I was doing the evening thing here down on the farm, feeding various animals, worrying about our poorly little Luka, wondering what in the hell to do with the old pig pen enclosure and so on when i noticed 2 people chatting by the bottom fence. The new owner of the acreage next door, who runs horses, lots of beautiful horses, and the previous owner, who is also the same farmer whose herd Tippi infiltrated some many months ago - you might remember the Bring Tippi Home campaign - there were t-shirts and everything!

So I wander down, looking glamorous in my gumboots and flanno, covered in mud and shit and say "g’day" over the fence… introduce myself to the new owner, who is lovely, and get a gruff reception from farmer boy who no doubt thinks i am just some freakish lowlife (hey, i *am* some freakish lowlife - yay!). Anyway, I push his patience by just hanging around, and he eventually tells me he’s transporting some of his cattle to market on Tuesday, and he’d put Tippi on the truck and send her round, if I could just fix up the carrier… sure, what the heck, I can do that… and off i go, executing a little jig of happiness (as much as the gumboots will allow) that Tippi is *finally* coming home.

Tuesday comes, and with it Tippi, hornless, but looking fine, and who knows? maybe pregnant… that would be sweet. The farmer’s herd bull is a Limousine I think, a big boofy gnarly looking curly headed brown thing with one horn turned in. He seems a fine specimen, and really quite docile. I’ve often been around and in amongst his herd (usually trying to run down escaped goats and calves) and he’s watchful but not aggressive…

Tippi joins our little farm herd and we stand in the paddock to watch how the dynamics play out. There’s abit of pushing and shoving, but Hinimoa (Tippi’s mum) remembers her and sniffs and licks and stays close by (she missed her terribly for a long time). Rosie is a bit wary but seems to respect Tippi’s place (below her, naturally) and Frenchie and Tippi seem to get along ok, being of a similar size and strengh probably. Little Girl is feisty but Tippi’s having none of her, so they keep their distance. In the final analysis, Rosie is Top Cow without a doubt, followed by Hinimoa and Tippi then slipping a few rungs down is first Frenchie (her sheers size and strength puting her above Little Girl) then Little Girl. They are a lovely herd, all fine fine cows, and a perfect herd to grow with. All have their purpose and we love them to death.

You’ll notice I didn’t mention Luka. Weeelllll… Luka doesn’t really even rate in the herd dymanics. I’ve seen Frenchie basically steamroller her from one end of the paddock to the other. She’s very poorly, and we don’t know what is wrong with her. She’s just not like any calf I’ve known. No frolic, no noise, no spark… we’ve been trying various things and have just gotten her to start eating a mash of dairy meal, oatbran, kelp, minerals with molasses dissolved in boiling water. I tried garlic, but she HATES it, so that will have to be gradualy introduced… so twice a day she eats this, has for a few days now. I’ve been increasing the amount and hopefully we will see some strength and spark enter her tiny little body which has become quite wasted over the last few months

I’m introducing her to the herd little by little and yesterday they all seemed to be grazing peacefully together. It makes my heart glad to see them together, looking so fine, so handsome.

PICTURE COMING SHORTLY 

The human herd is traveling well, with the Likely Dairylad still loving her work and becoming more ensconced in her working environment, learning lots of new things every day, and as its calving season, she’s in her element, wanting to bring home any unwanted babies… BUT we have babies enough! And being the dry season, only just enough pasture to keep them in good condition. Oh and she has new waterproof kit and boots to wear… she looks rather dashing in it!

Deb is working 7 days a week, with a day off here and there sorting macadamias - noisy work, but money is her reward, and she has a PLAN, which involves seasonal work, then travel. Working the maca season here (she’s been a great find for her employers, reliable and hardworking), then off to the UK to see her boy Tommy for a stretch. Hopefully Tommy will come and visit the farm, which will be a wild cultural change for her…

Me? Oh yes, me… Well, I’m doing some gardening on a coffee plantation for a nice bloke. I got to make vegie gardens the other day in raised beds, so that was cool, planted a veritable cornucopia of foods which will be bursting out the seams of the beds and provide food for my boss and family for the winter, I hope!  Now to continue the slow rescue and regeneration of my own gardens… I’m getting there… we’ll have no lack of leek and onion, and some rhubarb is looking good and we still have plenty of greens and herbs… oh and of course the endless limes and lemons and so on. Winter fruits will be setting soon as well… I’m tackling some web production for extra income and a few interesting things have come up for me after the last post I made. I’m very much looking forward to getting back into the dairy production once Rosie calves, too…

Yes, so after my last post I had a lovely comment from Joanne Hay, the editor of Nourished magazine, who tracked us down, as i had quoted from the magazine in the post I made. She loved the blog and so an exchange ensued. She is fundamentally involved in the raw milk movement here and is instrumental in setting up the herd share here in the Lismore/Byron region which is slowly moving towards being operational. I’m hoping we can become involved on a number of levels. So she will come and visit and we will chat. Joanne is also inerested in having me write for the magazine, and has asked me if I would ike to interview Dr Elaine Ingham, who is running a course out at the Uni and presenting lectures on SOIL, oh yes, my favorite topic to ponder… and ponder… and ponder… maybe i’ll actually learn how to deal with it!

Dr Ingham is from the Soilfoodweb Institute and is a world leader in the research and analysis of the soil foodweb. Over the past 20 years she has worked with growers worldwide and has developed a database of microorganisms present in various soils, and has observed the improvement in soild when the appropriate balance between beneficial fungi and bacterial biomass is acheived.

The course, running from June 23-July 4 is called Soil Foodweb Interactions and Benefits to Plant Production and will be held at Southern Cross University, Lismore, NS

So that’s cool…

Speaking of herds, well, packs really, there is an introduction to be made.

And Oscar makes 3…

Yes, we are now mothers of 2 fine puppies, the newest pack member being Oscar. Now Jimmy Jack has a little brother and a friend. The Amstaff breed is very very social and energetic, and a lone Amstaff would have been, well, lonely. Now they play outside all day long, a tiny Oscar holding his own against a much bigger Jimmy Jack. He’s twelve weeks old…

OK, enough, I need to go and dig and plant. I’m thinking potatoes… amongst the brassicas and beans and onions…

If anyone has any suggestions about how to manage 2 enclosed areas that used to be a pigpen and are now pumpkins and weeds but are really too big to cultivate as vegie gardens and could be grass crops but there is not a gate big enough for cows to pass through and so on… I welcome them!

Ok backyard buddies, I’ll be back again soon.

Vx  

So my computer died, which is something of a disaster, since it is my other window to the world, a way to make money when times are hard, and, ok, my primary addiction! I’ve always been blase about backing up my data, and now i’m paying the price… seems to be a hard disk fatality, as there was a lot of whining and grinding going on in the final throes as I was frantically trying to back up my shit (unsuccessful - death occurred mid-backup). I have some vague hope that I can still access the storage but it may require some extremely nerdly action on my part to make this happen, and it’s a long shot. I of course do not have the boot disks for my system and tracking them down is proving difficult. Cross your fingers on my behalf for bit torrent…

Anyway, I’m posting today courtesy of my nephew Darcy, who loaned me his old G3 (even smaller and older than mine!) in the interim… (interim to what, I ask myself?)

So, after my last post , with all my whining about needing dairymaking equipment, and posting on every possible public forum and inapporpriate social network my veiled pleas for gifts of churns and scotch hands, I had some luck and sweetness come my way.

One kind person who I exchanged farmtalk with online just once offered me her butter pats, a small churn and a stack of Good Earth magazines, if she could find them, since she doesn’t use them anymore. In the meantime, I received a mysterious package from a sweet farmboy in Broken Hill, and there, wrapped in gold paper and all tied up in string, were 2 butter pats - my scotch hands! I have posted pictures of me using them, though without the skill of my mother. I guess I’ll get used to the process… The churn is still out there somewhere, I am just waiting on it to arrive from wherever it is languishing. Ebay is useless for this stuff. People buy them as collectables, which pushes the price up to ridiculous heights. I just wanna make butter…

my scotch hands

butter pre-washing and squeezing. the buttermilk has separated from the butter fat

scotch hands in use!
 
Anyway, having said that, it’s all rather moot really for the next couple of months, since we’ve had to dry Rosie off. She’s in calf, and is due on the 10th June. Cows come to the end of their lactation a couple of months before calving, then all their energies go into growing the calf for the last couple of months. After calving the udder swells to enormous proportions. For the first couple of days we will not milk her, just leave her calf to feed off her, because she will be producing colostrum, which is special milk essential to the calf’s development. After a few days we will milk her out every day, and it will be a huge task, given the amount of milk she’ll be producing.

Anyway, we are now bemoaning the lack of raw milk in our daily diets, and cannot bring ourselves to buy any dairy produce from the supermarket. The processing of raw milk into the milk that appears in the supermarkets creates a product which is little more than white water, or worse. Raw milk is a whole food with good bacterias and yes, sometimes bad bacteria, but whole, not stripped of goodness and then pumped full of additives. Authorities believe that raw milk bacteria are harmful to human health. This is more likely to be the case if the milk comes from cows which have no access to sunlight, fresh pastures and cannot roam and graze freely.

There is alot of legislation around the production and distribution of milk. It is illegal to sell or buy raw cow’s milk anywhere in Australia except for use in pet food or cosmetics. The only way you can legally consume raw cow’s milk is to own a cow. There’s this action people are taking in order to take advantage of that legislation. Called cow share or herd share, it involves a number of people buying a share in a cow, or a herd, or a dairy, and therefore, each part owner is allowed to consume the raw milk. I’ve been trying to find out if there are any such projects up and running in this area. It seems there was some movement around a Herd Share in Byron in about 2005 but I’m not sure what’s happened with that. Current legislation is trying to stop farmers drinking milk from their own cows. Raw goat’s milk is available in some states.

There are some great sites talking about the raw milk movement. Just google raw milk movement and you’ll see how huge the movement is. Basically the raw milk movement is antithetical to the notion of factory farming and corporate consumerism. As Joanne Hay, Editor of Nourished Magazine says in this article, "Probably the most important benefit of raw milk is it’s incompatibility with corporate culture. You simply can not control large milk supplies without pasteurisation." This article from The Age gives a good overview of the current legislation and highlights some of the issues around the production and consumption of raw milk. realmilk.com is a great American site for global resources for the raw milk movement, with links to articles from all over the world and even has a listing of raw milk suppliers here in Australia. realmilk.com.au is an Australian lobby group working towards changing legislation around production and distribution of raw milk. In terms of supply that is legal, in a grey-area kind of way, we have 2 dairies in Australia who produce raw milk products for cosmetic use. Cleopatra and Aphrodite produce raw milk and cream and are probably responsible for bringing the raw milk movement into sharp focus here in Australia. Their agents and suppliers are cautioned to warm shoppers not to drink the milk. If there is any hint that the milk is sold for human consumption the producers will be fined $44,000. As Sally Jones from Aphrodite Dairy says "Where has freedom of choice gone? We have the choice to buy raw meat from the butcher shop and have the choice to cook it or eat it raw, we have the choice of eating raw fish in our sushi rolls… we can even legally buy cigarettes, branded ‘smoking kills’ -It doesn’t make sense?… people don’t have the choice to consume raw milk!"

So I guess we’ll be bathing in it instead of drinking it for the next couple of months, courtesy of Cleopatra’s… I’d love to hear about any herd share projects that are happening in the region, and would love to find a local supplier of raw milk - for cosmetic use only, naturally…

Creamily yours

Vx