Blog from home………

Hi All,

I’ve paid for this ‘blog deal’ for twelve months, so I may as well keep on posting while ever there is anyone interested in reading.

The site is still getting quite a few ‘hits’ & it has clocked up over 5,000 views from you guys out there over the last four months which has surprised me!

Jim Geltch & the good guys at Nuffield will be posting it in its entirety, along with a stack of photos on to the website sometime soon. There are also plenty of other reading & previous scholarly adventures there as well…. www.nuffield.com.au

Measured 70 points, or around 18mm here yesterday to add to the shower we got last week & it should do some good on the lighter country if nothing else. We really have not had a good fall of rain since the first week of February so it has been quite a long dry spell & thank God that we had the great summer we did last year to sustain us this far into the year. Especially as we have had plenty of livestock here on agistment, and are a long way ahead of the average DSE (Dry Stock Equivalents – that equals one 50 kilo sheep!) days per Hectare for the year, although we have cut numbers by 60% since July.

We had 156% of the district average stocking rate on for nine months, but our management will also dictate that we run less than the average if that is what our land should be sustaining.

To that end though, we plan on dramatically lifting the potential carrying capacity of this place over the next few years and part of that process is seeing us install more strategic fencing along the lines of what I’ve learned on my travels. The aim is to utilise existing water points & fence out from them in the classic wagon wheel format, which will give us over one hundred permanent paddocks with the added benefit of using temporary ‘tape’ we can then take that out to around two hundred in total. Our aim is to reduce the actual time that plants are exposed to grazing livestock in any one graze period to as little as one to two days every four to eight months, depending on plant growth rates. That will give us a more even graze across the paddock while maximizing the beneficial dunging (fertilizing) and trampling (mulching) necessary to optimize plant regeneration.

Fortunately, when you have those sort of landscape goals than organizations such as the Western Catchment Management Authority (WCMA) etc usually like to help out with some contributory funding….

Unfortunately though, I spent two days doing up a funding proposal to them which was knocked back last week on grounds that their next funding round is not till next March / April….

Although they did agree on principle that what we are trying to achieve is desirable, and they have ok’d some smaller infrastructure deals here before for us, it was not possible to access any funds at this stage.

Fair enough I thought, but I’m not interested in waiting that long & I’m a firm believer that these funding schemes should only be viewed as a ‘bonus’ to help do something that you are already willing and able to do, and be doing it for the right reasons. Alas, it meant a review of my budget & a change in plans to down grade the quality so that we can still get the quantity necessary…..and the livestock won’t be concerned about the look of the fence! However it also meant that the cheapest labour I can afford is my wonderful wife, and anyway….she was looking for a break from changing beds and running the accommodation enterprise. Like they say…a change is as good as a holiday!!

Mind you, we still have guests staying here of course so, she is not getting that much of a break.

My new fencing plan (see latest ‘home’ photos) will entail about another 120klms of mostly single wire electric, with just a wooden post in either end of a run for an ‘end assembly’ and up to forty metres between star posts. Pretty basic but it works very well with cattle, and that is the animal we’ll be sticking with for at least the next couple of years & if we eventually go back to a smaller version of livestock then we will just have to run another wire. Not too big a deal anyway.

The first paddock we split up again had the cattle in it straight away & even though the pasture isn’t so good, they stayed right where they were meant to. Actually when I went to move them to the next paddock I found a gully that they had been walking past & the wire was about five feet off the ground….and they still didn’t go under to the better grass.

I hung a log off it to bring it down to a better height to satisfy my own doubts….the cows were not too worried.

They get pretty well trained to where they should be & also get very good to handle in a system like this. On Friday night Cathy & I got back from town at 7.30pm after having a drink at Heathers, seeing mum & dad & buying some Chinese take away because Friday night is Cathy’s night off cooking & we call it ‘catch & kill’ night. I had been worried about where the cattle were due to rain being forecast & not wanting to ‘pug’ that particular paddock up, and I was wishing that I had moved them before going to town as I first intended. So….when we got home I decided that we should go and move the cattle just in case, & so we jumped on the bikes and went mustering. Because of the small paddocks & the fact that we handle them so much made it a breeze, and putting 514 cattle through a corner gate in the dark was easier than you could imagine. I asked Cathy when we got to the gate to turn the motor bike off and listen as there was hardly a sound coming from the mob while they calmly walked off into the dark.

Beautiful to see & a great experience. Also, it did rain so we were really glad to have done it the night before.

Rain was particularly welcome, although we need quite a bit more than 18 mm to fire up the new growth on some of our less desirable country. It always surprises me how certain areas here are starting to grow grass where I’ve never seen it before and yet some other areas look like the soils are ok and yet there is very little advance happening, with not much ever growing there.

Just tried to put some more photos onto the site & for some reason my camera settings have changed to about 1.6 Mb sized pictures which this blog site will not accept as it has a limit of 1Mb per picture. So I’ll change my camera settings I guess & start clicking again tomorrow…..

It may be Sunday, but we had yesterday off so we have been putting in end posts today & will resume running wire and pounding in star pickets tomorrow, with the plan to now try and stay ahead of the cattle making new paddocks as we go.

Should be easy enough & hopefully we will get many of the other things on our lists done as well…