The Farm Files

While at first this may seem a gratuitous I love my cat post, it is far more than that. Yes, I have a very naughty, loveable inside-only cat, and my reasoning for having her as strictly an inside cat follows. My grandmother detests cats– and understandably so, when you think of all the damage and harm they can do to the wild flora and fauna that appear on a farm or in a city. I could bore you with statistics from WIRES or the RSPCA, but I’m not going to. Instead, I’m going to be talking about the impact of cats in the countryside.

One of the more problematic issues with cats on farms is that one hand, they make excellent ratters and mousers, but on the other hand they do more harm than good to the birds you may be trying to attract to your garden. Our two sets of neighbours at the farm refuse to desex their cats, and as a result, we have had numerous kitten sightings. The wretched (and I used that word with great affection) Jack Russell terrier we have used to bark at them, and while you initially think it’s cute to have kittens randomly appear, there is also an element of exceptional irritation that the neighbours refuse to be responsible cat owners. To me, a responsible farmer will make sure that, unless they wish to drown their feline and canine accidents, their animals are desexed. But these are not the only things that can cause immense damage to the native fauna. (As I write this, my happily desexed cat sits on my bed cleaning herself.)

While wild pig is a delicious piece of meat that is darker than commercial pork, it is a problematic animal in the wild. From my limited knowledge of the damage wild pigs can do, they are an even bigger pest in some ways than feral cats and feral dogs. Foxes are an acknowledged pest, and as I have seen first-hand the damage that a fox can do, I classify them as a greater danger to the farmer than pigs, cats and dogs. A couple of lambings ago, we had a terrible time with an adjistment further south. At the time of this lambing, the adjistment was a new thing that we were trying, and when I returned one spring from visiting my father up in the humid region of Australia known as Byron Bay, I saw first-hand the terrible damage foxes can do.

One of our lambs got savaged by a fox to the point where her mouth was almost open to the elements. While she survived the fox attack, it was further complicated by a disease that, had we known it was in the soil, we could have vaccinated to prevent. That disease is a highly-contagious one known as Orf or Scabby-Mouth. Scabby Mouth is a pest to treat, because it’s in the soil forever once it’s on your place, and the only known vaccine does not prevent it when it’s not in the soil. A PDF from the Department of Primary Industries seems to back my claims up. Scabby Mouth PDF

Laur, signing out.

If you’ve lived on the land at any point in your life, and had a variety of stock over the years, the amount of seemingly random incidents that you’ve learned from can be unexpected and sometimes quite entertaining and other times, sad and sorry. As the daughter of a farmer, with a family history with a wealth of rural experience, I have learned a lot from the various stock we’ve kept over the years– chooks, guinea fowl, guinea pigs, stroppy Shetland ponies and retired old trotters, and most importantly, the sheep we currently have on our combined three hundred acres of land just outside Canberra.

Farming is not for the faint of heart– the experiences farmers gain from each lambing, and indeed, each day they work their land, are the type of experiences so outside the world of the suburbanite or the person who has a mild interest in the bush, but has never ventured further than the local native trail. At twenty three, I have lived on two farms, one was a small hobby farm with a measly forty acres just two hours north-west of Tamworth– that was my introduction to farming as a small child from the ages of two through to eleven.  The other farm I have lived on is the one that I will be blogging about; the one where my parents run around one hundred-odd head of meat sheep known as Dorpers– a relatively new breed in the world of sheep in that they require no shearing and minimal maintenance– unlike the breed that made Australia a name in the wool industry– the Merino.

I won’t be going into too much detail about the breed’s history, because it can be obtained with a swift search on Google. But the things I’ll be blogging about are the unexpected things that you learn on a farm. I have found that farming sheep provides no previous training– it’s all stuff you learn on the job. I’ve learned things that have made me stop for a moment and reassess the world of farming, and indeed, the way we eat and produce meat. Reading books like The River Cottage Meat Book have also had a lot to do with my education as far as meat production is concerned. But like I said earlier, farming provides little training in some matters, and too many things can go wrong if you’re not prepared.

The weekend we’ve just had proved my point about things going wrong if you’re not prepared– or even if you’re extremely prepared, things can get vastly out of control regardless of how much preparation is done. On Sunday, a huge storm hit our farm and we were lambing into it. My poor mother had to go outside in the freezing wind and bucketing rain to check on our sheep. She brought several lambs into the house who would have easily died had she not found them.

So that’s where one of the unexpected things comes in. I never imagined that I’d be sitting in an empty bathtub with an almost-dead lamb holding a hairdryer on it to attempt to stop it from dying. Fortunately for us, the lamb survived– and we were able to revive it enough to tube-feed the poor darling. This is not the first disaster we’ve encountered going into winter lambing this year. We’ve lost several lambs to both lack of colostrum (the first bit of milk lambs and babies alike drink contains all the antibodies in them that help them survive), and plain bad luck, as well as a fox, who took one of our first lambs this lambing from the electric-fenced lambing paddock near the house. But before you think that farming sheep is all doom and gloom, there are a multitude of pleasant aspects of lambing and farming altogether.

With poddy (or bum lambs, as they’re called in the States) lambs, they never forget your kindness to them, and remain altogether tame. One of the tamest former poddy lambs we’ve got, called Myf (after an Australian tv personality called Myf Warhurst), is exceptionally amusing. We thought that her tiny, tiny baby would need to be bottle-fed from the outset, yet Myf wasn’t happy that we had her baby inside where it was warm– so she would stand at the glass sliding door and bleat in an exceptionally cranky voice that we had her baby and she wanted her. So we gave Tiny back to her very tame, but very cranky mum.

And that’s all for now. If I posted more right now, I wouldn’t have more for a blog. The next topic I’m planning on covering is regarding things that are exceptionally disturbing and not for the faint of heart: sheep and autopsies.