Nan Bray
Call the Midwife

It doesn’t often come up in farming conversations, but my title is officially Dr. I’m not the useful sort of doctor, though — just an academic. In retrospect, I should have studied medicine, as I originally intended. Instead, my academic qualifications extend to explaining climate change, but are totally useless in the project that is about to take all of my time and energy for the next few weeks: lambing 33 ewes.

This is the first time in six years that I’ve had lambs of my own. I had lots of good rationalisations for why it was a good idea to buy in lambs, but the truth is I chickened out. Lambing, like ageing, is not for the faint of heart.

Call the Midwife
Nan Bray
When the Grass is Ready to Burn

An early season bush fire on my farm earlier this year led me back to studying the knowledge of indigenous Australians about using fire to shape the landscape and enhance biodiversity.

When the Grass is Ready to Burn
Nan Bray
Shearing Marathon

Note to self: you need to change your mindset well before shearing next year.  Let this be your reminder to practice staying in the present moment almost all the time, rather than just occasionally.  If you don’t, you will, at the very least, leave a critical gate open and lose your sheep into the back country when you really, really don’t want them there, and don’t have the time to gather them back into the fold. There was a lot of swearing, none of it particularly inventive, when I did precisely that two days ago on my fifth straight day, and 7th out of a total of 12 days of shearing. 

Shearing Marathon
Nan Bray
Pure Blind Luck

It was a cross between a flying tackle and a wrestling pin to the mat when I tripped and fell on top of the old ewe I was trying to catch.  She’s a 14-year-old with severe cataracts, and she’d gotten lost in Chicory Hill tree reserve a few days ago. It was pure blind luck I found her when I did.

Pure Blind Luck
Nan Bray
Kangaroo Dogs

As I held on to all four legs of the squirming, hapless young kangaroo, all I could think was. “WTF am I going to do now?!” With my five working dogs swirling around me, I couldn’t let the little bush kangaroo go—they’d already had him up against the fence once, which is how I finally caught him.  Three of the five dogs were intent on finishing the job I’d so rudely interrupted.   

Kangaroo Dogs

cherishing biodiversity

Enhancing Biodiversity: Fire

Enhancing Biodiversity: Fire

We tend to think of fire as a predominantly destructive force—mesmerising and often beautiful to watch, but ultimately a threat to our livelihoods, property and even our lives. On my own farm, I have been deeply wary of using fire deliberately because of fear of it getting out of control. I used it to burn off gorse (before I learned the error of my ways) and even with professionals to help with control, found it a nerve-wracking experience. I’ve also had two bushfires start accidentally, one from lightning and one from a careless cigarette tossed out along the highway.

Watching the recovery from those three fires, though, taught me there is a benefit in the renewal of plants and diversity following the fire’s devastation, and those ideas have slowly (very slowly) led me to the study of Indigenous cultural burning.

Enhancing Biodiversity: Bush Tucker

Enhancing Biodiversity: Bush Tucker

In honour of NAIDOC week (4 -11 July) celebrating Aboriginal and Islander culture, I’m taking a side trip into the topic of bush tucker. During my hiking trip in Central Australia in late June, I had the privilege of listening to two indigenous presentations on bush tucker and bush medicine. I was struck by two things in these presentations: the intensity of the flavours of the foods and the depth of indigenous knowledge about the plants in their system.

Enhancing Biodiversity 2: Grazing

Enhancing Biodiversity 2: Grazing

Why is there an image of a humpback whale’s ‘bubble net’ at the beginning of this article? Well, it’s a story about grazing and biodiversity, and such a cool one that I couldn’t resist using it as the lead-in. The image captures the line of bubbles the whale leaves as he creates an acoustic net to trap small fish and then scoop them up.

Coming back to solid ground, grazing in farmland and bush is, like chocolate and carbon dioxide, a good thing in moderation. Grazing helps more sensitive plants that might not be able to compete with the most robust plants in the system (e.g. cocksfoot grass, silver tussock native grass) by opening up the plant canopy to allow sunshine in for photosynthesis.

Enhancing Biodiversity: Taming Gorse

Enhancing Biodiversity: Taming Gorse

If you can’t say somethin’ nice, don’t say nothin’ at all.
—Thumper from ‘Bambi’

Surprisingly, there are several nice things I can say about gorse, despite its notorious dominance in the woody weed stakes for Tasmania.

Gorse is (you guessed it) extremely nutritious, with high protein levels, comparable to other legumes like lucerne. In the 1800s, when horsepower really meant work by animals with four legs, gorse chaff was the primary winter feed for the working horses of Great Britain. In fact, land where gorse was cultivated was taxed at a higher rate, as it was considered such a valuable asset.

Biodiversity and Weeds

Biodiversity and Weeds

In the world of Dr Seuss, weeds would be plain-belly sneetches. Their close relatives, the star-belly sneetches, would be the rest of the plants—the ones we think we want around. Of course, shyster McBean so mixes them up with his star-on, star-off machine that in the end the sneetches decide to quit worrying about who has stars on thars.

And that pretty much sums up the most useful approach we can take to weeds: with a very few exceptions, it matters not at all to the consumers of plants who has stars on thars.

Biodiversity and Nutrition

Biodiversity and Nutrition

Biodiversity is not just a pretty face. It’s critical for nutrition for animals of all descriptions, including us.

All plants have developed chemical defences to keep from being overeaten. Known as secondary compounds, these are sophisticated chemicals like tannins and alkaloids. Oregano, for instance, a common culinary herb, boasts 26 different secondary compounds.

Secondary compounds do a couple of key things for us mammals. First, they limit how much we want to eat of a given plant, by making us faintly nauseous if we eat (or drink) too much of it. Think of the way your tummy feels after the 4th cup of tea or coffee, even SGC (seriously good coffee).

Biodiversity

Biodiversity

A note to my Yarns from the Farm Readers—I’ve started another series for our local newspaper on biodiversity. This is the first instalment. Nan

Through no fault of its own, the term biodiversity has become either a mantra or a swear word, depending on which side of the divide between development (including agriculture) and conservation you inhabit.

Animal Wifery

Animal Wifery

We've had 3 ½ inches of rain in May (hooray!) and the property is looking better than it has in months.  Admittedly, it looks better from a distance than at worm's-eye level, where there is too much bare ground showing.  However, the lovely spring green look is most welcome, along with the beginnings of run-off.

Six Impossible Things

Six Impossible Things

As often happens to me, I mis-remembered this quotation. I thought it was about doing six impossible things before breakfast, thereby revealing my lamentable tendency to jump into things with all four feet without due consideration of the consequences. Believing six impossible things is a lot harder, I think.

Flies and Spiders

Flies and Spiders

Devoted Tolkien fans will recognise “Flies and Spiders” as the title of the chapter of The Hobbit wherein Bilbo and the dwarfs enter the dismal forest Mirkwood on their way to reclaim their hoard of gold from the dragon Smaug. In Mirkwood, the flies are a nuisance, but the spiders are a fatal menace. This season in Tasmania, the roles are reversed.

Epiphany

Epiphany

Not the religious sort, more the “uh, duh” sort. Wikipedia describes this kind of epiphany as “an enlightening realisation that allows a problem or situation to be understood from a new and deeper perspective”. Sounds better than “uh, duh”, huh? It started a few months ago, though I didn’t recognise it for the turning point it has turned out to be.

Trip Report: Bendigo, Design Spun and Hinewai

Trip Report: Bendigo, Design Spun and Hinewai

Life on the farm was pretty intense all winter, and particularly so after my trip in July. As I finally sit down to write this, shearing has come and gone and four tiny cygnets are swimming with their parents on a much-depleted Swan Lake. I’ll give you the shearing and end-of-winter shepherding report in the next Yarn, hopefully fairly soon. Meanwhile, here is the belated trip report.

The Power of the Matriarch

The Power of the Matriarch

Had I any idea of the pivotal role she would play in my life, I would have given my lead ewe a better name. Boadicea, for instance. Or maybe Elizabeth. Or even Frances Darlene after my difficult and undeniably contrary mother. But at the time I saved her from the usual fate of 5 year-olds on most sheep properties, I only knew that she was a pretty good leader, at least at times. So she became simply “Old Leader”.

Cosmic Intercepts

Cosmic Intercepts

Have you noticed how sometimes the universe and your subconscious conspire to bring your attention back repeatedly to something you don’t particularly want to examine?  Recently I’ve had that experience with regard to herbicides.  While I’ve succeeded in keeping pesticides, chemical fertilisers and fungicides out of my management practices, spot spraying the major woody weeds (gorse, briar rose and horehound) has seemed like the only solution.