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

gorse

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.

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.