The entirety of New South Wales is rain-starved, with some parts receiving less than 20mm this year.
For many farms, it’s the driest 18 months since records began in 1900.
The Bureau of Meteorology’s latest outlook for the next three months predicts high chances of warmer and drier conditions over the affected regions.
Winter crops during the driest autumn since 1902 will largely fail, while many farmers in the northern half of the state didn’t bother sowing any crops and won’t draw an income until December next year.
More than half of Queensland is also grappling with the unrelenting drought, the landscape bone dry.
Source:News Corp Australia Families hardest hit by the drought are struggling to pay household bills like food and energy, and they need livestock feed to stop their farms going under.
He has lived on his farm at Goolhi, west of Gunnedah in NSW, for 60 years.
All dams on the property are either dry or contain just a few centimetres of brown water, which they had to fence off because sheep were getting stuck and dying in the muddy banks.
For weeks now they have been organising donations of much-needed stock fodder and care packages for those families in the dry zones.
“Quite often there are tears when we turn up,” Mr Cockerell says.