How to get drought, flood and bushfire help on a farm

Farm Household Allowance is the payment most farming families should look at first and most look at last. It provides fortnightly income support at a rate equivalent to JobSeeker Payment or Youth Allowance, plus a Health Care Card, plus funding for professional financial assessment and activities that improve your circumstances.

It is deliberately designed around the fact that farm income is lumpy and farm assets are large. Eligibility turns on a household income and assets test with a farm assets threshold well above ordinary Centrelink limits, because a farming family can be asset-rich and genuinely unable to buy groceries. Off-farm income is counted, and business income is reconciled against your actual tax return afterwards, so estimating conservatively during the year avoids a debt later.

It is time-limited across a lifetime rather than open-ended, and the limit is expressed in cumulative days rather than in one continuous stretch. You can move on and off it as conditions change, which is exactly how it is intended to be used.

Applying requires a farm financial assessment, done with an approved provider and funded up to a set amount. Many farmers describe this as the most useful part of the payment rather than an obstacle, because it produces an outside view of the business that nobody had written down before.

You must be a farmer or the partner of a farmer, contributing a significant part of your labour and capital to a farm enterprise, and you must be an Australian resident. Sharefarmers and lessees can qualify.

The Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry sets the policy and Services Australia runs the payment, which is why the two sites say different-sounding things about the same scheme. Services Australia is where you claim.

There is no requirement that a drought or disaster be declared, and there is no requirement that the hardship be caused by weather. This is the most misunderstood feature of the payment and the reason eligible families do not apply.

The Rural Financial Counselling Service is free, independent, and funded by the Australian Government and states to provide financial counselling to farmers, fishers, foresters and related small businesses in financial difficulty. Counsellors do not sell products, do not work for a bank, and are not accountants — their job is to help you understand your financial position, identify options, and negotiate with lenders and creditors.

They also do the administrative work most farmers do not have time for: preparing the paperwork for Farm Household Allowance, assembling loan applications, and dealing with agencies. If you take only one action from this page, this is the call to make, and it costs nothing.

The Regional Investment Corporation is the Australian Government's farm lender, providing concessional loans including farm investment loans, drought loans and disaster recovery loans. The loans are for viable farm businesses and require a business case, and they are refinancing and working-capital instruments rather than grants. The RIC publishes what is currently open, and offerings change with policy.

Farm Management Deposits are a tax mechanism, not assistance, and they are one of the most valuable tools available to a primary producer. Deposits made in a high-income year are deductible in that year and taxable when withdrawn, letting you shift taxable income from a good season into a bad one. There are limits on the amount and conditions on withdrawal, including early-withdrawal concessions in drought and disaster conditions. The rules are administered jointly by the Department of Agriculture and the ATO.

The Future Drought Fund funds preparedness rather than relief: farm business resilience programs, regional planning, adoption and innovation hubs, and drought resilience self-assessment tools. It is the layer that matters between droughts, and the programs are delivered regionally.

Primary producers also have specific income tax concessions — averaging of taxable income across years, accelerated write-offs for fencing, water facilities and fodder storage, and treatment of forced livestock disposals. These are worth raising with a tax agent who works with farmers specifically, because they are substantial and easy to miss.

State rural assistance authorities administer their own loans, rebates and subsidies. The NSW Rural Assistance Authority is a worked example; every state has an equivalent body or program area, and the offerings differ.

Check whether the event has been activated for your local government area on Disaster Assist, the Australian Government's national list. It shows each activated disaster, the areas covered and the assistance measures switched on for each. Assistance measures are activated individually, so an area may be covered for personal hardship assistance but not for primary producer grants, or the reverse.

Check again after a week and after a month. Activations are commonly extended to further local government areas and further measures as assessments come in, and there is no notification to individual farmers when that happens.

Where activated, the two federal payments to look at are the Australian Government Disaster Recovery Payment, a one-off lump sum for people seriously affected, and the Disaster Recovery Allowance, a short-term income support payment for people who have lost income as a direct result. Both are claimed through Services Australia, both have claim windows, and both are separate from Farm Household Allowance.

State-administered measures under the joint funding arrangements are where the farm-specific money sits: primary producer recovery grants, clean-up and reinstatement assistance, freight subsidies for fodder, stock and water, emergency water infrastructure rebates, and concessional disaster loans. These are administered by state rural assistance authorities or equivalent agencies, not by the federal government.

Document everything before you clean up. Photograph damage, dead or destroyed stock, fencing, sheds, machinery, fodder and pasture, with dates. Keep receipts for every dollar spent on clean-up, agistment, freight, feed and emergency water. Grants are almost always reimbursement-based and require evidence of expenditure, and the most common reason a claim fails is that the evidence was destroyed along with the damage.

Contact your insurer immediately and separately. Insurance and government assistance are different systems, and many grants specifically exclude losses covered by insurance. Do not delay one waiting for the other.

Ask about deferrals rather than waiting for arrears. Banks, the ATO, councils and utilities all have hardship processes, and a deferral requested early is a much better outcome than a default managed later. The ATO can defer lodgement and payment for taxpayers in disaster-affected areas and often does so automatically for identified postcodes.

Call your insurer before you clean up, and photograph everything first. Insurers can and do decline claims where evidence was removed. Ask specifically what the policy covers for fencing, fodder, standing crops, machinery, sheds and business interruption, because farm policies vary enormously and gaps are common.

If an insurance claim is refused, delayed unreasonably or underpaid, use the insurer's internal complaints process and then the Australian Financial Complaints Authority, which is free and binding on the insurer if you accept the determination. The General Insurance Code of Practice sets standards for handling claims after a declared catastrophe.

Be alert to disaster chasers. After every significant event, unsolicited tradespeople, claim managers and finance brokers appear in affected areas offering immediate help, demanding deposits, and pressing for signatures on documents that assign your insurance claim to them. ASIC's guidance on this is direct. Never sign anything at the gate, never pay a deposit to an unsolicited caller, and check any tradesperson's licence with your state's building or trade regulator.

Rebuilding often triggers current building standards rather than the ones that applied when the original structure was built — bushfire attack level construction requirements in particular. Check with your council before assuming a like-for-like rebuild is possible, and check whether your policy covers the difference.

Watch the tax treatment of what you receive. Some disaster grants and payments are tax-free and some are assessable income; insurance payouts for revenue items are generally assessable while payouts for capital items may have capital gains consequences; and forced livestock disposals have specific concessional treatment. Get this checked rather than assumed, because the difference lands in the following year's return.

Keep a single file — physical or digital — with photographs, receipts, claim numbers, correspondence, grant applications and agency reference numbers. Every scheme asks for the same evidence and the file is what makes the fourth application take twenty minutes instead of a day.

Do not spend recovery money on the highest-emotion item first. Rural financial counsellors consistently report that the order in which recovery spending is sequenced determines whether a business gets through, and that fencing, water and feed usually come before rebuilding a shed.

Drought and disaster on a farm are prolonged rather than acute, which makes them different from most emergencies. The pressure does not end when the fire is out or the water goes down; it continues through destocking, rebuilding, debt and the next season's decisions.

Every state runs rural mental health and outreach services, and the Rural Financial Counselling Service is often the first point of contact because financial and emotional stress arrive together. Counsellors are experienced at making that referral without being asked directly.

Lifeline provides 24-hour crisis support on 13 11 14 and Beyond Blue on 1300 22 4636, both free and without referral. Rural-specific services exist in most states and the Royal Flying Doctor Service delivers mental health outreach across remote areas.

A GP mental health treatment plan makes Medicare rebates available for psychology sessions, including by telehealth, which for many farming families is the only practical delivery mode. Telehealth eligibility rules for rural and remote areas are more generous than for metropolitan patients.

Watch the people who do not ask. Older farmers, single operators and family members carrying the administrative load are consistently under-represented in service data and over-represented in poor outcomes. A direct question from a neighbour does more than a brochure.

Look after the practical basics that hold a household together during a long event: keeping children in school and connected, maintaining routine, and keeping at least one thing on the property that is not about the emergency.

The Bureau of Meteorology's drought and rainfall deficiency information is worth watching not because it changes anything but because it converts an anxious guess into a fact, and decisions made against data are easier to defend to a bank and to yourself.