increase font size
The new handbook provides practical step-by-step advice to help lifestylers and landowners to create a detailed emergency plan to keep themselves, their family and their animals safe. Photo credit: Auckland Council.
Plan for all eventualities. That’s the message from Auckland Council amid the release of a new emergency management handbook for urban dwellers moving to lifestyle blocks.
The handbook was developed by Auckland Council’s Auckland Emergency Management, Fire and Emergency New Zealand (FENZ), the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI), and Farmers Mutual Group (FMG).
Auckland Emergency Management general manager Paul Amaral says emergencies can happen at any time.
“It is important lifestyle block owners can easily get the information they need to prepare for and make well-informed decisions to keep them, their families and their animals safe,” he says.
The Lifestyle Block Preparedness Handbook is designed to give practical advice on how to make a property more resilient to emergency events and what to do in specific emergencies.
It includes practical step-by-step advice to help owners to create a detailed emergency plan to keep themselves, their family and their animals safe.
Amaral says the handbook includes advice on emergency alerts and warnings, getting to know neighbours, power and phone outages, property access, insurance, making an emergency plan and what to do in certain emergency events.
“At the end of the handbook there is a planning template to help users develop an emergency plan which meets the needs of their unique situation.
“Experience from past emergency events has proven that lifestyle block owners tend to be less resilient than their farming neighbours,” says Amaral.
He says that while many lifestyle block owners are well intentioned, they lack the necessary information and resiliency skills.
“Many lifestyle block owners are city dwellers with little farming experience and few rural connections and networks,” Amaral told Rural News. “As their primary income normally isn’t from their property, owners rely on employment in the city to fund their lifestyle block and as such are often not on the property when disaster strikes.”
“Unlike their farming counterparts, who earn more than 51% of their income from the land and are therefore eligible for government support, lifestyle block owners are mostly not eligible.”
Amaral says this means lifestyle block owners are often disproportionately impacted during an emergency.
To get a copy of the handbook, head to: https://www.aucklandemergencymanagement.org.nz/lifestyle-block
The recent East Coast Farming Expo, held over two days at Wairoa, offered an insight into the current state of agriculture on the east of the North Island, at a time when the locals are remembering the second anniversary of Cyclone Gabrielle.
OPINION: At last, a serious effort to better connect farmers and scientists.
An initiative by the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) to connect farmers with scientists is taking off judging by the response at recent regional field days.
Scientists from the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) are part of an international team working to develop a low-cost diagnostic tool that could significantly improve food crop production in developing countries.
Landowners with farms bordering the Hoteo River, north of Auckland, are hopeful their pressure will influence the outcome of two applications by local iwi relating to ownership of the riverbed.
Among the regular exhibitors at last month’s South Island Agricultural Field Days, the one that arguably takes the most intensive preparation every time is the PGG Wrightson Seeds site.
Two high producing Canterbury dairy farmers are moving to blended stockfeed supplements fed in-shed for a number of reasons, not the least of which is to boost protein levels, which they can’t achieve through pasture under the region’s nitrogen limit of 190kg/ha.
Buoyed by strong forecasts for milk prices and a renewed demand for dairy assets, the South Island rural real estate market has begun the year with positive momentum, according to Colliers.
The six young cattle breeders participating in the inaugural Holstein Friesian NZ young breeder development programme have completed their first event of the year.
New Zealand feed producers are being encouraged to boost staff training to maintain efficiency and product quality.
OPINION: The world is bracing for a trade war between the two biggest economies.
OPINION: In the same way that even a stopped clock is right twice a day, economists sometimes get it right.
OPINION: The proposed RMA reforms took a while to drop but were well signaled after the election.
