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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Is the following claim, made in early January of this year, true? ‘Zinc supplements can protect against COVID-19; zinc kills the virus, and zinc ionophores are a zinc delivery system that allows zinc to go from outside the cell to inside the cell.’
Although it’s plausible, it’s unsupported by any evidence in humans. It is being promoted online by a family physician, Vladimir Zelenko, who is selling a dietary supplement called Z-Stack.
This morning I saved a baby swallow who was caught in the tangle of flowers at the base of my floor-to-ceiling window. I first noticed Mama or Papa swallow apparently trying to get to my Christmas tree through the window, hovering and crying. The other parent was circling near by. As soon as I lifted baby up out of the flowers, it flew away with its parents, though Mama circled back and dive-bombed me—either to say thank you or to chastise me for setting a trap for her baby.
Let’s face it: sheep are slow. Not their mental acuity, which is sharp as a tack in their proper cultural milieu. I’m referring to their preferred speed of locomotion, which is a saunter, at best. Until recently, though, my concept of slow wool was confined to the need for me to slow down to sheep time, which is essentially endless, and to go with the flow of wind and topography as the flock chose its preferred direction of saunter. This winter, though, I’ve added a whole new layer to slow wool—I bought an upright shearing platform.
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.
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.
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.
I got so excited about getting my vaccination, I decided to write this article for our local newspaper, rather than the one on I was planning for this issue. Getting my jab makes it possible for me to do a long-planned hike in the Northern Territory, and under the new rules, I’ll be able to quarantine at home on the farm if things go pear-shaped while I’m away. We’ll return to the Biodiversity series for the July edition.
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.
During a recent podcast interview, I was asked to explain what I meant by a ‘conservation land ethic”, one of my three components of White Gum Wool production integrity. I have to say I struggled to answer the question succinctly, and even when I tried to be clear, found myself becoming quite emotional, nearing tears at a couple of points. I know I have an intimate connection to the land for which I’m responsible. And I can articulate some of the more obvious ways in which my responsibility is conservationist and ethical, but I was shaken by just how emotional my response was, and how inarticulate I felt in trying to share it.
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 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).
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.
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.
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.
Runoff is a bit like warfare— months of boredom punctuated by moments of extreme terror. The vast majority of runoff occurs in extreme events, usually involving looding and erosion. In between times, the system more or less just sits there “looking stupid” as my friend, ecologist Graham Harris, describes it. All water supplies ultimately rely on surface runoff or groundwater accumulation. Here, we’ll focus on runoff, since groundwater has its own unique complexity.
The pattern of heat at the ocean surface drives rainfall and evaporation patterns. Where the ocean surface is warmer than the atmosphere above it, evaporation and upward convection create the right conditions for rainfall. Hence, when the Indian Ocean near Australia is relatively warm (called a negative Indian Ocean Dipole), we generally see higher rainfall across Australia as eastward-moving weather patterns bring that moister, warmer air over the continent.
For at least a couple of years, I’ve been convinced that my flock is locally adapted to their home. The term “locally adapted” is not just rhetoric, it has a specific meaning in the context of animal behaviour. Locally adapted animals know how to thrive in their environment—where to find shelter, water, and the plants they need to stay healthy.
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.
