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

climate change

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.

A Sunburnt Country

A Sunburnt Country

Although I am not at all superstitious, in the two months since I began writing about runoff and flooding, we’ve had four significant recharge events and the landscape is decidedly soggy for the first time in about five years! So, I’m wary of the possible consequences of writing about bushfire risk at this juncture, especially given the likelihood of high fuel loads after all this lovely rain.

Of Drought and Flooding Rains

Of Drought and Flooding Rains

Last issue I promised you an article about extreme weather events related to climate change. I will now confess that I’ve really struggled to write this article. While all of us who live close to the land have a feeling that things are not as they were even a couple of decades ago, Australia’s naturally variable weather patterns can easily obscure the effects of climate change.

If You Don't Like the Heat, Get Out of the Kitchen

If You Don't Like the Heat, Get Out of the Kitchen

The title is a quote attributed to President Harry Truman, and a metaphor we often use in conversation. We tend to use the terms heat and temperature interchangeably, but technically they are vastly different things. Your body temperature is about 37 deg C, but the heat you generate in a day to maintain that temperature is perhaps 8000 joules, or roughly 0.1 J/sec.

A Silver Lining

A Silver Lining

What do the ozone hole, coronavirus and climate change have in common? The simple answer is the use of chemical tracers to track where heat is going in the ocean. The full answer will take me a bit longer. But since we’re all sitting at home now, we’ve got plenty of time to learn new things. And one of the things I’m really enjoying about writing these climate change articles is that I’m learning stuff that I assumed I knew, but didn’t.

Carbon dioxide: nature's tiny solar panels

Carbon dioxide: nature's tiny solar panels

Carbon dioxide, like chocolate, is a good thing in moderation.  Without carbon dioxide gas in our atmosphere, life as we know it could not exist.  This is because carbon dioxide molecules are nature’s own tiny solar panels—absorbing, retaining and re-emiting heat from the sun. 

However, as the concentration of carbon dioxide increases, the atmosphere is able to retain more and more heat, with consequences for life on our planet. 

Hinewai

Hinewai

Over the past 32 years, the Maurice White Trust has transformed large swathes of its 1500 hectare (3700 acres) Hinewai Reserve from steep, gorse-infested ex-farmland back to its pre-settlement native forest ecosystems on Banks Peninsula south of Christchurch, New Zealand. The work began as an unlikely partnership between botanist and artist Hugh Wilson, who developed a passion for the plants and wildlife of his childhood home, and Maurice White, a local businessman with a passion for native birds. Together they established Hinewai as an experiment in botanical succession as a means to eliminate gorse and re-establish native forest ecosystems in catchments that run from the hilltops above Akaroa down to the sea. Their story is told in a wonderful video recently released: Fools and Dreamers.