Tough times - Roche

He says MPI has been working with other organisations such as Beef + Lamb NZ, DairyNZ and the local Rural Support Trust to run seminars on how to deal with the dry conditions, and social occasions to get farmers to meet and support each other. 

Roche says different groups of people are affected in different ways.

"For example, your dairy farmer has a good milk price to look forward to and so does your sharemilker, but your contract milker is depending on the milk coming in to get their revenue. So we are just trying to cater for all the different people who will be differently affected," he says.

He says while sheep and beef farmers have little supplement, they tend to react more quickly, for example, destocking, when the drought starts to appear.

"The idea of a declaration is that it recognises that it has been much drier than a normal summer," he says.

Roche was at the Northland Field Days recently and says conditions are very dry on the west coast of the north.

He says the area around Dargaville is very dry and farmers there have been feeding out for the past couple of months.