Nelsons Plains landholder Murray Schaefer has built a laneway to help evacuate his cattle in flood time.

And when it’s time to evacuate them from the flood plain it will take an hour instead of half a day. 

Murray Schaefer has installed six kilometres of fencing to create a laneway the cattle will use to safely evacuate from the flood plain.

And he’s got a bit more to do before the stretch will extend all the way to the Williams River.

The move was part of his farm flood readiness plan, which the Hunter Local Land Services created after the region’s agriculture industry lost $105 million in productivity because of the 2015 April super storm. 

More than 115,000 animals also lost their lives in the disaster.

Mr Schaefer secured a Hunter Local Land Services flood recovery grant to help foot the bill for the fencing. He said it was worth every cent. In the April flood the low-lying areas of his property filled with water from heavy rain before the Williams River had even flowed onto the farm.

Properties along the stretch are usually inundated when the Williams River breaches its banks. His wife Deborah had been watching the Bureau of Meterology radar and thanks to her quick-thinking they evacuated all of the cattle in time. 

Some of his neighbours weren’t so lucky. Hundreds of cattle and horses, and a dog, lost their lives on the same flood plain a few kilometres from his property. 

“It can all happen so quickly, you can wake up one morning and its all over,” he said. 

“If we’re not home then our neighbours or our agents can get them up.

"It would normally take half a day to get them all up, and now they’ll be able to do it in an hour.”

Nine paddocks feed into the laneway, which will make it easy for anyone to round up the stock and feed them into the stretch to high ground.

He has also replaced the roofing on old hay sheds so he can store feed in case a natural disaster occurs, and put in stock yards. 

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