You need money for feed for the next couple of months too, as well as money to buy seed and fertiliser for next year’s crop.” Despite the hardship, Mr Brown said it was a good life and that he had always enjoyed dairy farming.
“The reward for us is producing quality milk that’s recognised and appreciated by people who buy Dairy Farmers, the brand that our milk supplies.” Mr Brown said the public’s generosity and support in paying an extra 10 cents a litre gave hope that people out there were thinking of dairy farmers and were willing to lend a hand when times were tough.
In total, 60 dairy farmers in Queensland, 80 in NSW and 41 in Northern Victoria will get a share in the funds.
Funds will be distributed among suppliers in the drought-affected regions on a cents-per-litre basis.

The report was furnished in a suo motu case initiated by the apex court regarding deaths of 400 newborns and infants in Thar due to diseases and malnutrition.
The report says that the Sindh government has declared Tharparkar district and the affected Dehs in seven other districts — Umerkot, Sanghar, Shahdadkot, Dadu, Jamshoro, Badin and Thatta — “calamity affected” areas under the Sindh National Calamities (Prevention and Relief) Act 1958.
But senior counsel Faisal Siddiqui, who represented civil society, said that a number of recommendations by different committees had never been implemented and that the real problem behind the issue was lack of implementation of the proposals about the tragedy in Tharparkar.
Sindh govt report submitted to SC highlights measures to mitigate suffering of affected people The lawyer said that the real reason behind neonatal or infant deaths was the absence of doctors, paramedics and other staff (at government-run health facilities in the desert area).
The Sindh government’s report says that it has also announced a relief package of free distribution of 50kg wheat among all households in the affected areas for three months.
The distribution process of free wheat started from September 24 and by the first week of November 172,505 households in Tharparkar have benefited from the relief package.
About the availability of water, the report says, 589 reverse osmosis (RO) plants have been installed in Tharparkar, of which 443 are functional.
As per the report, the Sindh forest department is in the process of setting up two fodder blocks of 40 acres for livestock in Warwai (Khario Ghulam Shah forest blocks) and Danodhandal (Loonia Samaa forest block) areas of lslamkot and Nagarparkar talukas, respectively.
The Sindh government is leading the investments in ensuring participatory development and the Thar Foundation is facilitating action on the ground, the report says also emphasising the need to develop linkages between public and civil society institutions in terms of information sharing, medical services, training, research, innovation and digital transformation.
These linkages can bring in tremendous value for the people given the type of challenges that the terrain and demography of a desert region entail and simultaneously the opportunities that can unfold with cohesive development.

October Drought Information Statement from National Weather Service Abundant precipitation over the Summer of 2018 across southeast Colorado has continued throughout the early Fall, with several weather systems bringing more beneficial precipitation across the area in September and October.
This abundant moisture has brought an end to the drought across portions of the far Southeastern Colorado Plains, as well as helped to ease the drought across portions of South Central and Southeast Colorado.
With that said, the latest US Drought Monitor, issued Thursday November 1st, is indicating most of Baca County, as well as eastern portions of Prowers and Kiowa Counties, as drought free.
However, the current map continues to depict portions of South Central and Southeast Colorado deep in drought, with Exceptional Drought (D4) conditions indicated across most of Mineral County and extreme western portions of Conejos County, as well as across portions of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of Southern Colorado, which includes portions of Costilla, Huerfano, Alamosa, Custer and Saguache Counties.
Severe Drought (D2) conditions are also depicted across the rest of Pueblo and Huerfano, Counties, extreme western portions of Otero County and western into central portions of Las Animas County.
Summer and early Fall precipitation has helped to ease fire danger across much of South Central and Southeast Colorado.
The latest monthly Evaporative Demand Index across indicating near normal to well above moisture across the area.
In the Arkansas Basin, the November 1st snowpack came in at 189 percent of average, with the Upper Rio Grande Basin coming in at 216 percent of average.
With the hot and dry conditions over the past several months, especially across western portions of the state, statewide water storage came in at 80 percent of average overall at the end of September, as compared to 117 percent of average storage available statewide at the same time last year.
In the Rio Grande Basin, end of September storage came in at 88 percent of average overall, as compared to 125 percent of average storage available at the same time last year.

If the supermarkets won’t help, we need the Government to implement a drought levy.
In modern society, we all suffer from information overload.
According to IBM, 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are produced every day.
So we can forgive the average person for their seemingly short attention span.
It is hard for people living in the currently grey and rainy coastal regions of Queensland and NSW to believe that we are still in drought.
Meteorological drought is rarely broken in a single event or month; typically regular rainfall over a period of several months is required to remove rainfall deficiencies of the magnitude of those now in place.
It was eight weeks ago that QDO called for the supermarkets to raise the 10 cent/litre drought levy.
According to the National Farmers Federation, Australia has 85,681 farms.
While some farms are not in drought declared areas, I would guess that at a minimum 25 per cent of all farms are being affected by the drought due to the costs of feed and irrigation.
Taking that number and divvying up the Coles fund, each drought affected farm would receive $560 – an embarrassingly small amount and a token gesture.

It also urged the central government to immediately announce a relief package for farmers in the province who were badly affected by the worsening situation.
The resolution was moved by Sanaullah Baloch of Balochistan National Party-Mengal soon after the provincial assembly’s session, which was presided over by Deputy Speaker Sardar Babar Khan Musakhel, began.
Speaking on the resolution, Mr Baloch said that according to international institutions Balochistan had been facing drought-like situation for long.
In view of the worsening situation the province should be declare calamity affected and the federal government should announce a relief package for farmers of the province.
He also called for reduction in the loadshedding hours, saying that at least 18-hour a day power should be provided to the province’s agriculture sector.
The resolution wanted the federal government to appeal international donor agencies to provide financial assistance and 300 solar tube wells to Balochistan Provincial Minister for Information and High Education Mir Zahoor Buledi said that the water crisis in the country, particularly in Balochistan, was now at an alarming level.
He said the provincial government was taking some measures on an emergency basis to improve the situation.
Nasrullah Khan Zerey of the Pakhtunkhwa Milli Awami Party said that environmental experts had urged the provincial government to build small dams in Quetta.
The previous government had proposed 200 small dams in hills in adjacent areas of the city, he added.
Published in Dawn, November 6th, 2018

It also urged the central government to immediately announce a relief package for farmers in the province who were badly affected by the worsening situation.
The resolution was moved by Sanaullah Baloch of Balochistan National Party-Mengal soon after the provincial assembly’s session, which was presided over by Deputy Speaker Sardar Babar Khan Musakhel, began.
Speaking on the resolution, Mr Baloch said that according to international institutions Balochistan had been facing drought-like situation for long.
In view of the worsening situation the province should be declare calamity affected and the federal government should announce a relief package for farmers of the province.
He also called for reduction in the loadshedding hours, saying that at least 18-hour a day power should be provided to the province’s agriculture sector.
The resolution wanted the federal government to appeal international donor agencies to provide financial assistance and 300 solar tube wells to Balochistan Provincial Minister for Information and High Education Mir Zahoor Buledi said that the water crisis in the country, particularly in Balochistan, was now at an alarming level.
He said the provincial government was taking some measures on an emergency basis to improve the situation.
Nasrullah Khan Zerey of the Pakhtunkhwa Milli Awami Party said that environmental experts had urged the provincial government to build small dams in Quetta.
The previous government had proposed 200 small dams in hills in adjacent areas of the city, he added.
Published in Dawn, November 6th, 2018

CNS Canada – Despite above normal precipitation over the last couple of months, when comes to the drought, the Prairies are not out of the woods as winter approaches.
For next growing season, especially like this year, they are going to require frequent, reliable rain during the growing season,” he explained.
Patrick Cherneski of the National Agri-Climate Information Service said Canada has a probability of experiencing an El Nino in the 70 per cent range.
He said an El Nino would mean a warmer winter for Western Canada with less precipitation and that would contribute to overall drier conditions.
“Quite often the arrival of the conditions, the climate phenomenon, does arrive but over the past several years they arrive slower than expected and not at the magnitude expected.
In this case for Western Canada that would be a positive,” Cherneski said.
In light of this fall’s precipitation, Burnett said southern Manitoba remains below normal in terms of moisture and there is a chance for southern Saskatchewan and southern Alberta to receive late season precipitation.
“But at this time of year you tend not to get as much precipitation just because of the atmospheric dynamics are far more subdued,” he said.
As for the central Prairies, Burnett said they are a bit dry and that the northern Prairies almost have too much moisture.
In turn, harvesting in northern Alberta and northern Saskatchewan could be delayed to until spring.

This October was only the 19th wettest on record at the airport, but it was 1.79 inches above normal and a significant change from the rest of the year.
Even with the help that October brought, Southeast remains drier than normal for the year.
While Juneau benefitted from a wet October, Ketchikan received only 62 percent of its normal rainfall in October and is 29 inches below normal for the year.
“Still, the situation over the southern Panhandle is somewhat better than it was in September,” the Weather Service wrote in its monthly update, before concluding, “However, portions of the southern Panhandle remain in a severe drought and significant impacts to communities located there persist.” October finished as the fourth-warmest in Juneau’s recorded history, averaging 45.5 degrees.
The warmest day ever recorded in October came on Oct. 1 this year, when the thermometer read 63 at the airport.
Elsewhere in Southeast, Yakutat had its warmest October ever, averaging 46.5 degrees.
(The old record was 45.9, set in 1980.)
Skagway had its third-warmest October.
The winter’s first snowfall arrived Nov. 1, and 3.2 inches have been recorded through Monday morning at the airport.
The coldest temperatures of the winter will arrive Tuesday night, when clear skies will allow temperatures to dip into the teens in the Mendenhall Valley and the low 20s downtown.

Climate change is impacting the Caribbean, with millions facing increasing food insecurity and decreasing freshwater availability as droughts become more likely across the region, according to new Cornell research in Geophysical Research Letters.
“Climate change – where mean temperatures rise – has already affected drought risk in the Caribbean.
Since 1950, the Caribbean region has seen a drying trend and scattered multiyear droughts.
But the recent Pan-Caribbean drought in 2013-16 was unusually severe and placed 2 million people in danger of food insecurity.
In Haiti, for example, over half the crops were lost in 2015 due to drought, which pushed about 1 million people into food insecurity, while an additional 1 million people suffered food shortages throughout the region, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Human Affairs.
Examining climatological data from the 2013-16 Pan-Caribbean drought, anthropogenic warming accounted for a 15 to 17 percent boost of the drought’s severity, Herrera said.
Climate model simulations indicate the most significant decrease in precipitation in the Caribbean might occur May through August – the rainy season.
A failed rainy season in spring and summer, added to a normal dry season in the late fall and winter, prolongs a drought.
Park Williams, Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University.
The research was supported by the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the National Science Foundation and NASA.

She connects dots between climatic events and famine amid rising global temperatures The world’s most catastrophic drought and subsequently deadly famine of the last 800 years was less than a century and a half ago.
“The book talks about famine and social-political factors — mostly the causes and consequences of the famine; we got interested in the role of climate conditions in causing this famine,” Singh said.
Understanding that information will help scientists eventually predict the when and how of severe future droughts of such widespread and prolonged endurance, she said.
What’s more, they’ll be able to understand how those droughts impact societies and their effects on the global food supply.
They began research that led to the Oct. 4 publication of a paper in the Journal of Climate, completing work that Singh had continued working on after arriving at WSU Vancouver in June.
But El Niño, even an extremely powerful one, cannot affect the entire globe.
However, in 1876 through 1878, that extremely powerful El Niño occurred just as two other extreme climatic events took place, collectively creating the conditions for global starvation.
The same three conditions actually have happened again in the same way as the Great Drought, in 1997 through 1998, but not to the same level of severity.
While the much of the rest of the world —Australia, Brazil, North Africa, Southeast Asia — were in the grips of a dire drought in the late 1870s, the Pacific Northwest was immersed in an extremely wet period.
If history is any teacher, it could be severe.