Rural Marlborough farmer loses ‘winter hay’ after shed ignites

A pile of ash and corrugated iron is all that remains of a shed that contained most of a rural Marlborough farmer’s winter feed.

John Small, who owned a small dairy farm in Ronga Valley, near Rai Valley, said he was woken up by a knock of the door in the early hours of Tuesday morning by the local volunteer fire brigade.

He was told that a hay shed on his property containing “at least a couple hundred bales” was up in flames.

“It’s certainly something we could do without,” Small said, as inside the shed was “most of the winter hay” he had prepared for feeding his cows over the next couple of months.

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“So that’s all gone, and the shed’s gone as well. So we currently are buying in some hay from Canterbury. We’ll need a few truck-and-trailer loads,” he said.

Small had another shed up the road to use in the meantime, but he said Tuesday’s fire had come following “a pretty tough little period really”.

Ronga Valley was hit hard by a weather event in August last year, when days of torrential rain caused widespread flood damage to properties and roads in rural areas of Marlborough.

Small said the flooding had washed away a bridge over the Ronga River on his property, right next to the now-destroyed shed.

“So it’s been a fairly tough reason,” he said.

Fire crews used water from the nearby river to put out the Tuesday morning fire, which Fire and Emergency was alerted to shortly before 4am, a spokesperson said.

Crews from Rai Valley and Havelock volunteer fire brigades responded to the roughly 10m by 10m fire, and spent just over four hours at the scene.

“The fire brigade were fantastic, they’re all local people, we know them,” Small said.

“They were all really good about it. They just contained it and made sure it was safe, and then we let it burn out.”

The farmer was called into action himself that morning, using his digger to “scoop out hay from the top of the fire” while crews dampened down the debris.

“It’s quite a surreal thing to be doing first thing in the morning,” Small said.

The cause of the fire was thought to be “spontaneous combustion”, which he thought could have been the result of hay bales being slightly damp when they were stacked in January.