Taree received record rainfall — 305 millimetres fell in the 24 hours to 9am on Thursday.

Nearby low-lying townships, including the village of Croki, were inundated, and some roads and pastures submerged as residents coped with their third flood in 12 months.

Croki dairy farmer Craig Emerton said 90 per cent of his farm was still under water and he had only just managed to plant his winter feed crop.

“We haven’t been able to utilise our paddocks properly since February this year. We have been under that much continuous wet weather,” he said.

“We were running six weeks behind in our planting and finally finished up our planting last week. Now it’s all gone under water … so it’s going to leave us with a huge feed gap.

The farm has been in Mr Emerton’s family since 1856. He’s been running it for more than three decades and had planned to pass it on to his daughter.

Now though, he is not so sure

“We’re trying to work through a farm succession plan but we keep getting thrown these curve balls with the weather,” he said.

“We wouldn’t like to hand it over to them at the moment … because it’d just destroy them to work under this.”

Evacuated residents return home

Further south, residents in low-lying parts of Tuncurry have returned home after being forced to evacuate during the height of the flooding.

“It’s a bit smelly and there’s lots of rubbish and brown water,” resident Craig Murray said.

David Hardaker, the local emergency services coordinator for the Salvation Army, helped coordinate operations at the Tuncurry evacuation centre and said it had been a very stressful few days.

“There was a lot of flash flooding and people were caught in vehicles, it was full-on.”