There is no doubt that the major issue for many farmers and others around the country over the past month, is the flooding of land and more importantly, homes.

You’d have to feel sorry for anyone watching water pour into their home, night and day, destroying possessions built up over many years.

On this farm, apart from the odd lake and pond that are overflowing with water, there is relatively little damage. Land is wet and slatted tanks are starting to fill up, but hopefully I can last until the slurry spreading deadline is passed before I need to take action.

While it would be great to get slurry on those fields that have poor soil indices at this time of year, it is just a matter of spreading it wherever it is dry enough to take out a tractor and tanker.

The other issue affecting many farmers over the last month is the slow or indeed the non-payment from the Department of Agriculture for various schemes.

Whether it is the Areas of Natural Constraints (ANC) Scheme formerly the Disadvantaged Areas Scheme, Single Payment Scheme, GLAS or Beef Data & Genomics Scheme, there seems to be a problem in processing payments that are due to farmers. A particular problem arises where a young farmer is involved in either a partnership or adding a name to a herd number.

Most young farmers have not received any notification regarding the top-up they have applied for, or any information on whether they have been successful in their application to the National Reserve.

Given that both the Young Farmers Scheme and the National Reserve had to be applied for online, it is inexcusable for the Department not to have systems in place to process these applications promptly and issue payments on time.

Adding to the frustration is the lack of communication or understanding from the Department regarding the issues involved. A simple text or email to confirm that the application is being processed and a likely payment date would ease some of the frustration.

With a few days off work over the Christmas, I took the chance to catch up on the last of the cattle dosing required, and moved the autumn-born calves to a new grazing paddock. This paddock is slightly further away from the sheds but after a few days the calves get used to the move out in the morning and back in that evening.

With about 900kg of grass dry matter per ha, the calves are certainly full by evening time, which will hopefully give them a good boost in terms of weight gain for the rest of the winter.