Questions raised over Colac-Otway council's Apollo Bay hay transport ban

Need for Feed chairman Graham Cockerell said the organisation wanted to urgently ship 500 tonnes of fodder and 200 tonnes of cattle pellets to King Island.

But Colac Otway shire council has blocked it from sending the fodder and pellets through Apollo Bay, the most direct route to King Island.

The shire has claimed an engineering study has shown the Apollo Bay wharf cannot take the trucks, carrying the fodder and pellets.

The shire previously banned Bass Strait Freight (BSF), Bridport, Tas, from freighting live cattle from King Island to Apollo Bay.

The issue is now before the court.

Mr Cockerell said Need for Feed had told the council how it intended to offload the products, but the shire still rejected the application.

"We never specified to them which company or vessel we were using at all, we just asked to use the port," he said.

"They are saying the number of trucks we were using would damage it, I am not sure how they work that out."

He said he wasn't sure how the engineering study came to that conclusion.

"We told them how we thought it would happen, the plan would be to unload the hay and pellets at an industrial estate at Apollo Bay," he said.

"The hay was to be offloaded onto container bases, in the industrial area, and they would be loaded onto the ship by forklift, which is how they do it at Welshpool and King Island.

"There didn't have to be trucks on the wharf."

He said the products could not be trucked to Geelong or Portland, as claimed by the council.

"Those ports are for bigger vessels that don't visit King Island - loading at those ports means the hay would have to go to Devonport first," he said.

The shipments would be caught in a shipping bottleneck, currently affecting King Island.

"There is already a bottleneck in trying to get trailers of hay on there and cattle off - we are a charity, we use volunteer transport, we don't own trucks or trailers and we don't have them to put on those bigger vessels anyway," he said.

Mr Cockerell said 35 trucks would be used to transport the hay and pellets to Apollo Bay.

"We wouldn't be clogging up the port with 35 trucks, it was going to be staggered over two or three days," he said.

He said he felt the council's objection was to BSF - "its a great pity - we even said to them we didn't want to get caught in the middle, we just want to get some hay out there".

It was likely Need for Feed would have to go through Port Welshpool, as "the hay needs to get there asap".

The first load was expected to go out next week, but using a different port would add about $70,000 to the cost of freighting the fodder and pellets.

"It eats into our budget - we will exceed it," he said.

"If we didn't have that cost, that is money we could put back into products," he said.

The Tasmanian government had been "extremely helpful," he said, but the council had made an assessment "without even talking to us".

It's believed Colac Otway councillors are being briefed on the situation by officers, this afternoon.