Avoiding the sale yard

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Our rare new addition- the small one

  The rural adage advises -   never give a name to anything you plan to eat, so our cattle have always had numbers- a letter for the year of their birth and a number to correspond with their parent, their mother that is. We have B2 and over the years she has produced calves CB2, DB2 and currently we have EB2. Each year the calves are weaned some more successfully than others, they learn to love grass, they fatten up and they're shipped off to market.
  
Depending on

• the rainfall
• the quality of grass
• the degree of sunshine
• the local economy
• the rural economy
• the global economy
• the weather in Russia or South America
• the current exchange rate
• the el nino/ la nina index
• the changing fashion for wagyu to angus burgers

and  any number of other variables, we just get a 'market' price.

We sell  our cattle for a cents per kilo rate. In the past we've received anywhere from 196 cents/kg to 100 cents/kg  for 350 - 450 kg animals.

That's right  $1.96 - $1.00 / kg.  
Compare that with the price you pay in the butcher shop or super market.

On a small holding it's hard not to get to know your stock animals, there will always the noisy one, the sociable one, the boof heads, the shy ones. So when they're loaded onto the back of a truck and trundled down the road there is a twinge of regret about their life and the fact that you have got to know them.
After a few years of this pattern we decided to try a new idea. And so was born the germ of an plan to go smaller. Like strawberries and tomatoes, certain breeds of cattle have been bred bigger over the years because big has always been better. But like the hollow, tasteless giant strawberry and the brilliant red but brick hard and tasteless big tomato, the bigger cattle have a limited appeal on smaller acreage and gourmet palates.

Compare the size - mini and regular

And what about the fact that it's OK to get to know your animals, to appreciate the welcome you receive when you walk into the paddock and to realise that though it takes a moment or 3 they do recognise you,  as the chatterbox starts bellowing and the sociable one ambles forward of the herd for a quick scratch.
Don't forget that above all cattle are ever willing lawnmowers with the added bonus of being enthusiastic fertilizer producers and they beat sitting on the slasher going round the paddock for hours on end.

We settled on miniature Herefords, a smaller but rarer version of what we already have because we know they can manage on our native pasture. They aren't too fussy,  they just have to inhale a blade of grass to put on weight.
First came the bull from up north, then the cows from down south, their diminutive size means four of them fitted into a double horse float with room to spare.

Miniature Herefords might seem small by today's standards and they have had their ups and downs - literally. Back in the late 1700's they were large plow pulling oxen from the Welsh border region, later they were bred to be chunky fatty animals providing not just beef, but tallow for the candle trade,  as the electric light took off so did a taller, leaner sized Hereford, no one needed or wanted fat any more. The popularity of smaller cuts of meat and small acre farms has helped reshape the Hereford yet again.

Horns - now you see em

Because they are quite rare we are planning to breed up our numbers and so avoid the truck to market option.  A smaller area can carry many more minis, an important factor when it comes to calculating your rural rates bill.  They are also excellent limited edition compact lawnmowers and out door companions to people like us on small farms.

Now you don't

So far there has only been a slight hiccup, miniature Herefords come horned, not polled which means to be born hornless. Because they will sometimes run with horses it was decided that the horns  would have to be shortened. Such indignity-- but they are forgiving creatures and forgetful too.
Horns -- what horns I don't remember them.

Meet the Team - the 2013 year book

 click  Apple Gully Farm  to see this at its best.

It's time to get to know our production team, the four legged wonders who tirelessly turn grass into protein.
  
Meet the leader of our production team, this is B3 - the alpha female. She is the smartest in the herd, first to figure out if a gate is open and first to act in any situation. Rounding up the herdlette is just a matter of getting B3 to go in the right direction and the others will follow.  B3 is a good mother and all her calves assume the dominant position in their year group, she must somehow instill  ' a born to rule' attitude.  So far her calves have all had her brown markings around their eyes - deemed positive for Herefords.
 B3 is currently pregnant by AI to a bull who died 3 years ago!!

 B10 was alpha female in the early days of our herd. The transition to number 2 was gradual, she is a sort of vice captain now.  B10 considers life from all angles, she weighs options carefully before acting. She will stand at a gate - look left- look right- then enter. She will never be hit by a car if she has to cross a road.  B10 is the mother of our snake bite calf, she stayed with him through the entire ordeal, lived in the shed with him and even let us milk her- consequently she is very calm around the human team. B10's pet hate is the cattle crush, she does not do narrow spaces gracefully. She too is pregnant by AI.

 B2 is a bit of an enigma. She has challenged B3 several times for supremacy. Once in a 45 minute duel in and around the dam she was beaten and nearly drowned.  She is only semi resigned to her subordinate position and has chosen the aloof and remote approach to life.  If B3 was to ever falter, she would immediately step up.   She never gets pregnant with the rest of the girls and has to be shipped off to a special bull or AI'd separately. True to form we had to call the AI specialist back for her this year.

What can be said about B6, just look at that face, there is not much going on between those eyes, in fact she is partially blind in one of them. Last through the gate, last to get any hay, last to realise something is happening - the slow learner of the group. Her pin bones always stick out and her ribs are always visible.  BUT she has the most amazing maternal instinct, she has nursed and saved  orphaned calves, she acts as nursery maid for each seasons batch of calves and her milk just never runs out. She is a dairy cow in disguise.




This little chatterbox is B10's off spring, BE10 is the survivor of the snake bite.
There are some benefits to being at deaths door- when the other yearlings went off to market we kept him back because he had been a slower grower, probably his early development was compromised by the effects of the snake bite. He's smaller and slow moving and if he was to be tested, he would be classified as 'developmentally delayed'. However he's a happy chappie who enjoys human company, especially if there is a molasses treat on offer. I suspect he may become a permanent member of the team.

  

F B2 is B2's calf, born a bull but along with the fate of most males on a farm soon became a steer. A farm is one place where females have the distinct advantage - they generally become breeders while the boys end up neutered and at the market. Being a calf of  the contrary B2 meant he arrived out of sync with the rest of the herd so he'll spend the winter on the farm. Like his mother he is an independent creature, he chose to wean himself early, usually most steers remain permanent mummy's boys and will suckle forever if allowed.



Now it's time to meet the newest and very important member of the team - the little bull known as 'Lord Harry' who is only just a year old -- with long lashes like that he's bound to attract the females.
There is a plan to avoid the market outcome,  but more about that later.
                                ````````````````````````````
Our production team is an amazing group of herbivores with the simple but sustaining power to turn grass into protein.               Wish we humans were that smart.

Hello -communications in the bush

 or just google Apple Gully Farm -  it looks better there

Back in April 2010 I wrote a blog on our trysts with Telstra  over the issue of getting a phone connection.
In my many chats with Telstra call centre employees  learnt terms like 'greenfield' which doesn't mean a field full of lush green pasture but rather a scraped bare brand new housing development. At the time Telstra was finding it hard to believe that in 2010 there had never ever been a phone connection to number 141 and now we wanted one but we weren't a 'greenfield'.

Fast forward nearly 3 years, we have had a phone all that time, sort of. The connection went down for a week after a cow scratched her back on a phone pole and managed to disconnect the line. Reception is almost impossible when the winds blows above about 25 kph. If it rains more than 60mls at a time the line is likely to go out, and if the wind blows and it rains -- it's called a storm-   then we are off the air for a week or so.

Get a mobile, (that's a cell phone to some), you say.  Great idea, I reply. I've got a smart phone, it's fantastic, I can check my emails, trawl through facebook, search for anything I want, take photos, play Scrabble with strangers, listen to music.

 A joke ( I think):  If someone returned to earth from the 1950's, how would you explain the mobile phone?
 'I have this small device that I can carry around in my pocket. It can access all the known information in the entire world. '
What do you do with it, they ask.
'I use it to look at cute photos of cats and to send stupid pictures of myself to strangers.'

Back to the story -   now we live one and a half hours from the country's largest city and one and a half hours from the nations capital, that's 5 million people not counting the ones who live in between. You would expect communications to criss cross our part of the world like a spiders web, yet we have zero mobile reception. 

When you live in the country, ingenuity becomes a vital part of your existence, so we built our own personal 'phone tower'.  It adds little to the front garden, but if it's calm and the skies are clear we can sometimes make contact with the outside world
 

Hello...

Garlic Harvest

   http://lplatefarmer.blogspot.com.au/    the blog looks better here

Ever wondered how that pristine white garlic in the supermarkets gets to be so clean! It's grown in the soil so shouldn't it have a hint of it's growing environment on it?  And the  taste - well, there isn't any, it doesn't matter how many cloves go into the pot it is just so bland. To get it looking snowy white it's bleached and given a chemical bath - then you eat it!   some extra reading -- http://www.naturalnews.com/022801_garlic_Australia_food.html

April planting

Now that we have the space I decided to test drive as many garlic types as I could find to see if I could rediscover the taste of real garlic in our food. I scoured the seed catalogues and the net to learn as much as I could about the plant before I started to grow it. Our climate turned out to be perfect for garlic as it needs cold winters, like a lot of bulbs. Basically garlic can be planted at the same time as daffodils and most of your spring flowering garden bulbs.

up and growing

The trial garlic plot went in last March/April,  seven different varieties altogether. Each garlic bulb was split into cloves and planted. Most had sprouted within a week to ten days, so something in their DNA told them that the minute they hit the soil it was time to send out a green shoot and start the growing process.

October - not ready yet

We planted Italian Purple, Monaro Purple, ( which look the same to me) Italian White, Giant Russian, French Red, stiff necks and soft necks and a few nameless bulbs as well.
By May they were all up, then they just seemed to stop. Anxious to make sure my crop was not a complete failure I dug up a clove every month or so and I can report that all the growing action goes on below ground during winter. Each little clove slowly forms into a small new bulb that grows and grows till Spring. Then the green shoots really take off and the underground work gets serious as the little cloves morph into seriously big new bulbs.

My garlic is definitely not white

This year after a very wet start we ended up with virtually no rain from July till harvest, so the crop had to be watered. The blindingly obvious became clear - water is essential. The bulbs at the edges of the watering system did not prosper nearly as well as those with plenty of water.  Weeds were not a big issue because most of the growing cycle is in the colder months. I did discover a great Japanese tool for weeding that's more like a old cut throat razor than a hoe, it's so sharp you could shave with it- well I wouldn't, but that's how sharp it is. The tool comes with its own pouch, sharpener and a bottle of Camellia oil to clean it after use. Only the Japanese would treat a garden tool with such respect.  Unfortunately mine has assimilated into the Aussie way of life a little too easily, it's slouching around in the shed looking pretty dirty.


You know it's time to dig up the bulbs when the green foliage starts to turn yellow and die off. Everything this year has been done by hand, so it's labour intensive. You just have to get down and dirty. Next year I will have to move into the 21st century and find some sort of machinary to help me.

The crop was generally a success, except for the Giant Russians that are puny whimps. I don't know what went wrong.                                                 

The garlic is now drying in the shed, tied and labelled. I'm practising french plaiting and I'm gathering lots of recipes and ideas for garlic use. Watch this space.

On a sunny day the aroma of gently drying garlic drifting from the shed is tantalising. I can report that it's a successful vampire deterrent  - while we see many kangaroos, wombats, foxes, rabbits and wallabies --  not a single vampire has been spotted lurking around the shed.    

Garlic bulbils- I should have cut them off, but they looked too good!

Update on the little bull calf bitten by a snake

   

Last January we found one of our new calves in difficulty in the paddock, within an hour he was transformed from a healthy 3 month old to a paralysed, drooling shell, bitten by a snake.

 9 months later - on the hunt for the molasses bottle!

Check the January and February posts to track the calf's saga.        http://lplatefarmer.blogspot.com.au/

January - blind & paralysed

He survived, but not with a bouncing back sort of recovery, it was more a slow but determined struggle. It's hard to know exactly what goes on in bovine brains- not a whole lot at the best of times, but this little guy definitely finds life a challenge. He eats, drinks and is part of the herd, but he approaches life steadily and with a much concentration.

One of the many effects of the snake bite was loss of sight, we watched in dismay as he staggered around the paddock bouncing off barbed wire fences and trees, completely unable to find his mother. His sight has improved but he probably sees life in a blurry, unfocussed way. He is smaller than the other calves of the same age and he gets picked on by the bigger ones so he knows to stick close to his mother.

36 hours after the snake bite- blind, confused, paralysed

An enjoyable side effect of his close contact with humans while he was so ill, is his  ease in our company and his curiosity about the things we do.  He's happy to potter around the shed though his help in the garlic patch isn't always appreciated. He drinks from the sprinkler and has discovered the molasses bottle on a shelf in the shed. He can't open the lid yet but he's working on it, in the mean time he has perfected the pathetic look that ensures a human gets the lid off for him.      
We never did find out what type of snake bit him, but we have eliminated the eastern Brown, Tiger and the Mulga snakes because they would have killed him, so that only leaves the Copperhead, Death Adder, Red Bellied Black and 3 or 4 others!!
Our record is not really so bad, in India there are a million bites a year and at least 50,000 human deaths.



      

Getting on the map

   Google   - Apple Gully Farm to see the full blog

After years of confusion we finally have a road with a name and with it, an address.  When our area was first settled and  land divided into farming lots, our road formed a circuit through the green and rolling hills of the district, and so it was imaginatively named Greenhills Rd. The entire district is full of green and hilly land, if you check the map, there are a total of six Greenhills Roads in the Shire. When you want to report a bushfire or fall off the tractor and need to contact the emergency services you have more than one problem.  

About 30 years ago a state forest was planted and fenced off, straight through a large section of the road, so for 30 years it sat as a dead end cut off from it's other half, quietly sliding off the map and out of recent memory as it's original name faded away. Deliveries  mostly failed to reach their destination, utility meters were seldom read. Only intrepid Sunday morning joggers and serious bike riders ventured down our track and they needed to have a pocket for wire cutters to hack through the forestry fence.  To be honest our road is seasonally either rutted and dusty or rutted and muddy, it doesn't deserve much more than a dotted line on a map, and as one neighbour puts it
 " rocks grow up and potholes grow down in it"  

Unfortunately, as life gets faster and more complex,  living in a parallel universe reached through dust or mud has it's draw backs, the neighbourhood decided it was time to come in from the cold.

One neighbour had a sign to his farm put up at the corner, so we all adopted his farm name as our address - and it worked for a while. Then the bureaucrats decided to solve the problem by acknowledging the name of one of the original land holders- that unleashed some historical and hysterical skeletons from old family closets and so was duly dispatched.   Meanwhile rates notices, utility bills and all junk mail continued orbiting in yet another parallel universe. Not even the local council engineers could locate us.
Some might argue that we had arrived at Nirvana, leaving the mayhem of the world behind, but the Rural Fire Service had devised a brilliantly simple farm numbering system and they wanted to nail their numbers to a proper road name. A cunning plan was hatched to circumvent the skeletons in closets yet still recognise the early settlers. The shire council tentatively agreed, the geographical names board checked that the choice was unique in the shire, the name was advertised in the local paper as part of the process and received no objections - the process was complete, we had a name and would soon have a sign on the road to prove it.

Many months passed, so many that we presumed the process had once again foundered on some bureaucratic shoal.
A post script:
The road sign had been up for a week before anyone noticed, we came and went round the corner without actually being aware that after 30 years the road had it's own notable, unique and unparalleled signpost.

Another postscript:
Our most recent electricity bill was an estimate, I suppose it's too much to expect instant admission to the world after a 30 year absence.

Building a Shelter

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all mod cons

For almost three years our shelter on the farm has consisted of a 6 metre  container and a hand built bush shed. We share the shed with enough tools to give Bunnings some competition, a tractor, a contrary quad bike, seasonal waves of rodents and layers of mud or dust depending on the weather. Tucked into the back of the shed are a range of storage containers holding about 200 litres of various vehicle fuels. A cap left off and a small spark could leave us heading heavenward. It's OK though because at least the diesel doesn't ignite like that so I only worry about petrol.

We try to stay linked to the 21st century, we can boil water and power a few lights with a generator and our collapsible camp chairs create an impression of happy domesticity.  There is a thermometer nailed to a post in the shed and when the mercury slips below double digits there is only one option- put on another layer and work harder to keep warm. There is another emergency option -  and that is to pack up and go home.  The trouble is our plans are for the farm to be our new home, but walls of rusty corrugated iron just don't cut it.

as good as it gets

So we embarked on 'The Project' and set in motion plans for a new house. We decided on a gently sloping site and with the help of an architect and a team of builders set to work. Obstacle number one soon emerged, the 'gentle' slope was too steep for trucks to negotiate. That was quickly put right with the help of an excavator that wouldn't have looked out of place on one of Genia Rinehart's iron ore plots.

Mining in the Pilbara or our house site 

Obstacle two quickly became our road with four names, it created chaos with deliveries.
We know to turn a deaf ear to the calming tones of the lady in our GPS when she insists that we are 'off road, make a U turn where possible',  because despite having four names and the assistance of 4 tracking satellites our road does not exist in the global positioning universe.

Truck loads of bricks and windows turned up days late when drivers lost their way.

'once was a gentle slope'

Slowly our new home began to materialise from our laser levelled  'once was a gentle slope'  and the cattle somehow slipped through the fence and became our first official visitors.

'The Project' has been underway for 10 months, we have walls, a roof and some windows.

In by Christmas is the call - I just hope Santa's reindeer navigational system is fail-safe.

first visitors

home on the range