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Feb 09
2010
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I sold my Dream today.Posted by Farmer Dave in Life On The Land |
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Its incredible isn't that it can hurt so much, the freedom of letting go of something that has come to mean so much. I rose this morning like most mornings as the sun is thinking about making its daily lumbering across the sky, Piccaninny daylight is what the old stock man call it, its the time you either stuff about or get most things done for the day. Today I stuffed about, I made a cup of coffee, and another, I re-heated some off sausages I found in the fridge and coated them in American mustard to hide their truth, I tried to distract myself with a book on Egyptian Pyramid Building and a DVD on Alexander the Great, but I couldn't shake the sense of failure of whoring out my dream to the highest bidder.
You see yesterday I sent 173 of my sheep off to the Warwick Sheep Auction, and received fairly average prices for the tail end of each of my beautiful mobs, after all, each garden has its weeds, and these weeds used to try and kill me every time i tried to draft them or were prone to fly-strike or something that made them fall from favour. Sending them to market was a great relief it was like a teacher on the last day of the year farewelling the most troublesome of delinquents. However today on sale was my beautiful mobs, the culmination of a lifetime of dreaming and incalculable blood sweat and tears.
Today I sold my White Dorpers and my Black Dorpers, all in lamb to supreme Namibian White Dorper Rams. To the majority of you reading this, that means nothing but some rather odd and colourful words, but for me they are my strength, that part of my dream that I realised, that I brought from realms of a child's mind into reality. I bred them. I brought them out of old merinos, I went to war with my father, I stuck true to myself and despite everyone around me I realised my dream of having a flock of sheep that would be part of the environment that would not just be a European rapist of the land, but would be a part of the cycle, an integral link in the chain of regeneration; the natural way.
Back when I was a boy and saw drought after drought and flood after flood, I could not get out of my head that there was some way of balancing this see saw of a country we are part of. Not dousing the place in herbicide after drenching rains, and not grazing the place bare during drought. Zero till cropping was a way we could store moisture from one rain fall to the next and keeping stubble atop the soil held it safe from the thieving wind, ready and willing to steal our topsoil and dumping in the cities and hungry ocean that has no use for it. However like all of man's abilities to control and direct life, chemical control of weeds has its faults and for many, stock can fill that shortcomings, grazing the missed weeds and keeping them from seeding, however cattle leave massive foot prints which further disturb the soil and promote weed growth and shield those weeds in the hoof print furrows from even more chemical application, and merino sheep, hardly last during the times of hardship usually dropping dead at the first hint of trouble and goats, well goats are like Hilary Clinton, they are their own bosses with a well stamped passport and God only knows where the hell they get to each day.
What we needed in this system was an animal, that graized close to the ground like a Merino, survived on the sniff of an oily rag like a goat, but was easy care like a beast and was able to have a product that was saleable to make the whole use of the animal not just good for the environment but also profitable. Read More ...
