Such was the case last week with Pete Yardley, a Beaver rancher who lost cattle and feed to the blaze that scorched hundreds of thousands of acres in Millard and Beaver counties.

He made two cogent points.

First, he wondered why there were no controlled burns in this area over the past 10 years to improve habitat for domestic livestock and many wildlife species. Such controlled burns may not have prevented the wildfire in this extraordinarily dry summer, but damages may have been more limited.

The Bureau of Land Management's Utah Fire Management coordinator Sheldon Wimmer said two prescribed burns had been planned over the past three years in the Milford Flat area but were canceled due to unsafe weather and humidity conditions.

Second, Yardley said that in two years, the fire could make this land much more valuable than it is now. The logic, put out by another worker in the area, is that fewer trees mean more grass, which is good for domestic livestock and wildlife.

But that point remains in question. The Milford Flat fire was so large that it is going to be all but impossible for state and federal ecologists and land managers to reseed the land with native plant species, which would provide good food for livestock and wildlife while helping keep out the invasive cheat grass that will fuel future fires.

"A fire this massive can be devastating when talking about cheat grass [coming back]," said Jason Vernon, program manager for the Division of Wildlife Resources' Great Basin Research Station in Ephraim. "It gets the fire cycle to increase. Fires are not supposed to burn that much. We're having fires every three to five years on some of these areas. If we don't do something, chunks will burn every year."

With 400,000 pounds of native seed on hand, wildlife managers, like southern region DWR supervisor Doug Messerly, will sit down with land managers with maps of the fire area overlaid with maps of pieces of land deemed most important to wildlife. That's where the main reseeding effort will take place.

"The challenge with a fire of this magnitude is to obtain enough seed to make a difference," he said. "We are going to focus on certain areas within the fire that are high priority to rehabilitate and then do the best we can based on the availability of seed."

Getting federal dollars as well as state wildlife license dollars and money from the Utah Department of Agriculture to get the job done will be the key to turning this disaster into something that could be positive.

Just ask a rancher who works the land every day.

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* TOM WHARTON can be contacted at wharton@sltrib.com. His phone number is 801-257-8909. Send comments about this column to livingeditor@sltrib.com.