Getting ahead of the fire-notice season, while the grass is still green

Mid-August, and fire is about the last thing on anyone's mind. The paddocks are green, the mornings are cold, and the Fire Danger Period is still months off. Which is exactly why now is the time to think about it. The work that keeps a block on the right side of a fire notice is done in early summer, but the planning that makes it painless happens now, while the grass is still green and the contractor's diary is still open.

Understanding how the fire-notice cycle actually works is one of the more useful things a landowner around here can carry into spring. It is not complicated, and it gets a lot calmer once you can see the whole shape of it.

How the fire-notice cycle works

Across Victoria, councils are responsible for fire prevention on private land. Each has a fire prevention officer who inspects blocks before and during the Fire Danger Period, looking for land that presents a fire hazard. On grazing and lifestyle country, that hazard is usually long, cured grass, especially where it runs right up to fences, sheds and the road.

Where a block is judged a hazard, the owner receives a Fire Prevention Notice. It sets out what work is required and a date by which it has to be done. The common requirement is straightforward enough: cut the grass and keep it cut, or put in a firebreak, or both. Many notices ask for grass kept under 100 millimetres through the danger period, along with a slashed perimeter break on the boundaries.

None of that is cause for alarm. It is a predictable, seasonal cycle. The owners who find it stressful are almost always the ones who leave it until a notice lands in the letterbox in the heat of November. The ones who plan for it in winter barely notice it.

Why the planning happens now

Here is the timing that trips people up. The physical work, the slashing, is done late spring into early summer, once the grass has cured and stopped growing. Slash a green, growing paddock in September and it will be up again before Christmas, so the cutting itself waits.

The decisions do not have to. Late winter and early spring is when you work out what your block needs, where the breaks will run, and who is doing the job, before the rush. Spring and early summer are the busiest weeks of the contracting year, with pasture, spraying, hay and fire work all wanting the same short run of good weather. A block scoped and booked in August gets cut on time. A phone call in December joins a long queue.

The slashing waits for the grass to cure. The planning does not have to wait for anything.

What a compliant break actually looks like

It helps to know what sorted looks like, so you can read your own block honestly. A standard fuel-reduction firebreak is a slashed strip, not bare earth and not a burnt line. The width is whatever your notice says, and it differs between councils and properties. In the City of Whittlesea, rural properties in a grassland area need a break of at least 35 metres from every boundary. Read your own letter for the number. The break runs along the inside of your boundary fences and continuing around the house, the sheds and along the driveway for access.

• It follows the fence. A break parallels the boundary and turns with it. A strip cut through the middle of a paddock, with no relationship to a fence or an asset, is not doing the job.
• It is continuous. The break runs unbroken along the line it protects, with no woodpiles, drums, fallen timber or parked machinery sitting in it.
• The grass is short. Cut to stubble under 100 millimetres, with the cut material dropped flat as light thatch. No windrows, no raked heaps.

Some blocks need the whole area slashed rather than just a perimeter, particularly smaller lifestyle blocks where most of the ground sits close to buildings. Whether it is a perimeter break or a full slash comes down to the size, the layout and what the notice asks for. That is a judgment worth making early. You can read more about how we approach it on the fire prevention page.

Walk it now, while you are reading the rest of the block

You are already out on the block in winter, reading where the water sits and checking the fence lines. Add the fire lines to the same walk. Picture where a break of the width your notice asks for would run along each boundary, note where it would need to swing around the shed or the haystack, and check that the driveway has clear access for a truck. Look for the things that would foul a break: the woodpile against the fence, the trailer parked in the long grass, the fallen limb no one has shifted.

Write it down while you can see it. What you end up with is a short, plain plan: which boundaries need a break, whether the whole block wants slashing, and roughly when it should happen as the grass cures. Carry that into spring and the fire season becomes a booking, not a scramble. If you would like a straight read on what your block needs and when, that is part of what we do around Whittlesea and the ranges.

Oak Ridge Agriculture

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