A STRONG season could be just the tonic for Cleve district farmers recovering from January's storm on the Eyre Peninsula.
The Kimba district copped up to 300 millimetres in the once-in-a-generation event, but areas further south, like Darke Peak, Rudall and Gum Flat, also felt the brunt of heavy rainfall, raging torrents of water and the subsequent damage it caused to paddocks and fencing.
While bills for repair have been expensive, a promising cropping season has farmers feeling positive the event won't be remembered for the wrong reasons.
Michael Evans, who farms with wife Alison and son Riley at Gum Flat, 20 kilometres north of Cleve, said they had been able to hold onto moisture from the storm and their crops were looking very healthy, despite limited growing season rainfall.
"There is no substitute for subsoil moisture," he said.
"It has been one of those years where we've had the rain, we knew we'd have to put a lot of inputs in, and they're expensive.
"We're hopeful in the long run the subsoil moisture we've got will outweigh the initial financial impact of the storm and the following inputs.
"You've just got to wait 10 months for it to happen."
The Evans had 200mm across three days, with torrents of raging water resulting in four-foot deep gutters through paddocks, soil erosion, the destruction of kilometres of fencing and vehicle tracks.
More than 350 tractor hours were logged to repair paddock damage, using a notch blade, smudge bar, loaders and offset discs.
"Over 2000 hectares, we didn't have a paddock that we could spray due to the gutters," Mr Evans said.
"Priority one was to get paddocks into shape so we could spray them and conserve the moisture that we had (and not lose it to weeds).
"We had to get ready for seeding."
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Mr Evans said they were not completely overwhelmed when faced with the clean up, having had a 150mm rain event in March 2016 that, while not as bad, gave them an idea of what they were "up against".
"We were fortunate that Chad Glover from C&C Agricultural was able to get us a notch blade very quickly, which we are still very thankful for."
Fellow Gum Flat farmer John Flavell said crops at his property were looking fantastic on undamaged ground, but struggling on some of their worst impacted soils.
The Flavells had about 100ha of bad paddock gouging on sandy loam soils, as well as significant fencing and water pipe damage.
They had up to 150mm of the 200mm of rain fall in a 12-hour period.
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A contractor with a tractor-drawn scraper packed sand and clay back into gouged areas in time for seeding, but Mr Flavell said some of the sandy areas would only provide very low production value this year.
"The big upside is the huge amount of subsoil moisture left behind," he said.
"It didn't take much in April/May to wet things up to start seeding.
"We've got reasonable cover on most of our paddocks, apart from where we could only get some sands back into the gouge.
"Some of that's struggling a bit, so we'll have to go back and address that with some clay."
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Mr Evans and Mr Flavell expressed their disappointed, as Kimba district farmers had before, that state and federal governments hadn't provided any on-farm disaster assistance, due to no crops being in the ground, leaving growers to bear the machinery and fuel costs required to fix paddock damage.
The state government previously stated they were comfortable with national guidelines on disaster assistance.
Mr Flavell said their out-of-pocket expense for loss of production, scraper hire, fence damage and pipe repairs would easily run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
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FULL ROAD REPAIR EDGES CLOSER
SEVEN months on from the storm that caused havoc across eastern and central Eyre Peninsula, some roads remain closed and repairs continue.
In the Cleve District Council area, Council's assistant works manager Grant Crosby estimates 700 kilometres of roads were impacted with 60km of major repairs required.
The council received federal and state government support to undertake repairs.
Several roads were completely washed away, while there was severe rutting on others and multiple drains chewed out.
"We had in excess of 25 roads closed throughout the district," Mr Crosby said.
"We've got all of them open now, bar three.
"We've still got water laying out by the Balumbah-Kinnaird road, which is one of the main heavy vehicle routes, and there's still work to do once it completely dries."
Mr Crosby said farmers and the general community had been resilient in the wake of the January storm, reporting affected roads to council and remaining patient during the lengthy repair period.
"Historically we've had storms in concentrated areas that were perhaps worse than this, but never on such a scale as this," he said.
"Half to three quarters of the district was affected."
