Never be afraid to be the only woman in the room. A hard take in Australian Agriculture but today, on the International Day of Rural Women, I’m reminded of how far women in agriculture have come, and how much things have changed for women who want to work on the land. Like just about every…
There is something supremely beautiful and quiet about shearing sheds, when they are empty. I’ve always thought they are so atmospheric. When I was younger, I often headed up to the shearing shed on my Nana and Papa’s station and just sit and think, or even walk around and feel the smooth wood, smell the…
What a week of weather! I know if often seems as if farmers are always complaining about weather and that’s a fair comment, but so much relies on it! On Thursday last week, it was fairly bloody hot and humid after a thunderstorm the previous couple of days. I was drenching sheep and the shearers…
From Anne McCullagh Rennie, one of Australia’s leading popular fiction writers comes a big, warm-hearted outback coming-of-age saga in Under Southern Skies. I am delighted to be invited as a guest author on your blog to celebrate the launch of my fifth novel Under Southern Skies, an uplifting story of a young woman…
A little while ago, Anthony and I made a journey across the Nullarbor to Adelaide. We were going to look for good stud rams, to help advance our White Suffolk Stud. After a day in the airports we went straight from there to the show! It was wonderful to walk in and be greeted by…
This is what our first day of shearing looked like at 6:00am! Sheep all ready and waiting in the yards, clear skies and a wonderful sunrise, sending a message that it was going to be a special day! We tested our new shearing shed well and truly, with 450 ewes being shorn. It worked really…
Well the shearing shed that we’ve had put into our machinery shed is now finished! Doesn’t it look great? We can’t wait to use it, so the next photo might be of some crutching here. But we’ve got a bit of work to do before that can happen. All the gravel area will have to…
We were lucky enough to be able to buy the inside of a shearing shed, complete with catching pens, grating, gates… the works. Having two farms 18 kilometres apart and only a shearing shed on one of them, makes life quite difficult at times and involves stock trucks carting sheep backwards and forwards at shearing…
Dogs work really hard at shearing time. They make the job much easier by packing sheep into races, getting them into the shed, penning up and of course helping muster the paddocks to bring the sheep into the yards. That’s of course if you’re a work dog. Rocket’s not. But because his legs are so…
