So I am still in the city, still working 18-hour days and still no rain on the farm.

Great opening sentence you say....well it's all good. My workload is being shared by my long time friend who has come and joined me in my mission to bring about balance back into the food supply chain. Danni Crowe is not your average hardworking Australian, after one week in the job I feel like I cannot live without her.

Moving up from Melbourne for the position (well we haven't really settled on a title...so basically she is a pseudo me), she has been in the office and at the farmers markets, rising at 3am and working till all is done, as she, like me, reckons even if you only get a few hours sleep, as long as you complete the days work you are ready and raring to go the next 'new' day.

Having organised over 130 people from Melbourne to perform in the Sydney Mardi Gras each year, as well as hold down a full time job in finance and be one of Melbourne's most sort after DJs, Danni knows how to organise... and boy has she changed my life.

Each day we bulldoze through the workload and each night I sleep so solidly with a sense of traction, of really knowing that these dreams of mine will succeed as now I have the person by my side that won't let me fail.

Yesterday she was up and driving with me to Brisbane to do the highly successful Queen Street Mall Farmers Market and while we were stuck in the 7-8am carpark that is the Pacific Motorway she was informed that she won Best Costume for her group at this year's Mardi Gras.. and we got talking about her group, which upon moving up to Queensland has disbanded after five years, and her reasons for starting the group, which were to show people that you didn't have to run down Oxford Street naked or with feather boas, but you could perform a well rehearsed, decently clad routine with class and dignity. Hearing that, I knew that I had found a person who had the moral backbone that so well fitted my own, but still had an openness and progressive attitude that allowed for an absence of that worst of human traits... ignorance and apathy.

We arrived at Queen Street Mall an hour earlier than usual with another of our trucks in tow and we were set up in half an hour, and boy our site was impressive all ready to trade (mind you, from the moment we arrived we had customers climbing over us to get to the lamb).

Through lunch, the queue stretched twenty and thirty long. Four of us were soldiering away on sausage and lamburger duty and two on fresh meat sales. We didn't stop for four hours. By the end we'd served well over five hundred people.

It was a fantastic effort by the team, which was about to be put to an end...

 ... enter the bureaucrats...

The Queen Street Mall Markets is run by Jan Power, the Tzarina of Farm Sourced Foods, however, it is through Brisbane Marketing that we get the amazing location in the centre of the city.

Here lies the issues....

Due to the huge success of producers like myself who sell cooked, ready-to-eat product, many market stall holders are doing something similar... after all, most people at work want something now, not something to try to keep cool and lug home on public transport after work... so there has been a flurry of stalls doing fresh and ready-to-eat product, which has got the back up of BM who say that it is affecting shop owners.

However, throw into the mix the German Sausage Guy...

So we were all shut down from serving ready-to-eat food for two weeks, which plummeted my sales and made attending the market unviable, as it requires an unviable staff-to-turnover ratio, as most inner city buyers purchase just one or two things, unlike the weekend markets where they stock up for a few weeks...

We started back up last week, which was a massive success after giving away over thirty kilos of taste testers each day that we were unable to sell as product... and mate that is another story!!! 

But the issue is that all the while the German Sausage Guy was able to trade... right opposite the Mall in prime position with like seven hundred staff. Now I wouldn't be a farmer if I wasn't whingeing about the unfair playing field going on here.

It beggars belief that at a farmers market a guy like me who breeds his own product, grows his own product, butchers it, and hand makes all our own sausages and products cannot sell, yet a German sausage bloke who does none of the above still can... at a farmers market!!!

Talk about a bizarre and unfair situation. 

And to make matters worse, a German tourist came up after waiting fifteen minutes in our line and asked for sauerkraut on her lamb sausage... I politely told her where to go and informed her that we were Queenslanders and served Queensland style products, which did not include seaweed, sauerkraut or salmonella. She took a lamburger... well half a one and said she only wanted to pay $4 instead of $7  so I let her go... well she came back ten minutes later, paid the total amount and did a song and dance that it was the best burger she had ever eaten.

That totally washed away any shittyness I was feeling toward Brisbane Marketing and the bloody German... isn't life just marvellous!

This time last year I thought I was a busy chap. Looking back I was on holidays!!!

Let's start with Friday... I start early helping in the butchery and race out getting flyers printed up for the weekend markets, then head back to load up all the market trucks full of lamb for the two days of markets... nearly 2 tonnes of lamb is loaded out in neat packaging ready for the early starters.

Although I was packing trucks alone, the butchery was still a hive of activity with our team of packers still at it, packing up the fresh sausages that we have become so famous for.

We got out of there before 10pm and I sauntered into the place I stay at when on the Gold Coast where my housemates insisted we go out as I had become 'Mr Work and No Play', so I relented and off we went.

Saturday was my first day of not doing a 4am start at a market for bloody ages and boy didn't I need it!!! From 9am I was in setting up our new offices, a demountable rental hut that is costing under $80 a week... an absolute bargain. Then after hearing one of my market staff had hurt her back, I headed up to Marina Mirage to help her pack up, then headed back to the butchery to unpack and repack the trucks and get to bed by 10pm ready for the 12:30 am start.

Heading up to Brisbane I dropped off lamb deliveries and a refrigerated trailer to another of my marketeers at North Lakes then pressed on to Noosa. Due to the heavy rain on Friday and Saturday, our turnover was down by half so it was full steam to make sure we all sold more lamb on our Sunday markets than ever before.  Thankfully we all did way better then any Sunday before and considering all of us were doing each market alone - to assist with cost-cutting measures - it was no small feat.

After doing more deliveries and picking up the trailer, I made it back to the butchery to unload all the trucks. Unfortunately, there was still a heck of a lot of lamb returning to the butchery... and mate was it heavier than all the lamb I loaded on Friday night.

After unloading the trucks, it was time to work on the website and finally crash into bed and wake up eight hours later rejuvenated to do up all the cash reconciliations and ensure everything was kosher, do the banking and then help Tim complete the setting up of the office computer and printer network, made a little harder by the fact we didn't have ceiling lights in the demountable just yet....by 1:30am we were buggered. 

I drove Tim back to Brisbane and by 3am was beyond counting sheep!!! Crawling out of bed at 8am, I jetted around getting a new PC and office supplies then made it to Burleigh for an appointment to sort out remuneration with my business partner. To my massive disappointment he didn't show up, so I went ahead with the meeting with the business advisers anyway.

Working such massive hours without proper pay is hard enough, but when you can't sort out an outcome it really gets you down... Ha! I had no time to get upset, I was racing around getting chicken and lamb for a new pet food company I am getting involved with back in Brisbane.

After delivering the fresh meat, it was a trek through Brisbane's nut cracking traffic to Morningside on the opposite side of the city to pick up gluten free sausage meals so we can keep up with the insane demand for our gourmet lamb sausages.

Well, I'm in Kangaroo Point now at a mate's for a bite to eat and a bit of a yarn session... and in a half hour it's back to the Gold Coast to ensure everything is ready for tomorrow's 6am start and head back yet again to Brisbane to attend the Queen Street Mall markets, as well as deliver more fresh meats to the pet food company and also attend a new night time market at Rocklea in Brisbane's South Wes with another market team.

So there is the past six days... and all I keep thinking with every kilometre I drive and every minute past midnight I work is that nothing is going to keep me from my dream of living happily ever after on my own farm.

I just wish I could get back out there and enjoy sleeping in my own bed at night to the sounds of my happy sheep grazing.

Briony Goodsell's grandpa says kill all crocodiles

http://www.news.com.au/story/0,27574,25278021-17001,00.html 

I was at the Farmers Market selling my lamb yesterday in Queen Street Mall, Brisbane when at pack up time I was screaming like a girl when I noticed the possum I was checking out, as it ran toward me, was actually a giant rat.

Then as I sought some light relief last night (after watching Farmer Wants a Wife... let's talk about that later), I was watching on YouTube a guy in Santa Barbara who has a dog with a cat riding it and a rat riding the cat....

It made me laugh that I was so disgusted at a rat, yet here is a bloke living off people photographing his rat on a cat on a dog. Especially after I spent the lonely drive after the markets thinking about the pests I face and how much one has the right to exterminate them. (One bloke at the markets recalled an ABC show that had New Yorkers totally indifferent to living amongst rats).

On my farm I used to exterminate my vermin... shoot and bait foxes, wild dogs and dingoes so they would not rip my baby lambs apart, however, as was natural following on my breeding of a drought tolerant sheep, I thought that it is better not to fight my environment but to work with it. I bought Mareema dogs for my flocks of sheep and have not baited in over six months and seen no evidence of violent deaths to my sheep (at times I was losing up to 40 sheep in dingo attacks a night). The big white dogs protect the sheep just like our domestic dogs protect our families in our homes and yards, thus working with nature not against it.

The dingoes and foxes have to go elsewhere for a feed.. I'm hoping down rabbit holes...

After reading the comments by the grandfather of that most unfortunate little girl in Darwin this morning it truly brought my thoughts into perspective.

What is vermin?

Many of the replying comments to the article focused on them being a wild animal in the wild doing what they should do.

This is fine to say if it's someone else's daughter that is taken and ripped apart by a crocodile. Or someone else who picks up the ripped up lambs after an evening of butchery by a couple of dingoes... but for those who deal with vermin it's a little harder to deal with.

No one can say let all be in nature if, in their own home, they use chemicals and traps to kill mice and cockroaches. After all, are not these animals doing what they do...?

What's your view? Should there be two rules? One for those city dwellers immune from outta town killers, like snakes, sharks, crocs, dingoes or overpopulations of macropods and emus???  But it's fine for them to exterminate out of control neighbour's dogs, rats, mice and roaches???

I'm learning to live with nature... not hypocrisy.

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