An incredible and welcome delivery

THANK you to Need for Feed Australia and all who were involved in the delivery of hay, fodder and silage to Alexandra on Sunday, January 25.

There were 76 trucks and another 20 smaller vehicles, incuding utes and trailers. There were so many that at one stage the lead truck was in Molesworth while the last was just leaving Yea.

During the afternoon, most of the trucks were sent out to deliver hay direct to affected farmers across the area.

Graham Cockerell from Lions Need for Feed explained, “We’re a registered charity. We had a board meeting four of five days after the fires to say that we thought the need was great enough.

We originally had a straight hay run going to the Riverland in South Australia, which has been slow to recover from the drought over there. We’re probably in the fortunate position that we already had 25 or 30 guys signed up for that. We made a decision as a board to postpone that and concentrate on Victoria.

“We had some trucks drop out from South Australia because we couldn’t guarantee the load over here, but in the end, we had four or five come over.

Those spots were very quickly filled and then some once we’d put a post up on our Facebook page to say that we’re going to do Victorian fires, without saying where we’re going necessarily.

We’ve ended up with 76 trucks here [on Sunday]. I think 75 of them were delivered direct down on the farms. We had a B double load which was entirely vetch, which is very high quality product, so that’s been unloaded here [at the Alexandra Rodeo grounds] so it can get shared out to be fair to everybody,” he said.

He said that the smaller vehicles were carrying small bales and dog food, and things….