My stone soup adventures a couple of weeks ago were mostly a bust, with one delightful and important exception: I relearned key subtleties of active shepherding that I’d let slide over the last few years. Chief among them: the essence of shepherding is creating the opportunity for sheep to have a sense of discovery about their food. Parents will not be surprised.
The challenges of keeping everyone well-nourished in this exceptionally dry summer are leading me into the shepherding equivalent of stone soup: creative use of the patches of good forage and biodiversity that are still around, while still keeping the flock safe from fire threats.
Saturday, 4 January. As I’m writing this, we’re experiencing a Very High Fire Danger day here in Tas, but nothing like what they are going through on the mainland. I’m inside, out of the heat, but listening to the 50 kph winds whistling around my house, and obsessively checking the Tas Fire Services website to see if any new fires have started up anywhere nearby. The southerly change (front) that is making it so windy has reduced the temperature, and blown away this morning’s smoke haze. Knowing just how dry the landscape is, though, keeps me on tenterhooks.
In the continuing extra dry conditions for Tasmania, shepherding has once again become a priority. We’ve had less than half of our annual average rainfall over the last 12 months, and with the Indian Ocean Dipole at a record high, it doesn’t seem likely we’ll see much precipitation before early 2020 when the sea surface temperature pattern is expected to return to a more neutral configuration. (See my other farm journal, Yarns from the Farm, for a discussion of the IOD.) Knowing what’s causing the dry, and even when it’s likely to finally let up, is useful but doesn’t get us very far in terms of how to manage this gracefully. Shepherding will help.
The Lucerne Reserve is an area encompassing about 50 acres of monoculture lucerne, with grass and weeds, and an upper area of predominantly native pasture. Most of the fences shown on the map are no longer there-I took them down last year to allow free access from the sheltered hill area (native) to the lush feed of the lucerne flat. My plan is to give the flock the morning in the lucerne, then head up the hill into the native pasture for the afternoon.
The plan is to work the flock around all the lower edges of the paddocks that make up the Racecourse Grazing Area. Sheep prefer high ground-a predator thing, I'm convinced: much easier to spot the lions in the long grass if you hold the high ground. Of course, there's not much long grass to hide in these days...
