Dear pastoral friends,

At the risk of seeming like a perpetual whinge-er, I want to tell you about the weather up here in the farming country. It is another unbelievable bleeding (literally! – life-sapping) bad season. Our irrigation farmers on the Murray system have been given their annual allocation of water for the season – 0%! It will be reviewed in November to see if there any water has turned up by then. The annual flow into the Hume Dam between February and July averages 800 gigalitres. The previous lowest record was 200 but this year they only got 130! What can a farm grow with no water? How can a church give hope to the rural community where not just farmers but every business the farmers used to spend money at is feeling the pinch also? What’s more, the water authorities still make the farmers pay thousands of dollars for irrigation – they just have no water to deliver to them!

It is so cruel and unfair – infrastructure costs, they say, while the water authority workers drive around in new utes. In the Wimmera where they don’t irrigate, a channel runs from the Grampians’ storages to fill the farm dams. Not this year. There’s not enough water to fill the channels. Farmers wanting water for their dam have to arrange to pick it up in a truck. We thought we did the drought thing very well in 2002 and God’s season of abandonment once endured would soon pass. But no, it still goes on. Ah wait! one old farmer told me – it was bad years from 1930 to 1945 and then it rained from 1946 for 20 years. We have had poor seasons since 1994 so steel yourselves, it’ll turn around.

Pray for us, brothers and sisters. My article for the local newspaper on the topic can be found on the web at http://www.ruralministry.org

A country pastor-friend

August 8, 2006