Facing Farming Problems

I grew up on a sheep farm in the Adelaide Hills. During WWII, while dad was away in the army, my mother, brother and I lived with her parents on their sheep farm. We had pet sheep. They were rescued, bottle fed and then for months hung around the place. Even later they would run up to you when they had been placed back in the flock, treating you like their brother! Dipping, shearing, crutching, tailing, castrating the little males was all part of the richness of growing up on the farm.

Life took us into a different stream when Dad came home from the war and my parents moved into a country store and post office that they purchased. It was in the same district as my grandparents so I had times of helping on the farm until education and then job situations took me away from the store, the farm and the area.

Later I had bought a little farm of my own for one of our sons to live on and look after. It was small and was an after hours job for him and his family. When I retired from Ethiopia, aged 78, we moved onto the farm. Now we are trying to make it work as a small sheep farm. That son still lives on the farm as does our youngest adopted son. So, due to a few problems of aging I’m really a watcher as my wife and the boys make things work. Both the boys have other jobs but we manage somehow. We have chosen to have dorper sheep as they don’t need to be shorn which for our small crop would be financially a major loss. So we are into the market for meat. Now we come to the problems: –

• Dingoes – protected animals – live in the area. They can dig and jump but don’t do so often, and we have scores of wallabies that they can chew on. Nevertheless we have put in high quality fences both in an attempt to stop them getting in and the sheep, which sometimes think like goats, from getting out! So far we have not had problems although we have seen dingoes in the area.
• Sadly we have had to have our two beautiful dogs put down as they developed a taste for meat and killed one lamb. Having developed the taste we couldn’t take the risk.
• Eagles look and are majestic. We have, besides the fellow pictured at the bottom of the page, a couple of wedge tail eagles living in a tree overlooking the sheep. We have lost one lamb that we suspect as being taken by them.
• One lamb was still born.
• So from 12 ewes we’ve had 10 lambs but only 7 are surviving.

Dominic Cartier.