Ruffy farmer Phil Whitten says the pasture in his paddocks has never been better since the Longwood Bushfire swept through them in January.
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“It’s incredible, it’s beautiful; big clover leaves, phalaris, my gosh,” Phil, who grows out steers on his 300-acre property with his wife, Kelly, said.
“It started raining in February and it’s stayed green right through, which has never happened before, so that’s very lucky.
“You spend a fortune on fertilisers and you never get it looking that good.”
The Whittens bought their property on the Longwood-Ruffy Rd in 2011.
When the fire arrived on their doorstep, Phil chose to stay to defend their house and stock.
He was confident they wouldn’t burn because the radius was wet and green for about 150 metres.
He has an understanding of fire behaviour after spending time in the CFA when he was younger.
“We had water going everywhere,” Phil said.
“All summer, we keep it quite green, as much as we could, so that served us well.“
Phil had locked his 80 steers in a water trough yard the night before, after the fire had already started.
As it roared towards his property the next day, he raced against it to cut the fence and herd them into the lush garden by the house before it reached the paddock next door.
“I felt quite safe; at no point did I even feel any heat from it, I kept away from it,“ Phil said.
“It’s so quick ... I raced inside when it came through and you know that sort of orange footage you see, it was like that, and there’s an updraft wind appearing at the curtains; that was pretty scary.”
He kept the roof sprinklers on and within what felt like just a few minutes, the fire front had passed.
“Most things burned after the fire front passed; it’s not like Kinglake where you’ve got a mountainous bush, the fire’s five storeys high coming at you; it’s a grass fire, it raced across quickly,” he said.
He had to stay alert for the next few days, dousing embers and putting out spot fires.
The boundary fences burned, but new internal fences made of concrete and steel survived.
A yellowbox tree caught fire in about six different places, lighting up like a fireworks display.
Native trees, mostly stringybarks, were decimated, but all the deciduous trees survived, including the maples — which behaved like a buffer as the fire appeared to move around them — and have since sprung back to life.
Around a hundred 100-year-old pine trees that bordered the land couldn’t be saved.
“Once they burn, they don’t recover those big old pine trees, they just end up dying,” Phil said.
“But we did rescue some wood that ended up being exported to Indonesia for furniture.”
He was able to recover around a third of the cost of taking them down through the sale to a Seymour exporter.
“We cut them down pretty much straightaway in the autumn, before it got wet,” Phil said.
With massive trunks, it was just the rough outside bark that was charred.
Once that was stripped off, the wood inside was good.
“We haven’t had it as bad as others. We lost old trees, old fences and things,” Phil said.
“It gives us a chance to have a new era of the place and of the district, we sort of look at it like that.
“But we’re much luckier than most; we didn’t lose our stock, didn’t lose our house.”
They did, however, lose their garden to their stock.
“The steers ended up living in the garden for a few days — they loved it — so they got to eat that green grass they’d been looking at, ate the flowers, everything, trampled everything, made a real mess of it,” Phil said.
“But it was over $200,000 worth of cattle, so that’s much more than the cost to recover the garden.”
They were moved on within a week after the fire.
Half were sent for processing, the other half to a feedlot.
“We’ve only bought stock again in the past fortnight and the market is dearer now, but they were big and we got good money for them back then, so it’s not too bad, because we trade,” Phil said.
“We don’t have cows and calves, we buy steers and we grow them out and sell them.”
With a history of agricultural science, a curious Phil is now keen to look further into pasture after watching the new nutrient-dense grasses emerge.
“Phalaris is alive. It’s not an annual grass, it goes dormant, but if it rains in February, it grows,” he said.
“It loves a burn ... some cool burns on the paddock every now and then might actually be good for it.”