Day 131 South eastern Queensland just got hammered by record breaking rain. For 3 days it did nothing but rain. Clouds were thick and dark and not a ray of sunshine got through the whole time. There is so much water everywhere, the road to town is flooded in 3 different spots some being 20mm deep. And if your thinking take another road, well there is 3 options and they are all flooded at one point or two. It caught everyone by surprise and sent some farmers into a panic. Unfortunately Greg is one of them. We are only a third of the way through his 750 acres of cotton and rain like this is not good for it at all. The cotton we have picked is in modules and safe, the water just runs off the compacted sides. Because the rest is ready to be picked all the cotton is exposed. With rain like what we got there is a chance the cotton could start to mold before the rain even stops. When a cotton boll opens it has four quarters each fluffing out into a cotton ball. Each one of these balls has around 8 sunflower (with shell) sized seeds in it. When the water gets to the seed that is when the problem occurs and the cotton starts molding from the inside out. It takes quite the bit of rain to soak through but we are dangerously close. We don't even know yet because the paddock is too wet and sticky to even go look. Even if it looks good to us there is still a chance it might get downgraded at the gin. To put into perspective the possible result think of it like this. Cotton prices average around $450-500 per bale, we usually pack around 28 bales per module. Greg's cotton is yielding about 1.5 bales per acre. So there is about 750 bales of cotton at risk of downgrading. Each level of grade is about $50/bale. Not a good scenario. We heard of a paddock a couple of kilometers away that was picked and some 20 or so modules were sitting in 6 inches of water. We had to go see this. As we are there taking pics the poor farmer happens to drive by. Not surprisingly he admitted his beer intake has sky rocketed. Sitting in water the module will soak water about 6-8 inches higher then the water it is sitting in. This means he is gonna lose about a foot per module, each module being about 7 ft tall, equaling a loss of one module every seven. At 28 bales per module, him and Greg were trying to figure out who is worse off.
Most of these rain days we spent sleeping in. When we did get up we were off to town for this and that as we are still adding and fine tuning our future home. We have built a water storage system for the roof rack and added a little Canadian touch. Savanah, Greg's 10 year old daughter made us a maple leaf stencil, then using some spray paint got the chance to paint the van and our fingers while we held it in place.
We got 50mm of rain in the last few days add that to the 100mm we got 2 weeks ago and we are looking at quite the drying time. It is school holidays so the Evans crew took off to Nana's. We are also looking into where to go for a few days.