Sorry we’ve been absent… we’ve had a bigpond outage for a couple of days. Things happened in the meantime, nothing earth shattering, but we have decided to rename our cow. On the morning I went outside to find her apparently dead (yet not, after closer inspection and an emergency vet visit at 7.30am), totally recumbent, legs all stiff, bloated, I texted my sister and said “why did I name her Maybe?”. I like the sound of the word, it’s shape in my mouth, but it’s a dangerous name to crown a cow with… well, a strange and edgy cow. We thought Listen (since we whisper to her alot, many secrets and encouragement to get well), and also cos it’s the name of a character in a book which is whimsically lovely, and again, I like the way it rolls around the mouth…

The obvious alternative is Definitely. Deffo… ? I’m not convinced…

Anyway, what do you think?

Much love, farmgrrl Virginia xx

PS: When suggesting names, please remember that we have to call this out a number of times a day, so if you wouldn’t mind, try it out in your own backyard, call out the name a few times quite loudly, and see if it works *in the field* so to speak! x

Since I’ve lived in this region I’ve encountered more wild weather than I have anywhere. The most incredible cloud formations that swirl and fold and climb and ‘cumulate and glower and lower. Anvils and mammatus and mackerels and mare’s tails, whipped into fantastic patterns by winds high up or hanging, heavy with precipitation… though you’d hardly call these ferocious barrages of water “precipitation”… I’ve been caught in them more than once, trying to outrun them on the road from Lismore to Ballina. The colors are a delight or a warning or both… pink, green, yellow, some hues bringing with them a sense of foreboding.

It’s heaven for storm chasers round here… I recall a grrl by the name of stormchasr I used to chat to who lives around here and took awesome photos of cloud formations around here… I’ll try to track down a link…

So most of you will know that we have been getting some incredibly Heavy Weather since the beginning of spring. Each afternoon the heat takes on that electric quality that is the harbinger of severe storm activity. Lismore’s been declared a National Disaster (I mean we knew that, but this is with regard to natural disasters…) Area after a series of damaging severe storms with incredibly high winds, flash flooding and BIG hailstones. These storms have been coming with incredible regularily, sometimes day after day.

We watch the storms rolling in across the hills from Lismore, literally rolling, heavy and black, sometimes hear the hail coming, a sound like a waterfall as it comes across the Maca plantations, and sit tight as it hits and rages us around us often swinging back for a second go. Day turns to night. Eventually it passes and the sun comes out fierce and full, like nothing ever happened…

So last night we weren’t *really* prepared for a storm, hadn’t checked the BOM, hadn’t heard any storm warnings on the radio, but round 5-6 started to get that feeling, and it felt intense, and I quickly tried to secure some things, put the animals away, try to calm down the neurotic dogs who were slavering everywhere, try to calm myself and keep an eye on my own drooling and just wait for it to come our way. So we’re watching the storm from the backyard - I’m frantic getting nothing done but doing it all fast… charlene has the camera out - and she comments on a cloud formation directly in front of us and I look and it’s a FUCKING TORNADO!

I’m freaking out, I’ve watched plenty of stormchaser docos and know what a tornado looks like. This is definitely a tornado, touching down, whipping its’ tail up then making contact with the ground again, funneling up into the clouds, you can see it twisting. I text Michael, who makes a smarty pants comment about toto and kansas; I call my sister, but I don’t think anyone really thinks it’s a tornado, they think i’m being dramatic, just saying “big storm” or something…

By this time we have no power, and in the footage below you’ll see why we had no power…

The tornado seems really close, and then there’s the warning about big hailstones that’s coming from lismore way as well, so we’re watching all these things happening, coming in from different fronts, but they seem to be skirting us, which I’m kinda glad about. The storm hits, and we get huge rain and hail, none of it as big as my head, (thank fuck, since my car is NOT insured…) and we’re without power all night…

We haven’t seen any news or weather… BUT… just now, as I’m writing this post and searching for a link for the grrl mentioned above, I come across this link to the Australian Severe Weather Association and this report:

27/10/07 - Tornado at Dunoon near Lismore, NSW - 26th October 2007

Jimmy Degaura of www.australiasevereweather.com has captured what must be some of the most extraordinary footage (13mb file) of a tornado on the ground in Australia at Dunoon near Lismore on 26th October. An initial assessment by Jimmy and Michael Bath rate it as an F-1 tornado

So it was close - very close, just a few kilometers away, and below is some footage from the same site of the tornado on the ground and the reason why we had no power: (it’s in .wmv format and it’s not small - 13 mb)

Here is Charlene’s footage of the formation we saw on the ridge. It’s a small file, and brief (cos I was telling her to get inside), but you can clearly see the tornado formation right at the beginning of the video. There were some other spectacular cloud formations happening at the same time and then you see the ensuing rain and hailstorm: (oops, the sound on this is a little bit teeth grindingly awful, turn sound off until i fix this…)

So, it looks like we’re in for a summer of Heavy Weather, and spectacular sky shows. Dare I say it, it all feels a little Climate Change…

This evening seems clear… so far… in fact the sky looks beautiful.

This report comes from your t0xic weathergrrl xx

ps. everyone in the world has just rung me about Dunoon’s tornado being on the national news and are we alright… so i guess it’s old news now, but god, i guess i’m reporting from the front line! x

Good! Better than we expected (well, in my usual pessimistic fashion i expected Maybe to die…). So, after a few days of intramuscular medication (once again, thanks Charlene for your fortitude in slamming those motherfucking huge needles in Maybe’s flank), she’s up, walking around, rests but then gets up on her own, eats everything in sight and is constantly trying to get into the feed bins. So we *know* she is well improved since her appetite is huge… I milked her yesterday and this morning, and mixed the milk in with feed and minerals and fed this to her babies. I’m not game enough to put them back on her to suckle cos they’re rough, they go hard and really take it out of her I think. We’ll see how she is tomorrow. Might be just me bucket milking her then using this to supplement her calves’ feed…

So that’s all on the Maybe front for now. I shall post a video later today that shows she is much improved. Now it’s time for the weathergrrl…

Vxx

Maybe update… the vet is puzzled. She’s down, and can’t get up. She may have pneumonia. This tempers my happiness and ability to enjoy new life on the farm. We are now giving her medication via injections. I felt certain she would die today, but i hope that our ministrations, our will for her to stay alive and our quiet whispers in her ear will see her on her feet soon.

Vxx

charlene is typing this with a very soft, wrinkly little bag of puppy fur with feet (and we mean feet - LARGE baby feet) asleep on her lap. the aforementioned critter is called Jimmy Jack. she’s a 10 week old American Staffordshire Terrier and she flew all the way from Townsville in a dogtainer to Brisbane Airport yesterday. we, her two mums, picked her up and drove her back to her new home - The Farm. she was an extraordinarily well behaved traveller, sleeping much of the way or exploring the nether reaches of the car. sliding down makeshift slippery dips, bouncing off yoga mats and generally undertaking exploratory operations throughout the obstacle course that is the car. since getting her home she has been a constant presence around our toes. she loves red socks. she loves rearranging the recycling in the pantry. she loves crawling under the stove. she loves her little heart shaped biscuits. she likes long green grass and she likes playing with the water coming out of the tap. she is beautiful. she has a little bed but last night she slept with us….

….

So in a more whimisical vein, I’d like to pay homage to the humble bucket… probably the tool we make use of more than any other here on da farm.

We have stainless steel buckets for milking and feeding, ex-packaging buckets for bucketing duck water onto the gardens or filling up with windfall fruit or carrying tools back and forth from the shed or filling with dirt or making stinky compost mixes or ferrying cowshit. We have red buckets and green buckets and white buckets for sterilising feeding equipment or filling with soapy water for washing the cow’s udder. We have 5 identical buckets fixed to the wall of the animal house for 5 little calves to feed from.

Buckets are such a feature of our lives, and such a symbol of production, reuse, recycling, sustainability that we decided to honor the bucket by naming our business after it. Yes, we have a business. Small and simple, few clients as yet, and kind of flakey, but we do need to generate income, since we are not self sufficient and the farming at this stage is all expense and no income.

Media production is my other *thing*, the *thing* that has been my life for many years, as an artist, producer and teacher. While having a screen life is not my idea of fun, it is what i *do*, so my grrl and I have created BucketMedia, to do that do through…

This is Bucket:
What’s in a name? Well if it’s full, perhaps apples, or water, or animal feed, or milk from a just milked cow. Perhaps the bucket has a hole, eliza, and is therefore a leaky vessel, but it can still ferry things of many names and meanings, and perhaps you can use the hole as well as the container, to slowly drizzle liquid on a garden. Bucketmedia has it’s computers in the old bails (note that bail is also the name for the handle of a bucket) on a permaculture farm in the hinterland of byron bay. So we think that buckets are a fine technology and use them every day and indeed have many of different colors lying around. They are most excellent for collecting kitchen scraps to feed to animals. They are a basic recycling tool. What does any of this have to do with media? Nothing and everything. We make use of technology in the same way we use buckets, for a multiplicity of purposes, appropriately and inappropriately. We make of it what we can, and use the leaky part as well as the whole container, for we like things which challenge boundaries. Also, we just like to say the word “bucket”. It feels good to roll around the tongue and can be used as an expletive when the going gets tough. Bucket. Use it.

What does all this mean? We make websites. Yes, bottom feeders that we are, we scavenge work where we can! Charlene has brilliance in her, so that’s a bonus, and i have grunt, so we can bash together something better than passable. Using only buckets! Anyway, once we have a link (well, we do - bucketmedia.net but there’s nothing there yet), I’ll let you know…

Loving you, leaving you, more soon

Vxx

So I feel a bit flattened, along with Maybe, who just seems to keep falling over, despite our best efforts to put a spring in her step.

She’s currently abed amongst the lush green pastures in the chook run. I thought she seemed poorly again this morning, her movements slow, a definite disinterest in food (most unlike her), her head down, a general look of unhappiness about her.

Her unhappiness makes me feel similarly down.

I expect she has milk fever, which my Dad surmised initially. It’s a calcium deficiency (hypocalcemia) which cows post-calving are prone to, since nursing calves takes alot out of the cow. Worst case scenario is that she dies.

When she was very sick a week or so ago, we injected her just beneath the skin with a calcium/glucose/magnesium solution (see previous post). This seemed to assist. We kept her calves off her for some days, and stopped milking her. While she hasn’t been doing the highland fling, she has certainly been on her feet and on her food and looking much better.

So we let her calves in for brief periods once in the morning and once at night to drink their fill, since they have no clue how to drink milk from a bottle or a bucket, and we limited their feeding so as not to deplete her.

One night, we left her in the chook run, cos the grass is so lush, and she really needs to have good pasture to turn into milk. In the morning we woke up and there, in the chook pen with her, was her biological calf, Andy! How did he get in??? Well, he, long legged calf that he is, found a spot where the fence is in bad repair between the pigpen and the chook pen and stepped over in his high heels…

This was a bit of a blow, since he would have been nursing on her all night, undoing our plans to keep her healthy by keeping the calves off her except for short periods of time.

Today we went out for a while and when we arrived home Maybe was down (there’s resting and then there’s resting…). She eventually got to her feet, but still not bright eyed and bushy tailed. Off to the chook pen, Andy finds the break in the fence again. Finally, so do I, and repair it. But not before Andy has suckled off her and I guess finished off the least bit of strength she has.

She’s down. I’m feeding her comfrey leaves and mulberry leaves and I’ve put apple cider vinegar in her water and given her some of her feed with minerals, but it looks like an unhappy situation, and may require another visit to the vet for more awful injections. (Charlene valiantly administered the last lot, with my assistance, but she’s not at all keen to do it again.)

The outcome doesn’t look bright. Probably the only way to keep her well is to wean the calves. This is kind of disastrous for us. We bought Maybe with her calves in order that she nurse them (Andy is her biological calf, and Frenchie is her foster calf), and we grow them on her milk, which is the most healthy way to grow them. We also bought her as a house cow, to provide us with our dairy needs. None of this works with a dry cow.

I just feel devastated. I really want to look out the door and find Maybe standing and eating, knee high in psychedelic green grass.

I am telling myself she’s resting, but I know she’s not. I know she can’t get up.

So I’m gonna get up now, and look out the door. Maybe she’ll be kicking up her heels.

xxV

postscript:
Well, Maybe is standing, walking, eating, for now. Andy THREW himself over my repaired and now-much-higher fence to get to her. Desperado. He’s the boundary rider, he’ll find any break there is. Mum’s milk is the whole world…

so now that the pigs are gone, we decided to turn the space into somewhere where the calves can sleep and hang out in the day. we also set up a little feeding system in there so that we could feed each of the babies a bucket every afternoon. we have spent some time researching all the special things little calves need to grow up strong and healthy, especially in this region, where the soil is lacking certain minerals. our farming and agricultural compatriots quite often offer us tidbits of information that we add to our personal knowledge base. for example, when the farrier was here filing the horses hooves he suggested that copper supplements were really important in this region, Marja tells us that sulphur is not abundant in these soils, sulphur being the key to building up resistance to fly attacks which can lead to diseases such as pink eye. so after organizing all of this information inside our heads, we set out to buy all the necessary parts to start the perfect feeding regime for our special cows. all up it cost us around $200 for all the minerals, grains, oils, buckets etc. when we got home we spent the rest of the afternoon setting up a feed corner on our back verandah which would be where we prepared the food for Maybe and the calves each day. we also printed out instructions of what to feed and how much. we stapled this to the wall. that afternoon we set about preparing our specially formulated diets for our special little friends…

it feels so good watching the little ones eat and knowing that they are receiving all the nutritious goodness that will help make them strong!! im left feeling incredibly proud…

proud of myself
proud of us
proud of our creatures

but most of all proud of what we are doing and proud for getting it right

Maybe eating her minerals

Calves in their new house..

charlene xx

A preamble to this post:
It’s the tired end of the day. We managed animal nutrition, feeding systems, pasture rotation and bovine eye care today! Much of our knowledge about just *how* to do these things comes from our intense research, and also common sense. I treat myself often with herbal or other alternative modalities, and so we can transfer alot of this knowledge, simple things, across to animal care. Aloe Vera assists healing. We use it for cuts on Maybe, and for teat care. Garlic is a great vermicide. We worm the dogs with this, and will do so with the cattle. But we have a great arsenal of books (thanks Michael and Amazon!) which we rely on every day and we put together our own systems taking what we need from all these sources. We love the book “The Healthy House Cow” written some 20 years ago by Marja Fitzgerald who resided in this region. She’s very cool, plays guitar and sings to her cows, stuff like that! She had a diagram of a great little bucket feeding system just made out of wire rings and buckets for calves, so we set one up, and while, as Charlene says, this wasn’t a raging success this afternoon, at the tired end of the day, in a new paddock, I’m convinced the calfeteria will be well patronised as soon as they understand that *this is where the food is guys!* I understand Charlene’s flagging enthusiasm right now, but i also feel happy about our work today…

Soooooooooo… to follow on from some themes in Charlene’s post, not so much about the order aspect (which clearly, for those of you who know me, is integral to my continued survival!), but about modes of communication, the sensitive treatment and understanding of animals and about sensory *fields* i guess. About energies.

Today we were reading in our new favorite book Small Scale Livestock Farming about the emotions and senses of the beast, particularly about working with your animal to communicate what you need from it. The book refers to the “point of balance”, and one can use this, in addition to 2 specific “zones”, the flight zone and the pressure zone, to manipulate/communicate/choreograph the movements of a single or a group of cows. One of the things we have to do alot of is working just one animal, moving mum away from her babies, getting the cattle into a different paddock, things like that. The point of balance is at her shoulder. stand just forward of this point and the animal will move backward, stand behind this point and the animal will move forward. In addition to this, stand too close to the animal, interfere with its personal space, and you will activate the flight zone, and have no hope of working with the animal in a harmonious way. Move further away, but not too far, and you begin to “guide” in a kind of energetic way, the animal, and sometimes you can just wander along together if it all meshes right. I’m not sure you can learn this from a book, though it is clearly theorised. I think it’s a very “felt” thing, and you know when you’ve “got it”. One just hovers along the edge of these zones and quietly becomes part of the animals comfortable space.

This doesn’t mean that we don’t have plenty of times when we are frustrated in our attempts tomove a cow, or move *with* a cow to a desired location. This frustrated energy makes everything get pretty messy in terms of choreography and we will usually end up with a ballet of cattle in full flight kicking up their heels and tossing their heads scattered all over the paddock. Then we start again.

Anyway, all of this ruminating reminded me of the documentary of Temple Grandin ( link to part 1 of the documentary Woman Who Thinks Like a Cow), who suffered autism, and is a magical cow whisperer. This documentary, especially the parts about animal handling, and her ability to understand the behavior of cows through feeling/thinking(?) more like a cow than exhibiting or expressing or even understanding human emotions and motivations (an aspect of her autism) was very fascinating to me, and somewhat resonant… I find myself thinking about this documentary quite often. There’s this great image of her lying down in the dirt with a huge herd of cows gathered around all looking down at her in fear/curiosity/fear…

She also has a good look going on for a cowgirl… those shirts and neckercheifs are really somethin’

I always used to be afraid of cows, but now I just find them great fascinating ruminants, often graceful, and i feel quite comfortable with them, though i still sometimes don’t trust Hinimoa’s horns… a little respect for intstruments that pierce is a good thing… *smile*

Ok, on that note, goodnight Vxx

its been so chaotic here lately. nothing seems simple actually everything seems confused. i guess ever since we got Maybe, Frenchie and Andy we havent really created a structure that works. the lack of structure really plays on my mind. trying to manage so many animals seems beyond me sometimes. i mean we get it done but you are just left feeling exhausted. i guess its hard because we have calves and their routines are quite different. plus we have more than one paddock so you have to look at how to rotate harmoniously. we also need to have the calves locked in at night, away from the cow so she can produce enough milk for them to feed in the morning…

aarrrhhhh it all seems to much.

so the day the pigs left i sat down with a piece of paper and tried to work out the best possible structure, the most stress free way we could do things. today was the day we put my plan into action. lets just say it went so so… cows are funny creatures. they love routine, they love knowing what they should be doing and doing it. so when we dont really know what we are doing then the cows get a bit uneasy. today in the car, as we were driving to lismore, i started thinking about the whole idea of order. i rarely ever thought much about it and was someone who’s life was never IN order…i always preferred unpredictable, free, wild, (un)structure but since living on the farm i have seen the light. nothing turns me on more than seeing huge animals moving in exactly the way you want. little calves all lined up doing exactly what they should. the fact that all of these things are communicated between man and beast through movement and gentle direction. you never have to use violence or fear as a tool to make things happen. you just need to be clear about what you want. be a strong leader. show the cow that this is how it needs to be.

today we werent the best of leaders but i guess we werent really sure of what we wanted. tomorrow i will try to be more certain. let things settle in my mind.

tomorrow i will create order. tomorrow everyone will know exactly where everyone needs to be….

charlene