With support arriving months after the hailstorms, growers are wondering what took so long

The announcement of grants up to $50,000 for impacted farmers could go a long way towards recovery from the storms, but the nine weeks it took for the support to arrive took a tremendous toll on the mental health of those fighting for it.

Vito Mancini, chairman of the Griffith Citrus Growers Association said that the financial cost of the storms could have been minimised if support had arrived earlier, along with the mental health impacts.

"Without a doubt, and it's something I've been critical about," Mr Mancini said.

"First of all, the mental health side of things - to have growers ring you up and say 'I don't want to go on the farm' - I don't have the resources to try and make people comfortable on those issues and to get access to those resources was challenging."

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Bruno Brombal, the chairman of Riverina Winegrape Growers, agreed.

"It's been a disastrous year for grape growers. The weather conditions, the disease factor and then the hail came along and devastated a lot of growers. Vito's right, the mental health system is a big problem."

Minister for Agriculture Dugald Saunders attributed the lengthy waiting period to the relationship between the state government and the Commonwealth.

"It is one of those things that's a Commonwealth and a state arrangement so it goes through a couple levels. This took frustratingly, quite a number of weeks to get where we are today," he explained.

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"The process is always looked at in as quick a timeframe as possible. Hopefully if there is any more of this, and we are seeing natural disasters across the state - all of those things are activated as quickly as they can be."

"This took longer than I would have liked to see it take but we've chased it up over the last month to try and fast-track it as much as possible."

While the financial support might have taken weeks to finalise, Mr Mancini said it took too long to even just hear back from those he had contacted in the initial days.

"To even have someone in government just make a phone call and say 'we'll help you through this' took about a month. That's something that made me a bit down."

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