As breakfast television shows broadcast against the backdrop of Johnny Woods Crossing in the centre of Forbes on Monday, and debate raged about whether the town would be cut in two, out on the broad flat expanses where the Lachlan River winds its way west, farmers were already counting costs that run into the hundreds of thousands, even millions of dollars.

At Riversleigh, 23 kilometres west of Forbes on the flooded road to Condobolin – the town next in line to be consumed by the spreading Lachlan – Sarah Black checks a levy bank she and husband Andrew built after the big flood of 1990, before heading inside to hold a family conference. Her letterbox on the Forbes to Condobolin road looks like a pelican perched on a mooring post in a lake.

“At this stage it’s protecting us, but it won’t if it rains again,” she says.

Her daughter-in-law Julie, who runs a property near Trangie has flown in by helicopter, stopping at the Forbes SES headquarters to pick up two managers from the Forbes branch of the agricultural bank Rabo Bank.

In the lounge room too is Sarah’s husband Andrew, a vet, and a Dubbo agronomist and farmer Matt Shephard who has come down to check on a block behind the levee he leases from the Blacks to grow wheat. The Lachlan is lapping at the saturated earth bank as an excavator works to repair crumbling sections.

Nick Turner, a senior manager with Rabo Bank, talks in terms of $150 an acre to get wheat or canola crops to the point where they are now. All that has already been lost by hundreds of farmers and tens and thousands of acres more are in the balance.

Premier Mike Baird’s declaration of a state of emergency in Forbes is welcome news but that won’t stop the unfolding crisis in the Central West. Neither will government loans, he says.

“Low interest loans don’t tick the boxes because rates are already so low. Governments should leave debt funding to banks and look at grants.”

Mr Shephard says in a rural sector where farmers work willingly within the restrictions governments impose there must be some appreciation of the stewardship that farmers undertake.

“It’s really frustrating that our city counterparts don’t appreciate how good we are as stewards of the land.”

For Mr Turner there is an obvious justification for helping our farmers. 

“We cannot underestimate the multiplier effect farms have in local towns,” he says.

“If farmers are not spending money then we all do it tough, that’s why everyone gets the benefits [of emergency grants].”

For Sarah Black if selling the message to metropolitan voters is hard it is because not only the source but the value of food has somehow been lost in a society where households throw away thousands of dollars worth annually.

“People don’t seem to respect food and so they don’t respect the people who produce it,” she says.“