Oh, you mean a Scythe

I was off travelling over the weekend to the April Scythe workshop in the Totnes Valley northwest of Mudgee. I have been to the workshop on one previous occasion and enjoyed myself and I thought it would be nice to go back and see what had change and how the event had grown.

I travelled up on the Friday, I really enjoy the change in scenery from home. I arrived just in time to help set things up and get dinner – a beautiful Pumpkin soup, which if I remember correctly was what we had the last time I was there. Friday night was spent meeting new people and sharing our stories around the camp fire.
Differently to last time I was there, they had traders, only a couple but selling interesting wares. One guy was selling old tools, axes, adzes and hatchets. I would have loved to have bought some home but I’m saving for cows at the moment and I really needed a peening hammer anyway.
Activities started Saturday morning, and as traditionally happens a short yoga class before breakfast. I’m no yogi enthusiast so I stood back and willed the others on with positive thoughts – like ‘I’m positive I could never do that with my dickie knee’ or ‘I would positively look fat doing that’. Any way once that and breakfast were over it was into Scything, on really nice grass. I was asked to look after some beginners and in 10mins they were off happily scything their hearts away in the long grass. After things warmed up we had a demonstration on peening or sharpening the scythes. This was interesting in itself as I’ve never seen a field peening anvil used before; I also got to see one of the new anvil tables in action.

After lunch it was into Bio fertilizer making. I’m really interested in this and seeing we have so many issues with mineral deficiencies in our soil I was intent on learning more about using natural processes to get them back into the soil, or made available in the soil whichever the case may be.

Later in the afternoon I was able to try something I’d wanted to do for years, ever since the Cook and I did our ‘Cooks tour of American Civil War Battlefields’ (that’s a long story in itself) where we stopped and spent an afternoon watching Amish people mow hay with a team of mules near Intercourse in Pennsylvania. Anyway, one of the Mudgee locals, Danny , bought up his Clydesdale and hitched it to a plough. They guys from Scythes Australia want to start a market garden and needed a piece of land ploughed and Danny was giving everybody a go – so I was in.
It’s way harder than it looks, but way more fun as well, I think I had a grin on my face for hours after would. We had the opportunity to both handle the plough and drive the horse, I couldn’t wait to get home and tell the cook all about it.

Next on the agenda was Bio Char making, which I’d seen shows about and read about on the internet. The guys doing it made a small and simple error and allowed too much air into the burn compartment and buy morning there was nothing left but ash. There’s always next time.
I was lucky enough to be on a table of very interesting people for the dinner on Saturday night. We had a Biodynamic farmer from the Atherton Tablelands, the owner of Milkwood Permaculture, a Mine Worker, an Anarchist, a beginning farmer and myself. The conversation switch from topics like biodynamics and preparations to soil biology, home building and growing communities. I really enjoyed the evening and went off to bed with my head full of questions, ideas and plans.

Sunday morning I woke about 4:30am with the roosters crowing, this was drowned out by the snoring. I’ve never heard snoring like it before, it was worse than the pigs and Shadow. I couldn’t get back to sleep so I stoked the fire, made a cup of tea and enjoyed the stillness. After some more talking I was off back to Bredbo, picked teh Cook up some more Plymouth rock Chics and arrived home about 8pm – still trying to digest the information that had filled my head over the weekend.

Our changing landscape

The recent summer rains have left parts of the farm in disrepair. We have issues with fencing being destroyed, new erosion gullies forming and the possibility of losing our large dam in the gully up the back (now christened Carabineers Creek).

As we don’t have stock in that part of the property the loss of the dam won’t really affect us, but it will affect the wildlife that live in it and on its banks. Every year families of water birds use the dam and backed up gully for breeding, this year we had our first waders, as well as the Grebes, Coots, shags and ibis. What we would really love to do is to turn the dam and the area between the dam and the river back into a wetland habitat. Something that was common on the Monaro 200 years ago but sadly missing today – so if anybody knows of any grants going that we would be able to apply for let me know.

So, with all this hydrological damage about I spent a few days out at Milkwood near Mudgee doing a Watershed Rehabilitation Workshop. This was run by a guy called Craig Sponholtz from the US and was based on solutions outlined in the book “Let the Water do the Work” by Bill Zeedyk and Van Clothier. You can find a review of the book here -
http://permaculture.org.au/2011/07/14/let-the-water-do-the-work-induced-meandering-an-evolving-method-for-restoring-incised-channels/

The course was three days of mostly theory and a day of practical. Most importantly to my mind was the course covered in detail the effects that putting any structure into a stream will have, and the importance of putting the right structure in the right place. We covered stream and gully profiles, types and anatomy as well as formation and development.

The last day involved repairing an eroded gully using the techniques we had learnt. Which is another way of saying ‘hauling rocks’.

Overall I would recommend anybody who has a stream, gully, creek or run on their property to do this course. It's a pity the NSF doesn't have a course like this.

A big red horse

Got to tell you I had better things to do then blog the last few days, the weather here has been fabulous, nothing below zero and days have reached 20 Deg C. It’s just like Spring!

This the hole in the bathroom window - the window is covered in ice -it's 9am

But of course, things are still happening. We had kids’ soccer on the weekend, visitors up to the wozzu and jobs that went undone.


I bought the Cook a new toy, it’s big and red and hopefully will make her busy life a little more bearable. It’s the biggest garden tiller you’ve ever seen. You may recall that we use our pigs to do a lot of the digging around our place, but sometimes we need to finish things off a little better then the pigs are capable of, and the poor old Cook has a crook back, so digging isn’t something she likes doing. Hopefully as the ground becomes better we won’t need to dig.


In a perfect world, and following permaculture principles of low energy inputs this is more desirable, however we need to get to a point where that is possible for us.


I bought it home in the small trailer, we used ramps to load it on, but I don’t have any of those at home. I decided if I unhooked the trailer I could tip it up and roll it off. There was nobody around when I needed to unload so I did it myself, I untied the tiller and then I unhooked the trailer, unfortunately the tiller was at the back end of the trailer and the trailer tipped up rather suddenly. The tiller rolled down the tailgate and headed down the hill – strait for the cooks car, holy crap! I gave a semblance of a chase and managed to knock it off course just before it hit the car, not so lucky were three pigs, a dog a rose bush and the back fence, I haven’t told the cook yet.


We had the chance to give it a run on Sunday and managed to turn over the whole garden in less then an hour – that used to take us four weeks or more. We’ll have to change the way our garden beds are, but makes it possible for us to really start thinking about our option s for a market garden or CSA.


We had some seriously cold days last week, I think it was Friday when we had the coldest day in the district for 17 years. The diesel in the car turned to jelly and I couldn’t go to work until 10am when the truck had thawed. Unfortunately the Cook pumped water on the Thursday and I didn’t empty the pump, so when I went down to pump on Sunday it was sitting on the side of the river split open like an oyster – bugger.

It’s going to take a few weeks to repair so I’ve had to replace it, we’ll have a spare now I suppose.
I started picking up the bricks for the wood fired oven on Saturday, in the rain with Harrison, 1000 bricks is a lot, specially when your loading them by hand.

Winter is here

It’s official – if there were four of me I’d still be to busy to scratch. I mean, I can’t even sit down for a cuppa tea without something or somebody needing some attention. It’s been a awhile, so I’ll probably miss a few things out – but I better not forget to say thanks to my Mum for coming down from Queensland and paying us a visit, doing ALL our washing and being nice to the cat. And that seems so long ago now.

We had a field day out here a couple of weeks back and built some ditch and berm swales for the Cooks Food Forest. It’s all small steps, but we now have a couple of pears and plums planted. Unfortunately I managed to pull out an apple tree I thought was dead much to the horror of the Cook – for which I am unreservedly sorry darling.

Of course I’m still fencing, and last weekend saw me finish the first phase of the river boundary fence project. I still need to put in the gate, but once that has been done the horses and cattle have a new paddock for winter. I then need to extend the new fencing past the front of the house to keep the cattle on the river – on the river and not the Cooks garden.

Our Solar Array is up and running and we are taking energy from the sun and feeding it into the grid. We’ve already passed 100kwh feed back into the grid. We’re not to happy with the NSW governments decision to retrospectively reduce our tariff, luckily our local member only won his seat by the skin of his teeth – if it goes through parliament he won’t be getting our vote next election.

The Cook and I attended a Natural Resource Management Forum a couple of weeks ago, managed to meet up with some of our friends from the local NRM Groups including the local Catchment Management Authority. The forum was very interesting for the most part – the Cook kept passing me notes about the speakers as the day progressed, we’ve never been able to go anything like this together before, and it’s nice being able to compare notes instead of having to try and remember everything during a kitchen debrief – hopefully we organise the time to do things like this more often in the future.

I’ve finally planted (well, a month ago now) the Stone Pine trees that the Duckherder gifted us - I started to plant them whilst I was on my permaculture course and the Cook and the boys finished putting them in for me. If you’re out there Mrs D we need more, we are using them in our shelter belt along the western side of the farm. The plan is to plant them with other leguminous trees and some others probably nuts – possibly pecans, but oaks go well with conifers as well.

I finished my Permaculture Design Certificate over the Easter break. I met a lot of really nice people and learnt a lot as well. The course covered a lot of theory, but due to it not being a live in course there was not a lot of hands on. The Cook mocks me now because I tell her things she has been trying to tell me for years – I know – she’s always right, I should listen to her more – I’m a bad, bad man.

I wanted to catch up with Mrs D but the days were too long and I needed to get home to get things done for the next day, sorry about that Mrs D – I’ll catch up with you soon hopefully.

So we’ve had our first permaculture day, we built some swale or ditch and berm works for our new food forest. Starting small we’ve planted four new trees to compliment the three other fruit trees in the food forest area. I need to do more fencing – no really – I do, so that we can keep the infernal goats out before spring.

There are a swag of piglets running around at the moment and this weekend we’re moving some of them into the vegi garden for our winter clean out.

Last weekend we had a moment of confusion when Harry came in and told me we had a wild pig in the pig pens. I went out to look and low and behold a young boar had managed to force his way in with the sows. He was a very handsome young fellow, black and white – he looked like a Bentheim Black Pied, a rare native German pig which is crossed with the Berkshire in Europe, the only reason I say this is because I saw an add for one the other day (look them up on google).

I have done a little research and found that nobody has a record of these pigs ever coming to Australia – but somebody has one advertised for sale 100km from our place – in the same catchment. I’m pretty sure he was wild, but he did seem rather at home with the sows – anyway, I had no choice but to dispatch him. The Bottle Tree Creek/Rock Wallaby guys had a pig incident the other day as well I read – I wonder if they got that one?

I’m not a big reader – but since my course I’ve got dozens of permaculture ebooks to read. Somehow I’ve got to find the time, there is one I’m downloading at this very moment titled ‘Trees on the Treeless Plains ‘ by David Holmgren and is a revegetation manual that provides a design system approach and principles applicable everywhere to assist in the development of local strategies and design solutions. I reckon I’ll find this very helpful for our place and for a lot of the places we visit doing NSF work. I might even do a review.
It’s busy going forward as well, weeds to kill before an inspection in July, Kimberley from up at Jerangle is coming down to look at pigs this weekend, more field days to organise – not here thank goodness, and a long weekend of fencing – somewhere in this lot I’m going to have to get more pig food as well.

Jeez! I nearly forgot about one of the most pleasant days we’ve had out on the farm all year. Back a couple of weeks ago the Cook organised with another family or tow to have an apple crushing day – her hope was that somebody would be able to work out how our fruit crush works so we could make some apple cider.

So anyway we had a yard full of people, some copping, some mashing and some crushing, there were kids and dogs and by the end of it we had more juice then any of us knew what to do with. We’ve still got apple juice in ice cream containers in the freezer. So we now know how to crush the apples next is making the cider – Mrs D any ideas, you’re the alcohol specialist?????

A ton of pork

Honey Lotus

It’s been busy, we are down to 15 pigs – to think before Christmas I was worried I’d still have 100 by winter. My weekly 2am starts have finished and the lady down at the Sydney Markets has almost a tonne of Valley View Pork. By all reports she’s very happy with the quality of the product. This makes us happy about the way we are doing things – even if it is a little harder then the norm.

Thinking back over the past few weeks it’s all been a blur. We had a weekend of field days - that was fun. People were picking up pigs, tractors slashing, and new electricity poles going in, a lads sleep-over and day to day life.

 

I spent one weekend driving out to Griffith to collect two lots of pig feed. The car towed the two tonnes of grain well – unfortunately I had a blow out of a trailer tyre on the way out, fortunately I was able to get a new tyre in Wagga and continue the trip. I’ll be up for another one of those in the near future.

 

Our solar power station has been put back until August now due to a lack of photovoltaic cells. Luckily for me they have also changed the way they anchor the posts (our system is too large for the roof) so now I don’t have to dig 20 x 1m deep postholes.

Spreading Seed

Myself and Tanya a friend of ours from up the road at Jerangle (wave), went out to Lynfield Park at Gunning and had a look at the amazing tree plantings out there. I’m not much on which tree is which – but that’s all changing (sorry Matthew). I was really impressed by the modification that planting trees can have on the microclimate of an area. It was my first real encounter with fodder trees, something I’ve recently become very interested in. The man who runs the property, John Weatherstone was great, he gave us a great briefing on the history of the property, his vision and how he accomplished what he had. As a bonus - at the end of the day he filled the back of my Ute with wool packs of seed trash, which is the pods and stuff left over from seed collecting. The trash contains loads of seed still and is good for sowing across rip lines in a paddock; we saw the results of John had done at Lynfield Park. I was also lucky enough to be given some Palonia seeds for the Cook – she has been wanting to try growing these for years, she was very happy when I arrived home, seeds in hand.

During the week on the way home one evening I spied a grove of Honey Locus trees on the side of Adelaide Avenue. These are great fodder trees and resist cold better then the carob trees. Animals feed on the large seed pods they drop in autumn. I pulled over and filled a feed bag with pods and took them home. Unfortunately, the pigs have found the bag and I’ve lost some of the pods – but at least they like them.


So the next Saturday a friend, Paul, from the NSF and I spent the morning out on the quad bikes seeding the top gully, I think we managed to do about and acre or so – now we need to wait for spring and see what germinates.


I attended a presentation about the water/plant cycle and its affect on Climate Change. This dealt with the establishment of micro climates to help cool the planets surface and about how if we control the amount of solar energy used to do activities other then just heat the soil we can increase productivity and mitigate the some CO2 generating processes.

Rip Line

The kids had a group of mates over for a sleep over as well; it’s a highlight of the school holidays for them. On the Saturday before everybody was due to arrive I had gone into Cooma to get some supplies. Whilst I was out Fatso the pig knocked over a beehive which is located quite close to the house. The Cook asked me to go have a look at it when I got home. The lid had come off the box and it was laying in pieces on the ground, I walked over top it and had a look, the bees appeared to be calm so I thought I’d give putting it back together a go. But they weren’t quite as calm as I had first thought; resistance began to grow, so a deliberate withdrawal to the house was in order.

 

I got into my bee suit and ventured back to the hive and began putting it back together. No sooner had I got out there and bent down to pick up the first box when a very savage bee managed to sting me right on the end of my rather big enough already nose. I swear he took a run up – I saw him coming, it was like a kamikaze – it all happened in slow motion. I’ve been stung before – but this ‘really’ hurt.

 

Wolf Spider

The rest of the bees seemed to sense victory and in a few seconds they were all over me – a second withdrawal was in order, this time I was perused and harassed for some distance. I returned after a short break to regain my composure, I took a long walk around the paddock trying to avoiding bees which were still following me.

 

A little while later, after I had managed to break contact with the bees I went back and fixed the bee box and made sure they were secure. I went inside to ice my throbbing – now humungous nose.

All the Cook was do was look at me and laugh, she had me sit on the lounge and put a bag of frozen corn on my face – that didn’t help, but at least I couldn’t see her laughing at me, just hear it. Poor dogs got a couple of stings as well.

 

The Cook has had her fair share of pain and agony this month as well. Whilst I was away one day she had to help somebody load some pigs. One of them was an awfully pregnant sow. Now, we tell people to bring a trailer, that we don’t have a ramp and that it’s hard to load up a ramp. And then people turn up with 4WD’s with crates on the back and we have to try and lift 120kg moving, thrashing, squealing pigs into it. The only guy’s that have done it well were the two Police Officers just before Christmas – but they have a lot of experience.

 

Seed

Anyway, the Cook is helping this fellow load his pigs, luckily the tractor driver turned up to do some slashing and was able to give a hand. But, in the struggle, the Cook managed to get her hand jammed in the side of the crate and crushed her thumb. She told the guy’s she needed to get some ice and ran back to the house – were she nearly fainted on the floor. Once she had regained he composure she stuck the bag of frozen corn on her hand and went back out to help the tractor driver change a tractor tyre. How’s that for tough! That’s why I do what I’m told.

 

Other news – I’m off to do my Permaculture Design Certificate next week. Looking forward to this, I’ve had to do a lot of reading prior to the course – which I don’t really like, but it has been very educational. I must thank Tanya again for loaning me some great books from her library.

 

We are having a farm planning workshop with the NSF in a couple of weeks so we’ve started getting busy readying for this. If your reading this and interested in attending send me an email via the blog.

The aim of the workshop is to introduce people to the ideas about blending NSF with other alternates farming principles like permaculture and biodynamics. The topics we will addressing include;

1. Healthy landscape,

2. Healthy soil,

3. Sustainable production,

4. Drought proofing.

5. Food security

It’s taken me a while to discover the links between all these things, about how NSF, Permaculture, biodynamics and methods like pasture cropping are key to establishing a sustainable farming enterprise. And sustainability is the goal – in any type of season, which means all inputs have to be from on farm, non chemical and non petroleum based.

The map shows the area we will concentrate on for the project, after the workshop we will further cut it down into phases.
And why do we feel it’s important to create a sustainable farming enterprise, go here and read this - go here!

Work to do

Harry Cooking Breakfast

 It’s full steam ahead on the farm at the moment, we’ve managed to cut back our pig numbers, noticeably and this has allowed me to free up some money to invest into the Cooks Garden. We are extending the front fence and pig/goat proofing the whole area so the Cook can plant her orchard and not have to stress about animals eating everything she plants. I’ve also built her a brand new double tub worm farm, using old bath tubs. They are high enough off the ground that she can have a bucket underneath collecting the worm juice. And to finish it off she has a brand new barrel for her seaweed tea using the seaweed she towed back from their holiday down the coast last week.

The Rooster

I’ve just spent the last few days hobbling around the place finding it very difficult to walk. I couldn’t get out of bed on Monday. Of course the Cook doesn’t like me laying around the place making it look untidy, she had my crippled body out doing jobs which included digging post holes and mowing the lawn – albeit very slowly. And the culprit? Not a farm accident, not my old army injury or even a fall from a horse or quad bike, no, none of those things. Nothing even slightly funny, exciting or even dumb. Seems I have a Magnesium deficiency and all I needed was a supplement and everything would be better. A day later and I can almost walk again, hallelujah!

Our lawn whilst being mowed

The Cook has been busy in the garden and it looks great. I hope she is down there now filling up her brand new worm farm with lots of treats for our next load of micro livestock. She was telling me a few moments ago about how she had just about sliced off a finger with my sickle harvesting some Lucerne, the big cry baby, she had to hang up so she could try and stop the bleeding – I guess I’ll hear all about it tonight. At least its better she did it in the garden then the kitchen – I hate having to fish through dinner looking for loose digits. She runs the risk of the rooster grabbing hold of her finger and running off with it.

We got a little surprise in the mail today, a bunch o f books arrived I’d ordered on Amazon for Christmas. Most of them were for the Cook, but one was for me! It’s about building smokehouses and meat smoking – can’t wait to get stuck into it. The cook got books on Poly Tunnels, Preserving and small scale grain production.

Our experimental wheat patch has progressed, it’s full of Lucerne at the moment, we sowed it fairly thickly as the main aim is to enhance the nitrogen in the soil, the wee little pigs in the pen next door keep sneaking into the patch, but they’re currently too small to do any damage. We decided it was too late to plant summer wheat; we’ll leave that till next summer and maybe put some oats in the patch over winter.

The Rooster is keeping us all entertained. He continues to sleep on the front veranda and start crowing at 3:30am each morning. I think I’ve just about managed to ignore him now as he didn’t wake me up this morning, but the Cook did ask me if I had sharpened the axe since winter yesterday morning and we did have roast chicken for dinner last night – I wonder?

The farm dam

We had a bunch of NSF people over to help us do some more work on our leaky weir in the gully. We’ve suffered a small amount of new erosion with all this rain so working to fix it before our next deluge is becoming a priority. Luckily the weir we installed worked well and has silted up a lot quicker then we expected – probably due to the new erosion in the gully above. I think we’ll need to get some machinery in to do some of the work as there’s large head wall erosion close to the main dam wall.



Helpers at the leaky weir



to do's

There seems to be a big difference in the way people think about sustainability. I believe it means being able to farm with out effecting the environment or any local ecosystems. Being sustainable is harder work and probably less profitable then more industrial forms of agriculture, but at the end of the day it’s the condition of your property that you’ll be judged by. So how does a farmer judge what the balance is between sustainable and profitable? I’m still looking for an answer to this one – but it’s not lots of pigs.

I would like my pigs to live in green fields, interspersed with oak and chestnut trees, how do I get there? Over the last couple of weeks I’ve tried to stand back and reassess what it is I’m doing and how do I get there. I think reassessment or review is an important part of any enterprise and knowing when to change is important. Let’s face it, pigs are hard work, twice a day feeding, lots of water, electric fencing, housing and the list goes on. I like the pigs and they have just started to bring in a bit of money – but I’ve got to change the way we do things to make it easier.

Up until now we have been jumping from one thing to the next, we didn’t have the first pig paddock finished until the morning I picked up the pigs. The chicken pen is still only half finished. The sheep don’t even have a proper paddock yet. I haven’t finished fencing off the garden or begun on the orchard – and the Boss is going to bring trees home on Sunday. We don’t have water to everything and I have to cart buckets everywhere. The cook has to water the garden from a water can and, well, you get the picture.

So it’s time for what we used to call ‘consolidation’, I need to, in consultation with the cook, prioritise what our list of ‘to do’s’ is and get on with it. And not let anything else lead me astray. Of course I’m getting hassled about the renovations to the house as well – like I don’t have enough to do!


For got to mention on Tuesday - there is a LandCare general meeting in Bredbo this Saturday, which I am going too. It’s interesting hearing what people are doing and planning on doing. Some people are Biodynamic, some are Organic and some conventional, but ever body seems to get along and hopefully learn from each others experiences.

Today’s photo is of the Cooks garlic, one of three patches she has growing around the place.

Say Cheese!

When I started my Blog I intended it to be a way I could pass on information about sustainable farming practices, our conservation efforts and how we were managing the two on the one property. Looing back on what I have done so far I see it has turned more into a diary of day to day life on the farm.

So, what I have decided to do is make a few changes. Firstly, from this week Monday will be diary day, Tuesday I will look at what’s new and topical in the sustainable farming world, Wednesday will be photo of the week, Thursday will feature topical issues and Friday will be a roundup of the weekly happenings – lets see how it works.

This week is school holidays, and on the TV at 6:00am – Yes I watch TV at 6:00am in the morning much to the cooks’ disgust, is a show on the Lifestyle channel called Cheese Slices. This program follows the adventures of some fellow travelling around the world investigating and show casing the world of cheese making. It’s not the most “entertaining” show on earth and it’s not Emmy material, but it is a good medium for showing the difference in old and new world thinking on one particular aspect of farming and food production.

I have, for a long time, been interested in cheese making. Growing up in a dairy farming area I always liked the routine and calmness that it offered. I like the idea of using raw milk for cheese making and I know that cheese making although far more time consuming and labour intensive then just milking, can be rewarding and enjoyable.

All this, of course, helps explain the Jersey cow in the front paddock. The Cook likes the idea of fresh cows’ milk for cooking and drinking, whilst I’m the cheese lover. I’ve been looking for more Jersey cows, or any milking cow for that matter, but these are rare to come by around these parts. And any I have found have been rather expensive, for example some went at a clearing sale the other day for $1500 each and heifers for $980. Anyway I may have had an idea this morning on the way to work which I will talk about next week. Of course a lot of people would think that dairy farming in an area like ours wasn’t such a good idea – but then they weren’t doing it as part of a closed farming system. Maybe I’ll try a blended cheese and use sheep or goats to supplement our cows – the possibilities!

The final Garnaut report on climate changes was released yesterday and suggests a shift away from beef and sheep production, to eating kangaroos. What a joke that this has become the focus of discussion in the farming community with regards to climate change! If the way people protested when the Defence Department wanted to cull some kangaroo’s in the ACT is anything to go by.

The whole farming system in this country needs to change; we need to become more sustainable, more regional and more disciplined. We need less reliance on chemicals, less reliance on energy, less reliance on resource intensive processes and more supportive for small scale local farmers, farmers markets and CSA’s. And what about reducing the amount of processing that is allowed? Do we need white bread? Do we need processed cheddar cheese? Can we live without fruit loops?

I'm Back!

We apologize for this break in transmission - we’ll return to our normal program as soon as possible. Sorry everybody I was a little sick over the past few days, damned flu got the better of me, but I’m OK now and it doesn’t look like I’ve given it to the cook. Well, a lot has happened and not happened over the past few days.

Firstly – it didn’t rain like they said it would. Sunday morning looked really promising – all we managed by the afternoon was 4mm. That was supposed to be two days worth of rain – nothing!

I placed an advertisement in the Allclassifieds free web site about our piglets – for sale $80 each at eight weeks old. I’ve sold eight up to now, out of the seventeen we have from the last two litters.

350 spuds in and planted – I don’t think we thought they would be that hard to plant. I can’t take much of the credit, the Head Gardener did most of the hard work. It took two days to get them all in the ground – I hope they work. I tried to use an old set of harrows on the ploughed area to break it up, it seemed to work OK, towed around the paddock on the back of the Jeep. With no tractor I couldn’t see another way, I thought of asking the cook to drag them around – but even in a delusionary state I thought better of that. We’ll see later how well it worked.

The cooks mate Jane rang on Saturday – she has found us another goat – great, where is that hole in the head I put down around here somewhere??? I was supposed to go and pick up feed on the weekend as well, but the lurgy put a stop to that – need to fix that up tonight.

We have a new boarder – a three week old Black Angus Heifer named Beccy. She was a twin, the smaller one, and has been rejected by her mother – so the cook is feeding it from a bottle. She came from the guys down at Ingelara. I hope she does alright she’s got really bad scours which isn’t healthy at her age.

More snow

It wasn't as cold at home as it was in Canberra yesterday. The fog didn't lift until late but the clouds hang around all day. It started to rain just as the last light began to fade and by 8:00pm we measured about 3.5mm. The Bush Heritage visit on Monday has been postponed until the 23rd of August which is no big deal. Greening Australia are still planning to do a field survey on Monday afternoon.

There's lots of feeds to do for the weekend, and I hope to get more straw for the pigs. It's been cold the last few mornings with a minus five and minus four, and more of the same forecast for next week. This weekend we'll be starting the weeding of the ploughed field - looking forward to that!! And - while your on the net, go visit the ABC Rural web site, they have my picture of the TSR on their front page. They got the name wrong - there is no way I look like a Mary!!!

Rain!

21mm of rain last night, snow on the hills and a cold southerly breeze. The pigs are up to their knees in mud and loving it also!!!!!!!!!!!! Well, after yesterdays little drama things have settled down. The roads are open and the ski traffic is once again buzzing along the highway.

We had an unexpected call from the guys at ‘Ingelara’ yesterday, they area Biodynamic farm on the Canberra side of Bredbo. Our garden guru has been busting to talk to them about Biodynamic farming for months, so when they rang she was very excited. They want to come and have a look at what we are doing and how we are doing it, in other words – they want to check us out. They are coming out on the weekend so it’s a full calendar for the next week. Better get the cook on the job!

With the rain we are starting to see the first green shoots come through in the paddocks. It’ll soon be time to yard up the pony so she doesn’t get founder. We’ve also got a few little boars to castrate – our midwifes favourite job!!!! What doe’s she say about it – “As long as I don’t have to catch them!”

Cold, Foggy and -3.0

Cold and foggy this morning! We had a little bit of rain last night, less than a millimetre, just after dusk - I thought it might snow. When I got out to the car this morning all the doors had frozen shut – I had pig feed in the back I needed to get out. By the time I had the car open I’d woken all the pigs.

The fog wasn’t that thick, you could see the blue sky peering through. It’ll probably be another glorious Bredbo winters day. The snow has gone off the ranges which is different to last year when it hung around for weeks. Yvonne will be happy; she’ll be able to get into the garden for a few hours today.

The Community Subscribed Agriculture system - according to WIKI

This is an extract from Wiki on CSA, it covers the main points and addresses how it is done in other countries. Subscription farming, as it is known here in Australia, is growing in popularity and is probably one of the most sustainable forms of farming practiced.

Our farm will provide chemical, artificial fertilizer and GMO free food, using only heritage fruit and vegetable varieties. Our goal is that everything we use on the farm in the production chain will eventually be a product of the farm.

Subscribers can also have personal choice of which vegetables are to be planted and which varieties of fruit we would plant. This of course is provided they are able to be grown within our climatic zone and suitable heritage seedor root stock is available.

In the future we also plan to be able to supply eggs, pork, mutton and beef under a similar system. If you would like to find out more please comment.

What is Consumer Subscribed Agriculture.

CSA generally is the practice of focusing on the production of high quality foods using ecological, organic or biodynamic farming methods. This kind of farming operates with a much greater-than-usual degree of involvement of consumers and other stakeholders—resulting in a stronger than usual consumer-producer relationship. The core design includes developing a cohesive consumer group that is willing to fund a whole season’s budget in order to get quality foods. The system has many variations on how the farm budget is supported by the consumers and how the producers then deliver the foods. By CSA theory, the more a farm embraces whole-farm, whole-budget support, the more it can focus on quality and reduce the risk of food waste or financial loss.

In its most formal and structured European and North American form, CSAs focus on having:

a transparent, whole season budget for producing a specified wide array of products for a set number of weeks a year;

a common-pricing system where producers and consumers discuss and democratically agree to pricing based on the acceptance of the budget; and

a ‘shared risk and reward’ agreement, i.e. that the consumers eat what the farmers grow even with the vagaries of seasonal growing.

Thus, individuals, families or groups do not pay for x pounds or kilograms of produce, but rather support the budget of the whole farm and receive weekly what is seasonally ripe. This approach eliminates the marketing risks and costs for the producer and an enormous amount of time, often manpower too, and allows producers to focus on quality care of soils, crops, animals, co-workers—and on serving the customers. There is little to no loss (i.e. waste) in this system, since the producers know in advance who they are growing for and how much to grow, etc.
Some families have enrolled in subscription CSAs in which a family pays a fixed price for each delivery, and can start or stop the service as they wish. This kind of arrangement is also referred to as crop-sharing or box schemes. In such cases, the farmer may supplement each box with produce brought in from neighboring farms for a better variety. Thus there is a distinction between the farmers selling pre-paid shares in the upcoming season's harvest or a weekly subscription that represents that week's harvest. In all cases participants purchase a portion of the farm's harvest either by the season or by the week in return for what the farm is able to successfully grow and harvest. The largest subscription CSA, with over 4,000 families, is Farm Fresh To You established in 1992 in Capay Valley, California.

Some farms are dedicated entirely to CSA, while others also sell through on-farm stands, farmers' markets, and other channels. Most CSAs are owned by the farmers, while some offer shares in the farm as well as the harvest. Consumers have organized their own CSA projects, going as far as renting land and hiring farmers. Many CSAs have a core group of members that assists with CSA administration. Some require or offer the option of members providing labor as part of the share price.

Some CSA's have evolved into social enterprises employing a number of local staff, improving the lot of local farmers and educating the local community about organic/ecologically responsible farming. Australia's Food Connect is a unique social enterprise that is now competing with the major supermarkets.

Typically, CSA farms are small, independent, labor-intensive, family farms. By providing a guaranteed market through prepaid annual sales, consumers essentially help finance farming operations. This allows farmers to not only focus on quality growing, it can also somewhat level the playing field in a food market that favors usually large-scale, industrialized agriculture over local food. Vegetables and fruit are the most common CSA crops. Many CSAs practice ecological, organic or biodynamic agriculture, avoiding pesticides and inorganic fertilizers. The cost of a share is usually competitively priced when compared to the same amount of vegetables conventionally-grown, partly because the cost of distribution is lowered.

Method of distribution is a distinctive feature in CSA. In the U.S. and Canada, shares are usually provided weekly, with pick-ups on a designated day and time. CSA subscribers often live in towns and cities - local drop-off locations, convenient to a number of members, are organized, often at the homes of members. Shares are also usually available on-farm.
CSA is different from buying clubs and home delivery services, where the consumer buys a specific product at a predetermined price. CSA members purchase only what the farm is able to successfully grow and harvest, in essence CSA members share some of the growing risk with the farmer. If the strawberry crop is not successful, the CSA member will share the burden of the crop failure by not receiving strawberries for the season or receiving lower quality strawberries. CSA members are also more actively involved in the growing and distribution process, through shared newsletters and recipes, farm visits, farm work-days, advance purchases of shares, and picking up their shares.

An advantage of the close consumer-producer relationship is increased freshness of the produce, because it does not have to be shipped long distances. The close proximity of the farm to the members also helps the environment by reducing pollution caused by transporting the produce. CSA's often include recipes and farm news in each box. Tours of the farm and work days are announced. Over a period of time, consumers get to know who is producing their food, and what production methods are used.

Share prices can vary dramatically depending on location. Variables also include length of share season, and average quantity and selection of food per share. As a rough average, in North America, a basic share may be $350-500 for a season, for 18-20 weeks (June to October), with enough of each included crop for at least two people (perhaps 8-12 common garden vegetables). Seasonal eating is implied, as shares are usually based on the outdoor growing season, which means a smaller selection at the beginning and perhaps the end of the period, as well as a changing variety as the season progresses. Some CSA programs offer different share sizes, also, a choice of share periods (eg. full-season and peak season).