Fire recovery comes with tough challenges

The sawmill, built and assembled by Mr Porter and employing five local men was deemed too profitable to warrant financial support.

"They said we weren't in enough hardship," Mrs Porter said.

Meanwhile, the mill's reconstruction has been delayed due to pandemic restrictions.

All the cattle on the property were sold before prices went up and as restockers are just too dear they have opened the place to agistment.

"When the bushfire inquiry asked for input I said to them next time we are in a situation like that again we would backburn from our property into the main fire the night before, like we wanted to, but weren't given permission," said Mrs Porter.

"Even taking into account the $11,000 fine if we had lit one and even if we paid the fine with our credit card at 27 per cent interest, even then we would have come out of better, given the loss of income."

"We still can't rebuild because of the virus, but we can't get financial support. Walls keep jumping at us. Every day there's another brick in the wall."

Related reading: Farmers continue rebuild battle after fires

To earn a living Mr Porter has taken a job away, driving livestock roadtrains in the Kimberly, and is gone four weeks at a time.

"It's tough on us and on his parents," Mrs Porter said.

With cattle on the property managed through cell grazing, the loss of internal fences from the fire was extensive.

If there was one positive Mrs Porter reports that paddocks made more resilient through resting were able to bounce back more quickly once the rains arrived, although gully raker storms pushed down some of the new fencing, creating extra repair work.

"This whole experience has made us more frail, but a whole lot stronger," said Mrs Porter

The image of Robert Miller's 1000 dairy herd standing on a concrete pad under sprinklers resonated across the country, showing the battle farmers faced in the South Coast bushfires.

It showed the lengths farmers went to to save their animals and livelihoods after the Currowan Fire, which burnt for 74 days across the Shoalhaven, wiped out large tracts of land and was officially extinguished by heavy rains in early February.

But he says the consequences of the bushfires that destroyed 250 hectares of his pasture, were still lingering. The fires were followed by floods in early February, which turned burned paddocks to green feed.

As a result, some of his cattle came down with pneumonia and died.

The rain also brought armyworms in mid March and in a matter of days, the caterpillars had eaten hundreds of acres of sorghum and millet crop on his farms.

The rain also saw the kikuyu grass come back quickly and a number of his cattle came down with kikiuya poisoning. At the same time many were hit by three-day sickness.

There was a 40 per cent drop in milk production drop and he had to buy an additional 150 head.

"It's been three challenging months, but we've seen a big transformation with cows coming back onto milk," he said.

"We also had a big frost, which means that all the bugs and problems have gone, you don't know what a relief it was to have a big frost. It's all up from here."

Just four months ago there was not a blade of grass left on Rocky Allen's South Coast property after fire described as "a tornado" torched 100pc of his farmland at Cobargo.

Now there is just a "green facade" as the fifth generation dairy farmer, who milks 180 head, waits for an east coast low to fill the dams and soil profile.

Before the January fires, Mr Allen didn't have much pasture because of drought and now he faces a third year of feeding if rain doesn't come in the next six weeks.

"We are a long way from the drought being over, let alone fire recovery," he said.

In February and March, his region received between 170mm to 250mm, which gave people a short reprieve from feeding. But there has been no rain since and the creeks flows are drying back.

"There is still a lot of work ahead with the clean-up only starting three weeks ago," he said.