Farmers provide emergency relief

FARMERS stick together and that’s never been truer than now in light of the recent fires in South West Victoria.
Local farmers – and members of the Leongatha South CFA – saw the disaster unfolding on the news and wasted no time in sticking their hands up to assist.
A hay drive was proposed and Hilco Zuidema of the Leongatha South CFA put the call out on Facebook for people to donate hay bales.
According to Mr Zuidema, the CFA expected to be carting around 60 bales. What resulted was a whopping total of 530 bales.
Donations came in from Yanakie all the way through to the Mornington Peninsula.
Mr Zuidema was amazed by the generosity and was backed heavily by the local community.
“We are all farmers here in Leongatha South. We’ve all had a fairly good season and have some bales to spare,” he said.
“Something like this could happen to anyone and we’d like to think people would help us out if we were in the same situation.”
Mr Zuidema put his Facebook status up on Sunday night, March 18 and by the Monday donations were already starting to roll in.
Once it began to snowball, he called on the help of emergency relief service Need For Feed, which helped to organise trucks to move the bales.
The bales were carted on Friday and trucked to Officer on Saturday morning. A convoy of up to 50 trucks took the bales through to Camperdown for distribution around South West Victoria.
“It’s been a big effort. It just goes to show what everybody thinks of one another,” Leongatha South CFA member Michael Landry said.
“We are all farmers and we need to look out for each other.”

Donations: from left, Leongatha South CFA members Michael Landry and Hilco Zuidema sought the help of Need For Feed to support farmers suffering through fires in South West Victoria by donating hay.

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Posted by Tayla Kershaw on Mar 27 2018. Filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry