It was a cross between a flying tackle and a wrestling pin to the mat when I tripped and fell on top of the old ewe I was trying to catch. She’s a 14-year-old with severe cataracts, and she’d gotten lost in Chicory Hill tree reserve a few days ago. It was pure blind luck I found her when I did.
As I held on to all four legs of the squirming, hapless young kangaroo, all I could think was. “WTF am I going to do now?!” With my five working dogs swirling around me, I couldn’t let the little bush kangaroo go—they’d already had him up against the fence once, which is how I finally caught him. Three of the five dogs were intent on finishing the job I’d so rudely interrupted.
For the third time in seven years I have reason to be grateful to our local volunteer fire brigades. My farm borders the Midland Highway for several kilometres south of Oatlands, on the downwind side of westerly winds, leaving me vulnerable to fires starting from a careless cigarette, or in this case, apparently a fault in the power line running alongside the highway. The third fire was started by lightning, back in 2019.
I’m starting to think about writing the book I’ve been thinking about for 10 years. Only this time, it’s serious enough for me to gather all my source material, create a timeline, start re-reading the 100+ Yarns from the Farm and Come Shepherding posts, and sketch out different themes in my head. Why now? Well, in the process of accepting that I’m not going to live forever, I decided to question what I want to do with time I have left—which I’m hoping will be a good 20 years, nearly as long as I’ve been farming.
Long time followers of Yarns from the Farm will remember Davey Carnes as the kind, gentle old-school shepherd who taught me so much about the care of sheep. Davey died peacefully at the age of 97 in October. Davey came out of retirement (which he loathed) at the age of 75, to help me through a rough patch for a few months just after I bought my farm. He stayed for 13 years, retiring for the second time at 87. In the intervening years he not only taught me much of what he knew from his past experience, he also stayed open to new ideas and approaches and supported my experiments as I gained confidence as a woolgrower.
As I held on to all four legs of the squirming, hapless young kangaroo, all I could think was. “WTF am I going to do now?!” With my five working dogs swirling around me, I couldn’t let the little bush kangaroo go—they’d already had him up against the fence once, which is how I finally caught him. Three of the five dogs were intent on finishing the job I’d so rudely interrupted.
For the third time in seven years I have reason to be grateful to our local volunteer fire brigades. My farm borders the Midland Highway for several kilometres south of Oatlands, on the downwind side of westerly winds, leaving me vulnerable to fires starting from a careless cigarette, or in this case, apparently a fault in the power line running alongside the highway. The third fire was started by lightning, back in 2019.
I’m starting to think about writing the book I’ve been thinking about for 10 years. Only this time, it’s serious enough for me to gather all my source material, create a timeline, start re-reading the 100+ Yarns from the Farm and Come Shepherding posts, and sketch out different themes in my head. Why now? Well, in the process of accepting that I’m not going to live forever, I decided to question what I want to do with time I have left—which I’m hoping will be a good 20 years, nearly as long as I’ve been farming.
Long time followers of Yarns from the Farm will remember Davey Carnes as the kind, gentle old-school shepherd who taught me so much about the care of sheep. Davey died peacefully at the age of 97 in October. Davey came out of retirement (which he loathed) at the age of 75, to help me through a rough patch for a few months just after I bought my farm. He stayed for 13 years, retiring for the second time at 87. In the intervening years he not only taught me much of what he knew from his past experience, he also stayed open to new ideas and approaches and supported my experiments as I gained confidence as a woolgrower.
We’re still celebrating White Gum Wool’s 10th birthday, and we’re just delighted Pip Courtney of Landline had the same idea. ABC TV’s Landline, Australia’s national agricultural tv program, recently produced an update on their WGW story from 2013. Pip posted a lovely ABC News article promoting the show this morning.
Our new 10 ply is revolutionary for us. We’ve always wanted to carry an Aran weight yarn, but our superfine fibre makes pilling more likely as the yarn diameter increases. (That’s because there are lots more fibres in the cross-section of superfine yarn, which means a higher number of them will stick out sideways, forming the basis for a pill nubbin.)
WGW is 10 years old this year, and we’re so excited to share two new colours as part of our celebration! Last year I asked Rebecca Robinson of Augustbird to create a multi-coloured yarn that would go well with our popular neutrals, quarrystone and gum grey. In the end, I couldn’t choose between Rose Hip, a subtle tonal in shades of magenta, and Apple Blossom, a bright spring colour way with lots of contrast, so I decided to do both! They are now available in our our new 10 ply Aran yarn, as well as our 4 ply fingering, 8 ply DK, 12 ply boucle and rope yarn weights.
There must be nearly as many ideas about how to start a working dog as there are people trying to train them. Working livestock with a dog is a complex, frustrating, amazing interaction between three species, where almost anything can happen, and usually does.
There is an astronomical level of uncertainty about the outcome when you ask a young dog to figure out what she is supposed to do with sheep before she even really understands her relationship with you.
Like the three bears’ porridge, managing biodiversity can be tricky to get just right: either too much grazing or too little can result in less species diversity. Diversity is critical for the resilience of the landscape and for the quality of nutrition for animals depending on it. Fire, like grazing, can improve the vibrancy of the environment if we get it just right. IIf we overdo either grazing or fire, recovery is slow and the impact may well change the environment permanently, so when it does recover it may not be with the same species mix. If we undercook, the most resilient species will dominate the others, and biodiversity will decline.
For the first time in my 22 years of growing wool, I have shorn sheep wandering around in the middle of winter. I didn’t intend to. A perfect storm of less-than-perfect decision-making on my part combined with a shortage of shearers turned my planned autumn shearing into a two-month-long exercise. Happily, all have survived the shock of losing their lovely wooly coats, and in fact are thriving on the abundant forage from the last couple years of enhanced rainfall.
If I had it to do over again, I would design the underpinnings of my holding shed differently, to make it much easier to extract the accumulation of sheep poo. Big modern sheds are built on pilings tall enough to allow front-end loaders to drive under and scoop out the poo. Sadly, my holding shed was one of the first things I built, and it never dawned on me that someday the job of scraping out the poo would fall on my shoulders.
Countering disinformation is less a war, and more a series of duels—each of us pitted against bad actors who are acting in their own best interests rather than ours. Winning these duels requires a suite of weapons as well as the skill to wield them effectively. We’ve talked about bringing awareness and objectivity when deciding whether a claim is suspicious. We also need help from experts.
In a recent conversation with good friends from Berkeley (thank goodness for Zoom!) we were talking about how to keep a genuinely open mind—about anything. The context was a recent epiphany on my part about how fixed my thinking had become with respect to fly strike, and the way that circumstances had rather abruptly forced a few critical cracks in my well-established thinking on the topic.
I don’t know why I seldom write about my working dogs. Maybe it’s precisely because they are such an integral part of my life. It would be like writing about the sun coming up in the morning—a common miracle. When I do stop to reflect, I’m amazed all over again at the way my dogs and I can forge a bond through work that transcends the seemingly insurmountable barriers separating two different species.
Those who control the megaphone control the message. In the days before Gutenberg invented the first printing press, even the Bible was only available to those who could read Latin and had access to precious hand-copied versions. While printing revolutionised access to the text of original documents, people still had learn to read if they wanted to make their own judgements about the truth, rather than be swayed by the rhetoric of others.
Is the following claim, made in early January of this year, true? ‘Zinc supplements can protect against COVID-19; zinc kills the virus, and zinc ionophores are a zinc delivery system that allows zinc to go from outside the cell to inside the cell.’
Although it’s plausible, it’s unsupported by any evidence in humans. It is being promoted online by a family physician, Vladimir Zelenko, who is selling a dietary supplement called Z-Stack.
This morning I saved a baby swallow who was caught in the tangle of flowers at the base of my floor-to-ceiling window. I first noticed Mama or Papa swallow apparently trying to get to my Christmas tree through the window, hovering and crying. The other parent was circling near by. As soon as I lifted baby up out of the flowers, it flew away with its parents, though Mama circled back and dive-bombed me—either to say thank you or to chastise me for setting a trap for her baby.
Let’s face it: sheep are slow. Not their mental acuity, which is sharp as a tack in their proper cultural milieu. I’m referring to their preferred speed of locomotion, which is a saunter, at best. Until recently, though, my concept of slow wool was confined to the need for me to slow down to sheep time, which is essentially endless, and to go with the flow of wind and topography as the flock chose its preferred direction of saunter. This winter, though, I’ve added a whole new layer to slow wool—I bought an upright shearing platform.
