Secrets of a happy life revealed and it was here on the farm all along

December 31, 2014 / dairymilkmaid / 5 Comments

“If your New Year resolution is to be happier, make your priorities fruit, nature, sun and sleep.”

This simple prescription for a happy life stems from Otago University research reported in the NZ Herald this morning. Sounds a lot like farm life, doesn’t it?

From all of us here on the farm, have a wonderful 2015!

Before we say goodbye to 2014 though, I’d like to pay tribute to our wonderful fellow Landcarer, Margaret Ferguson, who helped us plant trees this summer and tragically lost her life in a farm accident this month. I still can’t believe this magnificent lady is gone but she would be delighted to see how well our trees have already grown.

The trees arrived in September

The grass was sprayed to give the plants a head start

We finished planting in the first week of October

Giving the trees a helping hand when it got dry was noisy work

Look how much they’ve already grown: the same trees on Boxing Day 2014

RIP Margaret. We miss you.

RIP Margaret Ferguson: a passionate fellow Landcarer (Photo courtesy of Kaye Proudley)

From soggy paddock to paradise

July 25, 2014July 25, 2014 / dairymilkmaid / 8 Comments

Can you spot two black swans and a flock of wood ducks and moorhens?

Stretching a temporary fence across an adjacent paddock in the warm winter sun, I was captivated by the scene through the tussocks. Two black swans were gliding across the water, a mob of moorhens were stretching their long orange legs, while a dozen or so wood ducks gathered a little way off.

It wasn’t always this way. This is, or was, paddock 17. One of the lowest parts of the farm, paddock 17 was often under water and when we investigated the soil, we found it was a potential acid sulphate soil (PASS) with high levels of salinity. The safest thing to do was leave it alone, so we fenced it off and, one November, planted 800 moisture-loving plants with the help of a Landcare grant and the hard work of the Victorian Mobile Landcare Group volunteers.

The next two seasons were the wettest on record and I thought we’d lost the lot. We moved the fence out further and the Wellington Shire offered some extra money to replant the margins. Well, it’s all taken off – even some of the first plantings I’d given up on – and we now can boast a magical on-farm ephemeral wetland habitat.

Put yourself in the paddock with me for a few seconds and listen to this:

Why Landcare matters

May 5, 2014May 6, 2014 / dairymilkmaid / 13 Comments

It’s one of my earliest memories. Mum, Dad, my little brother and I took a tiny tree wrapped in paperbark down the paddock and planted it by the bank of the gully. It was a big affair that must have taken an hour by the time we got there, assembled the guard and wandered home again.

But that’s what “tree planting” meant back then and here is the very same tree today.

A tree just about as old as the Milk Maid

Everything changed in my teenage years when we joined 20 or so of our neighbours to visit a nearby farm criss-crossed with healthy young stands of trees. John and Gayle had created an oasis on a windy flat. It was the first Landcare event I can remember and Dad and I came away totally inspired. He set about planting trees.

An aerial photo of the farm in 1994 shows young trees emerging around the dam but little else. It was still a blank canvas but there was a sniff of success.

The centre of the farm in 1994

Can you see a few trees along a rough line in the centre of the picture? It’s a denuded gully that now looks like this, thanks to Dad’s hard work and a Landcare grant that went towards his costs:

The gully 20 years later

During my six-year-custodianship, we’ve planted nearly 10,000 trees and re-fenced our 11 hectares of forest with the help of Landcare, the local catchment management authority, the shire and Greening Australia. Although the funding sources are diverse, it’s all happened because of Landcare as the group acts like a triage service, matching funding sources with farm projects. The funding doesn’t cover everything but it does make it possible, especially with practical help from other Landcarers.

Landcare continues to inspire. In the last few years, our local Landcare group has created a grand vision that brings together the work of individual farms: creating wildlife corridors that stretch from the forest to the river to the foothills across farms, linking precious remnants to provide a network of habitats. And it’s working. Together, we can see that it’s not just our own farms that are changing, it is the entire landscape.

In this, the 25th Anniversary of Landcare, the Commission of Audit has recommended halving its funding – just as this powerful grass-roots volunteer movement has really begun to make a difference. Do you care? I do.

Bruce and Zoe planting trees in October 2011

Progress: peeping through the same trees two and a half years later.

For our children

December 1, 2013December 1, 2013 / dairymilkmaid / 4 Comments

Have you seen this?

Yes, it’s by Unilever. Yes, you’re entitled to be cynical and yes, I love it.

The global manufacturer and ice-cream maker has just accredited Australian dairy production as meeting its Sustainable Agriculture Code – a huge accomplishment, which is also a world first. Of course it doesn’t mean Australian dairying is perfect and Dairy Australia has published a Sustainability Framework that will nudge us all to do better.

Here on the farm, our family does a bite-sized project for the environment every year. We have:

preserved 11 hectares of native forest for the environment
audited our energy consumption
removed tonnes of rubbish
massively reduced our use of inorganic fertilisers by soil testing each paddock annually and making better use of the cow poo that collects on the dairy yard
conducted days of weed control each year, plus this year’s removal of the big box thorns
planted around 8,500 trees in five years

When I say “our family”, I have to stress that we haven’t been able to do all this without help. Grants from Landcare, Greening Australia and the Wellington Shire, work by the West Gippsland Catchment Management Authority, together with the hard yakka of volunteers from the Victorian Mobile Landcare Group and some of our friends have made the tree planting possible.

It just goes to show what we can do when everyone pulls together.

Green is not always good

February 13, 2013 / dairymilkmaid / 1 Comment

Our farm hosted some very distinguished guests yesterday.

VIPelicans

I am so glad they arrived now and not two weeks ago. The farm’s stunning Land for Wildlife Dam is sanctuary for many beautiful birds but, for the first time in living memory, the dam succumbed to an algal bloom that looked more like a massive acrylic paint disaster.

Algae on January 30

The stuff was brilliant green and, while not smelly, it was not a welcome sight. Excess nutrients and warmth can combine to bring about algal blooms that leave waterways toxic for weeks or months. Here’s how the water’s edge looked yesterday. A lot better but still not clear.

Algae February 12

So, what to do? Experts say to exclude stock from the dam and create a buffer to prevent fertiliser runoff – and that’s already done. Next, we will emulate the sewage wetlands of Melbourne’s newest housing estates and plant dense stemmy vegetation upstream of the dam that will encourage “good” algae and strip nutrients from the water as it passes through. It will mean more wildlife habitat and safer water. Good for everyone!

The positives of being a dairy farmer

April 13, 2012 / dairymilkmaid / 1 Comment

It’s one year since I started Milk Maid Marian and seeing as I’ve just finished reconciling our accounts for March, I thought it perfect timing to do the same for my life as a dairy farmer, beginning with the top five positives.

Love of the land
The first one has to be love of land. I am connected to this place and think of myself as its custodian. Just being here is good for the soul.

Farm children have something special
The farm allows me to work with Zoe and Alex, even in those precious early years. The farm’s also a great teacher: respect for work, respect for the environment, animals and nature. They have seen birth, life and death first-hand and I hope they have learned to accept life with good grace yet develop inquiring minds. There’s a palpable sense of responsibility about farm kids that’s matched with the enormous freedoms of farm life.

Working with animals
Cows, calves, bulls and dogs all have their own personalities but none of them play office politics around the water cooler. Because we work with our cows at least twice a day, we get to know and appreciate the characters!

Exercise for mind, body and soul
Farming is not for dummies, lazybones or fragile souls. The challenges are immense and that can be enervating because there is always something new to learn and do.

Knowing that we are making a difference
We produce great, clean, healthy food while looking after our animals and the land. That’s very satisfying.

I’m with Hugh on this one: it’s not fun to kill

March 22, 2012March 26, 2012 / dairymilkmaid / 1 Comment

I am no stranger to death – every year, just as new calves are born, some old cows must pass away. I am, by necessity, philosophical about it but, still, every loss is felt. Nor can I eat an animal I have known, although I am keenly aware of my own emotional hypocrisy. One thing I am clear about, however, is that I will never kill for fun.

I don’t understand duck season. If I were to fire endless shots at stampeding cows from a hundred feet or more away, I would be rightly condemned for animal cruelty. Why is it so different with birds?

Australian Shelducks

This Spring, we’ll be creating another permanent sanctuary for our bird life on the farm with the assistance of the Shire of Wellington, which has provided a grant for the fencing and trees (thanks Andrew!). This paddock will be broken into three pieces: the wet centre will belong to the birds while the higher, drier sections will be amalgamated with neighboring paddocks.

A prickly character on farm

December 20, 2011 / dairymilkmaid / 2 Comments

Dairy farms are great places to teach kids a love of – and respect for – creatures of every kind.

We are really privileged to have acres of beautiful bush on our farm and we come across all sorts of creatures – even the threatened goanna. One of the cutest but least cuddly is the echidna and the forest has thousands of these little ant-eating waddlers.

An environmentalist once told me that she builds connections with farmers via birds because they are the most visible fauna on a farm but it’s the far less glamorous and more timid creatures that make an ecosystem. This was brought home to me yesterday when one of the shire’s environmental staff visited to assess the farm’s potential for green projects. One of the criteria was whether the farm is home to threatened flora or fauna. Apart from the goannas, I really don’t know, and that’s a shame.

I hope my children will indeed learn so much more than I’ll ever know about our wonderful world.

What a farm upbringing brings

November 23, 2011 / dairymilkmaid / 4 Comments

I am a very proud mama. Zoe loves to run and while I was setting up a paddock for the cows, she galloped off along the track and challenged me to beat her to the next gate. I watched the little dot bob along the track and reckoned she might just win, too. Instead, I found her three-quarters of the way to the “finish line”, doing this:

"Rotten rubbish"

Just being part of farm life teaches children responsibility, care for animals, respect for the environment and a sense of pride in their own work. We are very, very lucky.

People who drive conservation by walking the talk

October 23, 2011October 23, 2011 / dairymilkmaid / 9 Comments

Three men drove up to five hours (each way) to get to our farm and then worked tirelessly all day for nothing except the sense of satisfaction that comes with doing something good.

David, Chris and Bruce are members of the Victorian Mobile Landcare Group, which is unique because rather than being a collective of environmentally-aware landholders keen to make their properties more sustainable, this is a group of environmentally-aware volunteers who plant tens of thousands of trees all over the state.

As they explain on the group website, VMLG members are “people passionate about land care through responsible 4WD use, we are a non-profit association tightly affiliated with Landcare Australia and 4WD Victoria”.

Last year, the VMLG helped us plant 800 trees and we were wrapt that they could come again this year to add 1200 more. Here they are at the start of the day, ready to get stuck into planting.

Victorian Mobile Landcare Group volunteers: Bruce, Chris and David (L-R)

Bruce, Chris and David soldiered on in the rain (“just one more tray,” eh Chris?), stopping only for an hour-long BBQ lunch. I was proud to have Zoe working alongside these fellows who do so much more than talk about their commitment to the environment.

Bruce shows Zoe how to plant trees

At the end of the day, we had created two wildlife corridors and shelter for the cows – a great outcome for the environment, our animals and the landscape. One tree was set aside for Zoe and ceremonially planted in the garden to remind us of the day.

Members of the VMLG and Zoe with a ceremonial tree

Members of the VMLG (David, Bruce and Chris) and Zoe with a ceremonial tree

Thanks guys. We couldn’t have got this done without your help. Thanks also to the West Gippsland Catchment Authority for spraying and 800 metres of fencing and to the Yarram Yarram Landcare Network for the donation of 400 trees.