Torrential rain in Canterbury could be the final straw for some of the region's crops.
Parts of Canterbury had more than 60mms of rain in 24 hours on Monday and Tuesday.
South Canterbury arable farmer and contractor, Jeremy Talbot, says many of the crops still in the ground, like high value seed crops worth millions of dollars are now deteriorating rapidly and have reached the point where it's simply uneconomic to harvest them.
"They'd already deteriorated significantly before this weather, and this will now will really just about finish them off before we get some fine weather. "
"We're talking a week or two of norwesters and that's just not on the forecast at the moment," Mr Talbot says.
"And we're getting much colder days, they're now talking about periods of frosts and it's just making things very tough for the guys, particularly trying to get those crops out and get the next lot of crops in."
Mr Talbot says it's time the adverse events framework was activated to help Canterbury's cropping farmers.