i live on this farm, quietly, peacefully. i love my animals and i am happy and feel blessed to be living amongst family - queer, environmentally conscious, communal, harmonious.

anyone who has been reading this blog for a while will be aware that i do not own this farm, but that i reside here as a tenant, but love it as if it were my own, and care for the earth and the animals with respect and honor.

this farm is at the centre of an outrageous litigation claim, which impacts upon me on a daily basis. greed gone mad.

while i am personally not involved in the case (i am merely collateral damage), the claimant makes my life uncomfortable on many fronts.

this blog (as well as other personal websites and the public domain blogs and information of anyone who has stayed on the farm) is scrutinized and printed out as part of a surveillance campaign that doesn’t stop at the public domain, but involves surveillance of the farm with telephoto lens. i do not know what other surveillance is in place. it is the nature of surveillance to remain invisible.

i am writing this post to let you know that i will not be posting here until the litigation is over.

peace and love

Ms Vxx

 

It’s really damn hot. For winter, it’s hot. Too hot. Disturbingly hot. This morning I drove past a tabloid sheet that pronounced today the "hottest winter day ever". I felt every degree, arm out the window as i drove. Last time I ventured into the bigbackyard to blog I was in need of gumboots and wet weather gear (or was alternatively unclothed, often a better way to manage the ridiculous downpours). Today, by contrast, I set foot on dry land, gumboot-less and in need of sun protection. Where once there were small lakes and sodden fields the earth is dry, compacted, cracked, shrinking away from fence posts and pipes and from around the stems and roots of plants. I find myself wondering, with an edge of anxiety, when the next shower will come. My sister calls me and says she’s run out of water. I am shocked. She’s had an excess of water for about 2 years. I am suddenly conscious again of the capricious nature of the weather and that drought is only ever a few days away from the last shower. We’ve been living in a wet dream of too much water for so long now that the days of hauling water from the duck’s bath to nourish the plants is a dim memory. From the side door I can see the usually psychedelic greenness of the surrounding hills turning brown before my eyes. Smoke rises like a warning from spot fires along the horizon. Farmers are burning off, anticipating a scorching summer. The smoke creates a quality of light which engenders a sense of unease: yellowish, dense and strained through the threat of fires to come. I plan rescue strategies for the vegetable gardens and carry bucket after bucket of water to the newly planted and embattled palms in the driveway. Looking out into the big paddock, I worry about the lack of pasture for the cows, and the impact of their hooves on the dry earth. Only weeks ago the paddock was carpeted by an impossible lushness of fodder for my small herd. Today I see a carpet of yellow; fireweed; and a forest of those weeds that grow green parachutes full of beautiful but evil diaphanous seed-silk, carried on the hot early summer breezes. I don’t know the name for this weed. I see very little in the way of food for my cows, in particular little to nourish cows in calf. I worry about the cost of feeding the cows through the dry, about hauling bales of lucerne from Casino or Tatham to see them through.

Sage words from local farmers indicate a dry season that may last well into next year, no doubt punctuated by heavy weather phenomena, the kind of weather that rumbles and boils out of a clear blue sky at the end of a scathingly hot day. The kind of weather that splits trees in two and blows apart churches. The kind of weather that turns on you, spitting in fury. No, Dorothy, we are not in Kansas anymore but Heavy Weather is here to stay…

So, having created the weather for this entry, i sit sweating in the double edged loveliness of it, looking into the cavernous gap of time between my last foray into the bigbackyard and this, today’s expedition. Alot has happened.

I did just mention in passing, did i not, without really a pause for breath; "cows in calf"? Yes! I did! While there is no empirical evidence to support my belief, I am quite certain that Little Grrl (now the banner pinup cow for this site!) is in calf. I’m unsure about Rosie, but Little Grrl was looking decidedly rotund this afternoon when I went to feed her and while I have, as I say, no empirical evidence, I witnessed some interesting bullish happenings last time Little Grrl was on heat. Not the least of these things being that Charlie is now a capable bull, and tall enough to mount Little Grrl successfully. Which he was doing repeatedly the last time she was on heat. However, more interestingly, during the same estrus period a bull from the next door property managed to jump all fences and and spend the night with Little Grrl in the house paddock. That bulls can sense the estrus from quite some distance and another property away is quite amazing. They are quite capable of and will jump fences to get to a cow in heat. As i witnessed. I’d say it was a rowdy night, judging by the bellowing, and none of my cows slept much, but the bulls know when to take their leave, and in the morning, not a sign of big bull. This will be Little Grrl’s first calf, which also means that she will be a lactating heifer, and I will have 2 house cows to milk. I feel some trepidation about milking Little Grrl. She has horns and is not afraid to use them. Her udder has never been handled, and while she has been hand raised and is very domesticated, she’s feisty and frisky and will top a puny human every time, regardless of puny human cow-topping strategies… one should always respect a good set of horns. I expect I will have to build her a stanchion for milking purposes, and perhaps restrain her while milking so she doesn’t kick me. All this will be a new experience for me, as I’m so used to milking Rosie freestyle, she being the most accommodating of cows.

My small herd of four became three recently. Regular visitors to the backyard will have seen photos of Miss Pretty, the sweet calf I raised by hand from just days old. She was a rescue calf from Trevor’s Dairy where the Lad used to work. A pure Illawarra dairy calf, sweet natured, very docile and human-friendly. Miss Pretty died recently after swallowing something which caused a blockage in her oesophagus and subsequently created bloat. Bloat is a distressing ailment for an animal. The animal is unable to belch, swallow saliva (cows produce up to an amazing 100 litres of saliva a day) or chew their cud. The gasses in the rumen expand and can’t escape, creating pressure on the lungs and obstructing bloodflow. Death can occur very quickly from suffocation and other complications. In a cow, diagnosis is often difficult and death is often sudden. Decisions need to be made quickly. The veterinary approaches to dealing with such emergencies are primitive and harsh. Thus a knife between the ribs or a metal tube down the oesophagus are part of the arsenal of emergency veterinary treatments. But one does what one can to try and preserve the life of a healthy animal. I desperately wanted to save Miss Pretty. I wanted to watch her calve and milk her. In the end, following 4 very distressing visits from the vet all through the day and night, I chose to euthanize Miss Pretty to end her suffering. The treatments were punishing. I couldn’t watch anymore. Miss Pretty was euthanized and buried down in the old pig pen, near May the goat and Charlie the rescue calf. I wasn’t alone in digging her grave and tossing the red soil on her red red coat. There were 5 of us quietly digging her grave, sweating alot and passing small comments. I am blessed to be living as part of a community that honors the processes of life and death as part of a sustainable system rather than just eating it, vacuum packed, from the supermarket.

 

Of course where there is death there is also an abundance of life. From where I sit, I can turn my head left and see out the side door down the garden path, towards the vegetable gardens and the hills beyond. The house gardens are still green, and the vegetable beds are full of bolting brassicas, rushing toward seed in the unseasonal heat. I have been eating fresh broccoli for nights and nights now, snapped from the stalk and steamed, with only cracked pepper as an accessory. Perhaps a squeeze of lemon. Maybe the smallest dob of butter. One doesn’t want to overdress fresh broccoli. The chinese cabbages are sprouting unruly heads of yellow flowers, securing their place in next season’s garden. Cauliflowers are nearing their denouement, packed tightly in their parcel of outer leaves, perfectly formed, having outrun the appetites of the green caterpillars. Baby greens are thriving and there is an abundance of last season’s straggler leeks, spring onions, brown onions, kaffir lime leaves, curry leaves, lemongrass, limes, lemons, galangal and mint for the creation of sublime evening meals.

citrus mania - taken by esther, farmfriend and marmalade queen

This abundance is due in large part to the time and energy of my farm family and to the neverending stream of urban retreaters, wwoofers and devoted friends who are so generous with their time and skills. After a despondent season or two, the gardens have now been beautifully overhauled and feel manageable, viable and are beginning a cycle of newfound productivity, I do believe.

Continuing the theme of abundance, I found yesterday a goose egg in the small goose house under the mulberry tree (which, incidentally, is ripening its berries at a rapid rate and subsequently i have stained lips and fingers most of the time…). This egg was the first goose egg i think i have ever seen. The appearance of the egg makes one thing clear: one of the geese is female, and since, apparently, it is rare for geese to lay unfertilised eggs, I would say I have a mating pair! I haven’t yet seen any mating activities between the birds, and believe me i keep a close eye on such things, but goslings would be a fine thing. The egg is sitting in the middle of the kitchen table, while i ponder what to do with it. Apparently if the egg is eaten on the day it is laid it is referred to as a Golden Egg. This is now a second day egg. I haven’t come across any references to second day egg naming. The shell of the egg is very white and somewhat matte and chalky. it sits next to a much smaller duck egg, with it’s waxy, smooth and slightly blueish shell, and a tiny smooth brown shelled chicken’s egg.

 

eggs: goose, duck, chicken

I think I will have a goosey scramble for dinner. 

Sending you all golden eggs and an abundance of all that is good. Let’s catch up again soon.

Ms V x

Heavy Weather: Taken From the title of a novel by cyberpunk writer Bruce Sterling. The sf thriller is set in a near-future world suffering from "heavy weather" - tornadoes and other phenomena caused by the runaway greenhouse effect. Last year a tornado hit Dunoon. My friend’s response to my frantic texting, knowing my penchant for drama, was "… yes, Dorothy … were’s Toto?". We don’t have tornados in Australia, do we?

i seem to have lost track of times and seasons. there was once apparently some order to these things. wet seasons, dry seasons. i recall a year hence we were rained in for months from december through to february at least. heaps of us. going crazy but laughing alot. this year over the period where many many gorgeous queers visited the farm we had such fine beautiful weather, sunny, and the rain came just as it was needed. the storms, when they visited, were spectacular, but it wasn’t like the season of heavy weather a year prior, which was drenching, unstoppable, flooding, cabin-fevered…

however, today and yesterday and for a few days, in an unseasonable turn (or is it? i don’t know anymore…) the heavens have opened and i can barely leave the property as there is a rather large lake in the driveway. i put on my running shoes and jog out of the property, down the potholed asphalt that passes for roads round these parts, running through the overflows from stormwater drains, dodging fallen branches, listening to the rushing floodwaters running off into dams and flooded fields. sweating in the rain. taking off my shirt as i run so i can feel the rain on my skin. inside, in a farmhouse, cabin fevered, in a rural locale named dorroughby, i feel like the world isn’t possible, but running along these back tracks and past farms and wet cows and everything dripping and green, the world seems possible.

it’s raining in the jungle

one soggy chook on the verandah… they hate the rain. the rest came to join her…

 

exuberant fungal growth

…even milking in the rain feels possible. i milk in a very freestyle way. i just make up a feed for rosie, put it in front of her and milk freestyle, bucket on the grass. i wash her teats first with warm and soapy water and always lubricate her teats with something natural. so she eats and i milk, and if she finishes eating before i finish milking, she wanders off, and i just follow her with the bucket. she usually finds a patch of grass to much on and just stands quietly until i finish. she’s pretty awesome like that. but given that i don’t have shelter milking in the rain is always a challenge. Water drips off her fur and into the bucket. I’m slopping around in the mud and puddles. if she flicks her wet tail whatever she’s carrying around in it might fly into the milk. a muddy hoof in the bucket also makes for a nice milkshake. any one of these things means that the chooks and ducks get the milk, not us… but if the cosmos is aligned correctly and all my wetness avoidance strategies are in place, then i can manage enough for the day. today i managed enough for the day, despite the cosmos feeling very very wrong…

the farm herd is smaller, more compact in keeping with the transitions that have happened here which i have been logging irregularly. my beloved farm family (The Likely Dairy Lad and Farmboy Deb) have departed to follow their personal journeys in the city and the dogs are chasing different rabbits in new parks. they are much missed. there are new farmhousekids (Jarrod and Janet) and new geese (Portis and Lamb). the bovine herd is reduced to 4. this is what I can manage at the moment. Rosie has 2 foster calves. Pretty, who will stay with us and become a housecow like her mum. see many pictures of Miss Pretty in earlier posts. rosie is also fostering Charlie, who came from the dairy. he’s a stocky, bullish bull, already has his horns and is a lovely santa illawarra cross, dark caramel. he will not live with us forever. Little Girl makes 4.

terrible picture of the geese Portis and Lamb. i can’t get close to them yet, they are still pretty wary…

the geese are to keep the orchard free of weeds and keep the grass down. i am in the process of making that more viable. they don’t like long grass (check that growth!) and it can be dangerous for them to feed on long tough grasses. Our mechanised tools of grass maintenance are currently out of order (they get worked hard) so there’s been alot of hand weeding and slashing going on… oh… we do not know if they are a mating pair or not… genderfluid geese… friend mez suggests that a female has an "egg waddle" going on, like a lower belly and a waddle to accommodate, and that she is smaller than the male. i would hazard that lamb, on the right is a goose, and that portis is a gander. really wouldn’t have a clue though. any goose experts out there?

i spoke about artificial insemination in earlier posts in passing, and the time has come to bring it on. so far it’s been rough and ready and entirely unsuccessful. if you have time and powers of observation and the ability to interpret what you are seeing, then you can know when a cow is on heat, and receptive to insemination. this tells you all about it…

"Standing estrus, or "heat," is the most reliable indication that a cow is going to ovulate and release an ovum… Estrous behavior is used to determine when a cow should be inseminated. A brief window of opportunity exists for fertilization of the ovum and pregnancy of the cow to occur… Ovulation usually occurs approximately 28 to 32 hours after the onset of estrus in dairy cows (Trimberger 1948; Walker et al. 1996). After ovulation, there is only a short period when ova can be fertilized (fig. 1). Optimal fertility of ova is projected to be between 6 and 12 hours after ovulation (Brackett et al. 1980)."
from here>http://aces.nmsu.edu/pubs/_b/B-117.html

standing estrus is when the cow stands still when mounted by another cow, rather than moving away. if she stands still, and is observed to do so a number of times, then one can assume she is on heat. easy! easy to misinterpret, hard to calculate.

you can also get these strips, like scratchies, which glow flourescent green when the cow comes on heat. theory being that one cow stands still, another mounts her, rubbing off the silver and revealing the flouro green. rosie’s tail happened to switch away at flies just about where we applied the strip, gradually rubbing away all the silver. useless. one can also needle the cow to bring her onto heat. takes up to 10 days for that to work. the needling and the strip should work together. no such luck. disaster.

then you have Dwight Wyatt, local AI guy. professional imseminator. i have his number, and i plan to use it.

both Rosie and Little Girl are ready to be inseminated, but as there is a dry period when cows are in calf, they will need to be inseminated about 3 months apart, so that we are not left short of milk for any period. this process will take about a year all up i guess. this will be Little Girl’s first calf. i’m a little trepidatious about milking her. she has her horns still and loves to fling her head about. i haven’t dome any kind of proparation with Little Girl around milking. they should have their teats handled early on so they get used the the feeling. she’s just wild. there’ll be no freesyle milking of Little Girl…

it’s 2.36am. i have to sign off. there is rosie to be milked, there are roads to be run, and then a weeding date at 9!

i always promise to be back soon. 

i promise to be back soon.

goodnight, farm freaks. all the love in the world. Ms. V x

It seems that Heavy Weather is back with a vengeance… Brisbane has been trashed by freak storms for days on end. We’ve had ceaseless rain for 2 weeks, now punctuated by blazing days with a hint of the storm to come rumbling on the horizon. Yesterday, after a very very hot day, the Dairylad and I sat on the back verandah and watched the clouds build and boil and race across the sky, eventually hitting us with great sound and fury - every kind of lightning, winds,  and bucketing rain. Two little calves sheltered on the verandah, soaked, despite the warm protected home we made for them. The rain was driving in horizontally and overflowing from the gutters, straight on to the little ones. I expect this weather pattern to continue, much as it did at the end of last year, leading up to the floods of new year.

I mentioned calves (do I ever *not* mention calves in this blog?) … Yes, we have calves. You saw Pretty (since that’s what we’ve called her in lieu of a name since she arrived here, it has become her name!) in the last post. She’s still tiny and delicate and sweet natured. She’s been a little sick, but is getting stronger every day. She has a companion now, a little bull calf called Joe. There is a story to Joe. He was rescued during a day of freakish storms…

I answered the phone the other day to one of our very neighbourly neighbours, Heidi. She told me that she had just been visiting some friends down the road, when a farmer called by to say that the mother of one of his calves had died, and he didn’t think he’d be able to rear the calf. Heidi, knowing that we are the local calf nursery, told the farmer that we might be willing to take the calf. I asked how old and what breed and so on, and apparently the bull was only 2 days old, and his mother had died while calving. So I’m guessing this means that he didn’t get the very first all-important drink from his mum. (the colostrum she produces post calving passes on her immunity to the calf, protecting the calf from all sorts of disease. There is a window period of 6 hours when the calf is receptive to this.) Anyway, it turns out the calf is a pure bred and registered Limousin bull (nice beef breed - Sunny’s sire out of Tippi was a Limousin). For us to buy a pure Limousin calf would cost us round $150. Bulls run to the thousands. So our good turn for the farmer was really a great bonus for us. We collected him in treacherous weather… I am sure the calf would have died had he stayed in the rain, and without a mum and no milk… he came home in the car with us, and was bedded down on the verandah with Miss Pretty. He’s a quiet calf, reluctant to drink, and very… slow… he moves very slowly. We’ll be happy the day he does a little high kick and highland fling, in the way that calves do. It’s such an expression of good health and happiness on their part. Not sure why he’s so… lacklustre, but possibly he’s still recovering from a traumatic birth and also, maybe he didn’t get his first drink. Anyway, we are deciding whether we should/could to keep him as our herd bull… He would produce beautiful calves with Frenchy - Charloais/LimousinX, and also with our other cows. Obviously he’s not going to be up to the job for another 2 years, but it’s about building something slowly, this cow business…

Currently we are in the position of having to artificially inseminate our cows, since we don’t have a bull. And milkers need to be impregnated in order to produce milk. As long as they have a calf on them they will continue to produce milk, though I’m no sure how long the cow produces milk for in quantities that are useful after calving. Little Girl is about ready to be impregnated for the first time, and Rosie will probably be ready in a few months also, though we need to stagger the impregnation, since the cows are dried off a few months before calving, so we want to organise it so that we aren’t without milk during that period. Frenchy can be impregnated at any time from now on, really.

So to have our own herd bull would be fantastic. We just have to see how he holds up I guess, and whether our small holding is suitable for keeping a bull. And maybe check on a few things like what size calves he’s likely to produce, and will any of our cows have trouble calving. His mum died because she prolapsed. It’s a bit graphic, but he’s a huge calf, and i’m not surprised his mum’s insides fell out while calving. I don’t want that to happen to any of our cows.

Apart from calves, there are gardens. I’ve had quite a productive time, and have had much welcome assistance from city dwellers coming for a farmstay. Erica and Coonan and Katy spent about a week in total here, and when it wasn’t raining, spent time in the gardens with me, mowing and reorganising the garden beds so that they are more manageable for me, and less available to rabbits. So things are getting crossed off my mammoth list. I’m happiest when writing lists and crossing things off said list.

So now I have one huge garden bed whittled down to a raised bed of reasonable size. The rest of the mammoth garden bed will return from whence it came - to lawn… The raised bed is still a work in progress, but looking good. Around this I will place pots up on decorative stumps and grow herbs and green leafy vegetables in them. Just down the hill a tad from this raised bed is the bed which was the winter bed of onions and leeks, which we have been eating for a long time now. Plenty of leeks still to eat out of that bed! This one I will fence with rabbit wire and star pickets. It will get any the runoff from the raised bed, which will be very beneficial for it. There are 2 more beds. One, neglected for the longest time, I mulched just this morning. It self seeds a variety of greens such as tatsoi, baby spinach, chard, rocket and parsley. Oh and bulbing fennel. I just gave it some love and attention, and I’m sure it will become a productive part of the system again soon! The second bed is full of weeds and seeding parsley. The bed is fully in te shade, since it contains a lime tree, a large rosemary shrub and a huge cycad. Anyway, I’m going to mulch it and see where to go from there. Some herbs seem happy in there, growing in amongst the trees and other plants.

The other thing which is about to happen is that we are installing a "hidden fence", a dog containment area which means that, come Saturday, our chooks and ducks will be free to range again, without fear of massacre. This will make me very happy. The ducks can go home, the chooks can live in a duck free environment and maybe maybe i will even get some geese for the orchard!

Seems that systems are being restored, and if my environment is functional, then perhaps i will be more so!

Now, I have photos, of course! Of Miss Pretty thinking I am her mum, and of a sleeping Joe. Gorgeous.

joe sleeping, which is all he ever seems to do, on the first sunny day after 2 weeks of rain

joe’s eyelashes

miss pretty

i am her mother… !

more gorgeousness

a succesful escape attempt by 2 small dogs… just go out through the glass!

pretty lyra - farmstay dog (belongs to erica, urban escapee and gardening buddy)

my lovely Likely Dairylad and 2 lovable terrors

That’s all for today… I shall post photos of the garden progress next time.

Backyard love,

from your Ms Everything, Vxx 

Writing this blog has been one of the most pleasurable things I have embarked upon in recent times. This began as a way to chronicle the life and times of… and also as a challenge to myself, usually a writer of obscure poetic melodrama, a challenge to write in a style that was not disclosive, and yet was warm and personal. To tackle a kind of reportage. To write about our day to dayness in an engaging way. To *do* narrative, of a fashion. To let people into our world. To take them on a holiday, maybe. To document learnings, and hopefully make them as fascinating to others as they are to us. To infuse words with a personal politics that reflected the basics of self sufficiency and sustainability. To keep it queer, in a country-assed kind of way! Since the Likely Dairylad writes less and milks more, or something like that, I have come to think of this farmer’s-almanac-of-a-kind as my own, though i probably don’t feed it as often as i should.

There’s always a line to be drawn. There are things I don’t write about here. And yet, boundaries bleed and sometimes what’s happening on the farm is more about the human inhabitants than about the bovines. We have struggles, living as we do, and i made reference to some of those struggles in the last post, and flagged some internal observations and conflicts.

…

short intermission for milking and to re-bury a decomposing duck for the umpteenth time… this time i have built a veritable cairn on top of it, perhaps it will be allowed to decompose with grace now, instead of being unceremoniously dragged around the lawn, eviscerated…

…

So where was i? Ah yes, I thought I would write today about some changes on the farm which I guess are just as much part of our day to dayness as the birth or death of a calf or our dairy adventures or why the hell is the hen’s comb flopping like that or any one of a multitude of happenings that bless or assault us on a daily basis.

The Likely Dairylad, my amazing and enthusiastic partner in this rural adventure, will return to the city in the near - middle distant future. I will remain on the farm, and we will continue to share the lives of our animals and some farm projects. There are things that LD needs to do and experience in the city, including live life fully and alone. Tackle the mundane day to dayness without support. Make new friends, open up the social spectrum somewhat. I’ve done alot of that. LD has not, well, not with her eyes wide open and the fear and excitement of a brand new day in her heart. I’ve no doubt she will miss this life terribly. It’s a living dream, it’s incomparable, it’s beautiful but when you live the dream, rather than dream the dream, it comes complete with the same struggles and sacrifices that urban dwellers face. Rent, taxes, death, politics, injustice and so on.

[edit :: i do feel heartsick over the leaving, however matter of fact I sound]

Things here will change little. I have embarked upon a list of mammoth proportions. I mentioned in the last post that i was feeling somewhat overwhelmed and disillusioned, that there were some systems failing and this was making my experience of living here a bit of a struggle. This feeling has lifted a little, especially since I’ve just been visited by the dream team! Michael, who owns the farm, and Matty, who did alot of the landscaping here. It was lovely to have them visit. Michael now wears a suit every day and lives in inner urban Melbourne, which seems incongruent with the Michael I know, doing hard labor in the garden, creating gorgeous life from the bones of an old dairy farm. So they spent a whirlwind few days here, pruning, replanting, taking care of alot of the stuff I just couldn’t manage to maintain alone. It’s given me a good kick start. We talked alot about how to rethink the systems so they are manageable.

The next project is to rationalise the garden beds, let some of the large vegetable garden area go back to lawn and create a couple of nice raised beds in order to keep rabbits at bay. Much of the work of making the systems functional again really hinges on getting the dog containment area in place, so that the ducks and chooks can free range again.The pastures suffer when this doesn’t happen (the chooks scratch around the cow shit for grain, spreading it widely, breaking it down quickly). The chooks become depressed and squabble in a smal area no matter that they free range in a fantastic run. The depleted duck flock, orpingtons and muscovies are living in with the chooks, since this seems to be the only dog-proof area. They might all be poultry but they shouldn’t live together. Even the different duck breeds don’t get along so well. I really want to put muscovies and geese in the orchard, and the orpingtons by the vege garde in their former home, so i can use their water for the vegetables.

The farm should not be run by the dogs, the dogs should be contained and the animals should be free. Right now, the other animals suffer because the dogs are prey driven. Hopefully it shouldn’t be too long before I can have the hidden fence installed, and the dogs can have a huge area to play in, without causing harm to the other living creatures.

So yes, challenges abound. I will prevail!

On another couple of notes… I think today a new dairy heifer is arriving on the farm, a little girl to grow into another housecow. 3 housecows! Wow… I’ll take a picture and edit it into this post later today. She will be my baby, so naming rights fall to me… ahhhh.. i might be all out…

…and here she is … she’s so dainty, such a long legged high stepper! red and white like her mamma. I can only think of names like daisy and bluebell and buttercup and lovely and beautiful when i look at these sweet things… suggestions welcome!

prettiest little thing - another housecow… looks like we are in cheese!

Camp Camp is happening again this New Year. I’ve put together an info kit, made mailouts, but thought i might link to earlier Camp Camp posts , and another , AND another… AND ANOTHER… and post the info kit for those who are interested. Perhaps I’ll make a dedicated Camp Camp website also…

NOW…how to post a pdf here…

OK, so I’ve made a new website for Camp Camp… pretty generic but has high quality maps and so on, and everything you need to know you will find there…

Camp Camp page

OK… that’s it for now… gotta get on with the day. It’s gorgeous here today, blinding emerald leaves and grass in the spring sunlight.

Love to you, backyarders. Vx 

 So I mentioned in the last post that Charlene has a new job. She’s still a dairylad, just changed venues. It was not a choice she would have made given different circumstances, and it was certainly nothing to do with dissatisfaction at Briarose dairy. Charlene drove the equivalent of a trip to Sydney every 3 days in her travels to and from work, 2 shifts a day. Petrol is at a premium and i’m sure she’s not the only person who is having to make decisions based on the cost of commuting, especially in regional areas where the distances are long and public transport is light on, ok, nonexistent… She loved her workmates at Briarose, she learned alot, loved the cows (they’re so pretty!) and especially will miss Alan who she worked alongside most days. In her words, he’s the best guy she’s ever met. What is so beautiful about this family (not just Brian and Rosie, but Flo and Roy, Brian’s parents also) and the workers at Briarose is that they accepted Charlene for exactly who she is, no judgment, open hearted and open minds, knowing she came fresh from the city with no experience, but what they could see was her desire to learn, her love for the cows and a sharp intelligence.

She started her new job today, with Trevor and his wife Alyssa at Dan Springs. Dan Springs is a 300 acre property just 10 minutes walk from home. They run Illawarra cattle and some fresians. Illawarras are big reddish brown and white cows that are big boned and very docile. They have long serious faces, not the cute upturned pixie noses of the jerseys.

The Illawarra

She will be their sole employee, so she will learn everything about the farm and Trevor has already learned all he needs to know about Charlene on the dairy grapevine (this is a phenomena we are just beginning to understand…) and seems well pleased… They produce alot of milk, quite high in protein but nowhere near the creaminess of the jersey. She came home well pleased with books underarm, having spent a day hooning around on quad bikes, riding shotgun on the tractor, learning about silage, communing with calves, and having eaten lunch with the family (including a delicious thai desert of coconut jelly!) AND an afternoon tea of scones. Her hours will be sane - every second day she starts at 5.10am, and on the other day she starts at the totally civilised hour of 8.30am… and she’ll be able to walk home for lunch! minus coconut jelly… unless i get inspired!

So to use a totally meaningless piece of verbiage… it’s all good!

I wanted some pictures of our herd as it is now, since the small ones have grown so much and, while it might look like a raggletaggle bunch of cows, I think we have a really nice herd. Every cow has it’s place. Little Girl will be our second housecow (so i’d better get that cheesemaking paraphernalia happening quick smart…), Frenchie is our prime beef breeder. Tippi is Mum to Sunny, and is growing her into a lovely little beef cow through mother’s milk (nothing better to grow a calf on…). Sunny and Willy will be grown freely and stay with their mums and will provide food for us and others when they are big enough (it’s not awful, it’s self sufficiency folks). Luka is a freak of nature albeit a cuddly little bear of a freak, and her job is just to be adorable. Tippi will go to market eventually. Rosie will be our housecow for always.

Little Girl, like a princess wearing a tiara

There’s something tasty down there

legs and udders

hiding behind mum

the family

One of the problems we are having at the moment is how dry it is, and the consequent lack of nutritious feed for our herd. A couple of days ago we sent Hinimoa away on a truck to the marketplace. There was just not enough feed to go around. Hinimoa is one of Michael’s original Dexter herd, and was born on the property, so it was hard to send her away. I hope she went to join a herd of Dexters, but we cannot know her fate. A fact of life is bills, and the sale of Hinimoa will enable us to get a piece of machinery fixed. She was a crazy, rotund, bolshy cow and we’ve all had our moments of terror with her as she bore down upon us shaking her head and horns like a wild thing but she’d always pull up short just as you were about to make a run for it… i’ve seen the looks of terror in the eyes of visitors…which often made me laugh, cruel as that may seem!

 The other problem we are having with pasture at the moment is fireweed… fireweed is evil… it spreads, as its name suggests, like wildfire, and carpets te ground so that no groundcover can grow… When one looks out over a field of fireweed te sunny yellow flowers look deceptively uplifting, like little buttercups in spring and so on…

 

…but the thirteen petalled flower is noxious, inedible by livestock, poisonous and difficult to eradicate. My mission… eradicate fireweed! So today I spent some hours pulling acres of fireweed by hand and carting it to the burn pile. Thankfull I’m a little bit obsessive compulsive, so tasks that require a singleminded dedication and repetition and stamina are right up my alley. I *will* eradicate the fireweed! The reason for its existence is a deficiency in the soil (I need to know more about this), but if one can establish ground cover, then the fireweed will retreat. Hopefully by hand weeding, and if some rain comes, there might be some hope for the pasture to reestablish… Then there are the thistles and the tobacco weed and the farmer’s friend and the alien weed with its evil pods… I would rather weed acres and acres by hand though than use any chemical eradicator…

It seems I’m making a habit of including recipes in my posts lately. The one I’m going to include today is the one that I won the very local bakeoff with! Well, i think me and the baklava kind of won it together, and maybe the baklava just pipped me at the post, but the judges, being ever so fair, made 2 prizes for the baked goods. My prize was a fridge magnet bearing the slogan, overlayed over a 1950’s kitchen and its’ 1950’s housewife, * a clean house is the sign of a wasted life* Ah, how ironic, me being a pedant about domestic duty and all that… most people laughed, some looked at me with pity - those who *knew*. Anyway, dammit I won, and I’m all about competition.

Oh yes, so what did i bake? Well, it was a gluten free lemon curd tart with almond and hazlenut base with chocolate ganache topping. Yes. Well you might drool. It’s damn fine… and here’s the recipe, cannibalised bits and pieces from a number of recipes… I’ll have to try and dig up a photo of this one from somewhere…

Gluten Free Pastry:
6 tbsp butter
3 tbsp caster sugar
grated zest of 1 lemon
1 free range egg
1/2 cup rice flour
1/2 cup of almond meal

Now I find that sometimes this makes quite a wet dough and i tend to add more almond meal and so on, up to 1 cup of each to make it more workable. It does harden up when it rests in the fridge. You can also add hazelnut meal, or whatever you fancy.

Spring form tin, greased and floured.

. Preheat the oven to 200C
. Briefly mix butter, sugar and grated lemon zest in a food processor or similar
. Add the egg and beat for a moment or 2
. Mix in the flours and add extra if you need until the dough comes together
. Make a ball of the pastry, wrap it in clingfilm and let it rest in the fridge for 1 hour
. Roll out the dough on a floured surface in the shape of the tin, cut enough for the sides and the base. This is more of a press into the pan dough, because of its consistency.
. Prick all over the base with a fork.
. Line the pastry with baking paper and fill it with rice or ceramic baking beans. Bake for 15 minutes.
. Remove paper and grains and cook in the oven for a further 5 minutes or until it seems well cooked.
. Set aside to cool

Lemon Curd Filling:
4 lemons
1 1/2 cups sugar
1/4 lb unsalted butter
4 large free range eggs
pinch salt

. Remove the zest of the lemons
. Squeeze 1/2 cup of juice and set aside
. Process the zest and the sugar in a blender or some such
. In a mixer, cream the butter with the sugar zest mixture
. Add the eggs one at a time, the add the lime juice until all is combined. the mixture will separate, and this is normal. Once you heat it, it will emulsify.
. Pour the mixture into a saucepan and heat over a low heat until thickened. The curd will thicken at about 175F
. Set aside to cool
. Pour into shell and allow to set at room temperature.

Chocolate Ganache
Some full cream, maybe a cup
About 3/4 block of dark bitter chocolate (I use the 85% lindt or green and black), cut up into small pieces
I tend to just estimate this bit, the quantities aren’t fixed.

. Heat the cream to a simmer. Do not boil
. Take the cream off the heat and drop the chocolate in. Stir until the chocolate melts into the cream, smoothly.
. Set aside. Put in the fridge if you like
. When the curd is set and the ganache is cool and slightly thick, you can pour the ganache over the curd.
. Another use for the ganache in this recipe is to line the pie case with ganache, base and sides before you pour in the cooled curd.

 Eat! I wish i had a photo of this, but I will take one next time I make it.

Time passes, its cold today and we’ll be needing a fire, the cows are bellowing and the ducks are telling me to get them some food, and make it snappy…

Thanks for dropping by

farmhousewife xx

 

 Ok…this post is especially for my mum.

Introducing Oscar… in these photos he is wearing one of the shirts Julie brought back from South Korea for him.

 

 Jimmy Jack sitting in the grass under the big blue sky…

 

And last but not least Me with my V and my new haircut…. sorry about the hat. Anyway its short (and looks awesome - note from V )

Love Always

Charlene

 

 

 

 

 

 

So the Likely Dairylad and i were moving our little herd this morning over to some new pasture, just taking in the sunshine, ambling along, hanging in the paddock with them, filling their water, scratching under their chins (they love that), when I hear Charlene yell out : babe! Tippi is bagging up!

What? Already? Rosie is not even noticeably bagging up yet…

Well, we knew that Tippi was running with the bull next door (the gnarly Limousin mentioned in the previous post)  and that she was probably pregnant, but she’s been home for some weeks now and we were just waiting it out, not really imagining that we would know anything one way or another for some time yet. Dexters are small cows, with small udders. You usually can’t even *see* their udders, so to see our little heifer bagging up was quite exciting. It means she’s not far off, maybe as close as Rosie. We both felt her udder and yes, it was quite tight and full. She’s been a bit bolshie since she ran away to joing the circus, and isn’t having much to do with humans. She’ll turn around and have a go at you with her non existent horns (maybe she still has phantom horns?) so it was hard to get a look at her vagina, which would be swollen if she’s nearing her cavling date.

So we have one heifer, Tippi (she will remain a heifer until her second calf, at which time she becomes a cow), and one cow, Rosie. Both of these animals are also springers! A springer is a heifer or a cow that is about a month off calving. So we say they are springing as they are preparing to calf.

Tippi had a sister, long gone now, who was from the same bull, called Pania, so we know what Tippi’s little one might look like. Pania (Little Pania of the Rocks no less) was brown, a lovely caramel brown, and the Dexters are black, straight up. Pania now graces the living room floor, so her short dignified life provided food and warmth for the family here before we arrived and still now.

There is alot of excitement about our first farm births, and some trepidation. I’m not so concerned about problems that might arise during calving, since I have seen quite a few calves being born in my time, and especially recently at Charlene’s work, and they just seem to get on with the business. Brian said they have very few problem births, and i don’t think they’ve had one this season. My trepidation is mostly around handling the calf rearing aspect, the milking and then the management of ALL THAT MILK! Cheese time! It will be a bit hectic, and we may need another calf or 2 to feed from the lactating cows, but it’s hard to say how much milk Tippi will produce. She’s a dairy/beef breed, meaning they do well for both, but will not produce anywhere near the amount of milk that Rosie, being a Jersey, will produce.

Naturally there will be a photo essay of the whole process! 

I think an update on little Luka is in order. She’s doing well! The Galloway are a hardy breed, and it seems she has not only pulled through but is making progress in leaps and bounds. We treated her for parasites and she now gobbles down 2 meals a day (with livamol which is a gorgeous mineral supplement, apple cider vinegar and garlic! ) and cries (quietly) for more. she seems to like being out with the big cows, and manages to avoid being stomped on or steamrollered. I hope she develops a loving relationship with one of the other cows, because she is still very much a loner. We have seen her trot, which was an exciting moment and she walks swiftly to her meal bucket but she is yet to present the full calf gambol that seems intrinsic to calf nature.

All is well with the herd!

In previous posts I have mentioned Nourished magazine and Joanne Hay, who is the superhero editor of the magazine, and is involved in all things sustainable and most especially passionate about the raw milk movement and the herd share. We made a lovely connection through this blog, and I hope to write for her magazine in the future. We invited Joanne and family out to the farm for lunch and chat and it was lovely! Joanne and her partner Wes and their 3 glowing children are a delight! Interesting, quirky, energetic, productive, and ever so slightly wild! We ate things we’d grown ourselves, and Joanne bought out an incredible raw cheesecake that I must get the recipe for… They live in a couple of yurts in Byron, managing businesses and family and still have time and energy for the sustainable projects they are involved in. We loved them and everything they do. Check out Joanne’s site Nourished Magazine for edification and enlightenment!

Well, it has been a year of change and inclement weather! All this has left me feeling a bit discombobulated, a wee bit out of sorts and … well … lacklustre. I’m one of those who are seasonally affected, mood-wise, and not enough sunshine is a recipe for a not so shiny me… So much great stuff has happened this year, and most of it chronicled in this blog. I feel quite content with the trajectory this small family seems to be taking, more than happy that my hardworking dairylad has found a passion and a livelihood that engrosses and inspires her, enjoying the small communal living situation we currently have here at Matiatia, especially loving the animals and how that is shaping up. There are also some very very exciting things that might be happening that I can’t talk about here yet which go even further towards making dreams come true. So why a lacklustre me? And what am I planning to do about it? Perhaps others can relate… With the lads out working all day I guess I’m missing company and project partners, farmboys to fix fences with and gardening enthusisats to shovel shit and compost with. I seem to have moved inside (the house, that is…) and have become a bit of a farmhouse wife, with tasks focussed around household management and domestic duty, rather than the getting grubby, hands in the dirt kind of activities which energise nurture, inspire and keep me sane! Lists. I think lists are the answer. And enforced family farm activities in worker’s downtime. If there’s anyone out there who’s up for a bit of farm exposure as an antidote to the urban, let me know, we’ll organise a working bee… Oh yes, and yoga. Of course, always the yoga. I’ve been re-establishing my acquaintance with yoga, and do a good hour and a half practise every day, and sometimes with a buddy and i remember that yoga is the one constant in my life. hari om!

I tend not to personalise this blog, but i think my experience of isolation and lack of motivation, and the perils of identity crisis (i’m just a farmer’s wife!) that we fall into when we are used to more complexity coming from the city is an experience that others who have done the sea/tree change might identify with.

Fundamentally I’m loving the simplicity of this life and the direct connection with the earth, my food, animals that provide and I’m really looking forward to taking on the dairygrrl challenge again (oh yes, still on the hunt for a butter churn and cream separator - old not new), but thought the slight malaise was worth a mention…

So I have more to write, but I shall put it in a separate post, since it’s not at all vegan or vegetarian friendly, and I’d like to flag that here first. Self sufficiency can be gory!

See you shortly 

Vx 

Ok, if you are vegan or vegetarian please don’t read this post.

As you all know, we have a little menagerie here on the farm. We have our herd of cattle. We have a goat. We have chooks and we have ducks of various breeds.

These animals all range freely around the farm, fed on what nature provides, supplemented by our vege scraps and grains.

We live based loosely around a permaculture ideology, and strive towards self sufficiency. We constantly have to take stock and rationalise. Are we putting more (energetically, financially) into our endeavours than we are getting back? Are we making the most of our resources? How can we do things more efficiently and not be out of pocket?

In addition to these practical questions come questions of ideology and ethics around the way I/we would like to live, the notions we would like to embrace more than theoretically. Self sufficiency is a huge umbrella, and means more than getting a few salad greens out of the garden. It can embrace everything from producing your own energy to killing your own meat and stuffing your own pillows with duck down from your poultry flock. All of this done ethically, and outside of a system of factory farming, mass consumerism and capitalism. I’ve mentioned in earlier posts my own upbringing on a farm, which provided for most of our needs. Mum is an awesome gardener and Dad is a passionate farmer.

For about 15 years before i came to live up here I was a vegetarian/sometime vegan. Not sure what changed, but being able to buy local produce, freerange, organic, not factory farmed probably had alot to do with it. The local butcher knows his meat, literally. It’s Monday’s chook, comes from Bill and Ben’s down the road…

Anyway, all this is a preamble to saying that, since I eat meat I believe I should probably kill my own. And we have poultry. And that poultry can provide food and feathers. In addition, during the happy life of the duck, it provides us with organic liquid manure from its bathwater (and ours).

We are in a position at the moment where cash flow is a concept we have only a nodding acquaintance with. Grain costs us quite alot. The ducks aren’t laying. A smaller flock would be more manageable and productive. The duck is currently more useful as a meal than a drain on our precious resources.

I have participated in kills before, mostly assisting, or helping to pluck. I have personally killed a chicken once, and I wasn’t really very skilled at it, shall we say, and it put me off trying again.

Yesterday Deb sad she would help me out, since it was crunch time, the ducks had to be either given away (to someone else who would slaughter them, most likely), or bite the bullet and make self sufficiency more than a concept.

It was very brave of Deb, I thought, and i welcomed her sure aim, which would ensure a clean kill and a painless and swift death for the duck.

I know when I was looking online and in all the books hereabouts for information on the *best* way to kill, pluck and so on, i found it hard to get a clear picture of how to go about the process… so many different approaches. So here is a step by step guide to how we did it, augmented by bits of information offered by those who know and by lessons i learned along the way.

How to Kill, Pluck and Dress a Duck (Deb and V  version)

You will need:

Sharp cleaver or axe
Chopping block
Bucket/s
Rope
Hose
2 large cauldrons (one with very hot water and detergent and one with cold water)
Newspaper, lots of it
Sharp knives for dressing the duck

Don’t let your animals near feed for about 6 hours or more before the kill. Water, of course, they should always have plenty of water on hand.

First, put all dogs away…

Catch your duck. I can’t tell you how to do that. I just try to do it with the least amount of thrashing about, just quietly stalk them I guess.

Hold the duck firmly, calm it down by talking quietly or stroking the duck.

[We decided the most humane method of killing the duck was one swift cut with a sharp cleaver. We had 2 people for the next part, which made it easier…]

Place the duck on the chopping block, with neck stretched out, underside of the bill along the block, eyes on top. If you hold the duck’s body up in the air by the feet (so it’s like a J shape) this will assist in lengthening out the neck along the block, and may help keep the duck still. I held the feet and Deb made the cut. She placed her hands lightly over the duck’s head and eyes and one sure fall of the cleaver made a clean cut.

Immediately hold the duck neck down, feet up in the air over a bucket to bleed the duck. There will be quite a bit of movement from the duck at this point, so be prepared for this as it can be disturbing.

[This next part I’m not entirely sold on, there seem to be a number of different ways to go. I’ll tell you how we did it and then i’ll tell you how others go about it.]

Tie the duck upside down and hang it by its feet to bleed it. We were racing against the clock, so didn’t hang the ducks for long. Michael says 4 hours. We hung them over buckets to lessen the chances of the dogs going crazy for blood if they just bled onto the ground.

[Some people don’t mention hanging the duck at all, they say to begin plucking the duck immediately, while the duck is still warm. Begin by dry plucking the large wing feathers, since they are the hardest to pluck.] 

I dug a deep hole in the veg garden and buried heads and blood while the ducks were hanging and while we were boiling the water for the pluck.

Plucking is the messiest part, and the most difficult if you don’t get it right. 

Set up for plucking outside is best, otherwise you’ll have a house full of feathers and a wet feather smell which is not pleasant.

Place sheets of newspaper all around, just on the ground is fine, quite thick. This stops the feathers blowing away. You place the wet feathers on the newspaper and they stick. Wet feathers also stick to fingers. Use gloves if you want, but might get a cleaner pluck without gloves.

Place 2 large cauldrons of water by the plucking area. One full of very hot water (what temperature is best? some people say 140 degrees is optimal, dunked for 30 seconds. Others say boiling, and you dunk them for just a second.) and one full of cold water.

We used very hot water and dunked for about 30 seconds. Then straight into the cold water to stop the bird from cooking.

Start plucking! Pull the large wing feathers first, and tail feathers, tho some people say not to bother about the tail featehrs, just cut the end of the tail off when you are dressing the bird. Pull in the direction of growth. You’ll find that some of the down will just rub off. 

Information just to hand says that ducks are the hardest poultry to pluck (I’d have to agree) because their feathers are oily, waterproof. Brian (C’s boss) gave us this tip. Hang the bird upside down. Using a strong hose, spray the bird while pulling the feathers firmly down against the direction of growth. This helps the water penetrate the feathers. Then dunk.

After the pluck comes the dress (butchering the bird) 

A cleaver and a very sharp pointy knife are useful here. Don’t use blunt knives. You’ll end up with a travesty.  

Take off the feet. cut around the knee joint with the point of a knife. Wriggle and bend. It should come away easily. 

Take off the neck, which you can use to make stock from or feed to your dogs with their dinner (very good for them). If the duck has recently eaten you will find its most recent meal in a pouch near the neck. Take this out first with one hand in one move. I think a swift cleaver blow would work best for this.

I then chopped off the lower joint of the wing, which is not meaty and just burns in cooking. Again, a cleaver works for this.

The next part is to eviscerate the duck, which is not as hard as it sounds. turn the bird overso it’s breastbone is facing up. Take your very sharp pointy knife and make a slit fron just below the breastbone to the top of the vent (asshole) just slicing through the skin and the fatty layer and the membrane beneath. Be careful not to pierce anything inside, any organs and especially not the intestines… Cut AROUND the vent and it’s tube. Don’t pierce it. Take your hand and work it up inside the duck, grabbing all the organs and viscera in one hand and pull it all out in one go throug the slit you have made.. This worked for me first go. Just take your time. Feel around inside and take out any remaining organs. The lungs are apparently attacked to the backbone. You may have to detach them in a second go.

Run water through the duck to clean out any bits that are left.

That’s it! Your duck is dressed. Cook in any manner you please. I am a novice at duck cooking, which I believe really takes some expertise. I think duck is a hard meat to cook well.

We killed and dressed 2 ducks yesterday. Cooked one. It was a biggish job. We are novices, however, and I’m sure it could have been done more efficiently. But I’m pleased to have taken it on.

Thanks Deb! 

OK, I really wanted to make that post, cos it’s the truth of how we live. I have mostly vegetarian friends, so it’s a bit exposing to write about killing animals, but I believe in the dignity of animals lives and in producing food on a small scale and in self sufficiency. I don’t think it’s ok to buy your meat vacuum sealed from a supermarket, so that it has nothing to do with you, so that it’s disconnected from any cycle of production that is ethical.

I’m off. Things to do. See you here again soon. The sun is out. It’s pleasant in the backyard.

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