For those who produce our food, natural disasters create work that lasts for years.
In the South Burnett lies the small farming community of Booubyjan.
And at the end of Booubyjan's quiet dirt driveways, farmers are settling in for a clean-up job of an almost unimaginable scale.
"The recovery time is huge," said Tracey Rockemer, who farms about 1,500 hectares of grazing and cropping country with her husband Dean.
"What we can do [will take] at least 12 months."
First things first
Cleaning up after a flood is both heartbreaking and hard work, but on a farm it becomes as much a logistical challenge as an emotional one.
"We just put the priority things first, the things that we think are probably urgent," Mr Rockemer said.
"We're on a highway, so straight after the flood we've got to do the best job we can to get fences back up to keep livestock off the road."
Dean Rockemer estimated he had about 10 kilometres of damaged fencing to fix in addition to destroyed roads, pumping stations and machinery.
But this type of damage — the stuff you see on television — is only the tip of the iceberg.
Mr Rockemer said critical infrastructure, such as irrigation switchboards, did not look impressive, but were what kept his business afloat.
Without this switchboard he was unable to water his cattle.
"We've had to resort to a firefighter pump," he said.
"We've been running that every few days just to keep water up to the stock."
A 'double whammy'
Farmers are paid for food they produce, and a flooded farm produces nothing.
As the rain pours down, the business's cash flow dries up.
To get money flowing again it was all hands on deck. Tracy and Dean Rockemer were well into the clean-up process when a second flood hit the farm in early March.
"We go hell for leather, and we've been six weeks from the first [flood] and now we got rattled again," Mr Rockemer said.
Erin Lawless also farms cattle and crops in Booubyjan. She said the community was still recovering from floods that hit in 2013.
"There are still some issues relating to that flood and it will be a long time before they’re fixed," she said.
"We have learnt a lot during those events and we’re desperately trying to adapt as fast as cash flow will let us.
"If we hadn't had those [measures] in place ... wow, I just don’t like to think what it would have been like then."
A dirty problem
One of the biggest costs incurred during a flood is to the natural resources on which farms are, quite literally, built.
Topsoil is the biologically active, nutrient-rich layer of the earth in which we grow almost all our food.
Without sufficient ground cover, floods and heavy rain can erode this precious resource and transport it to the ocean.
Ms Lawless said addressing soil loss would be a priority for farmers.
"It's going to take a long time for farmers to build that profile of functioning topsoil back up again so that they can have healthy crops.
"That's going to be a process that’s going to take a few years."
On Ms Lawless's property, she has the opposite problem.
"I’ve got really serious siltation over my [river] flats," she said.
"It’s suffocating the soil, there's no air getting into the soil so the grasses and all the pastures are just dying."
Forgotten work
Ms Lawless said events like the floods of January and March this year left a lasting legacy.
"We're awake to the fact that when we rebuild after these events we have to rebuild differently," she said.
"We'll redesign our place based on where the water went this time ... and we'll just keep trying to rebuild more resiliently."
But Dean Rockemer said it could feel like thankless work.
"At the end of the day, where does everybody's tucker come from?" he said.
"In some senses, yeah, I think we are [forgotten]."
