Lessons for a Novice Farmhand

Things I learned yesterday:

1) There’s a place for a direct casting dog.

As a novice or hobby sheepdog handler, I think there’s a tendency to over-appreciate the wide working dog. Especially on the cast. It seems safer, calmer, gives us more thinking time. Less risk of Bad Things happening. And it looks very impressive when you’re just focussed on the dog sailing away over the horizon, rather than the livestock.

If our dog is running out fairly straight, there are a million and one methods of persuading them to go wider, from stopping and resending, to hurling clods of earth or pieces of poly pipe, to fanning the air with garden implements and chanting mantras (“Keep off! Keep off!). I can’t tell you which one I think works best, because I’m sure they are all effective, to different degrees depending on the handler and the dog. Personally, as a rank beginner, I’ve had a bit of success and a bit of failure with more than one method (except with Bill, who doesn’t do training). One thing I haven’t tried is training dogs to run fences- some people specifically train dogs to go out to the fence and run along inside it to find their sheep. This might work okay if you only ever work dogs in trials and at home in small paddocks, but I don’t think it would be very useful otherwise.

Yesterday’s “wish I had my video camera” moment:

Mob of sheep in the Red Dam paddock, starting to camp up on the right hand side of the paddock, at the bottom of the gully half way down. From the gate, about 300m up the fenceline above them, I sent out Bill and Queani. They both see the sheep before they’re sent. Queani runs out wiiide. She’s heading out to the left, parallel to the gully before she angles across it and heads up the hill, still running out. Bill goes straight down the paddock, slanting out only slightly until he hits the bottom of the gully, where he suddenly arcs out and around the mob. By the time Queani is coming close to 12 o’clock, the mob are started up the hill to the gate, and she has to cut in and chase after them.

Mob at the gate of Red Dam paddock

Bill isn’t a great casting dog. Not even a good casting dog- he’s just adequate. He tends to focus too much on the sheep at hand and not think about the big picture, which can predispose to missing sheep. I probably should do some “look back” work with him. Queani is a great dog for mustering- she doesn’t run the fences, she’s just thinking big, and she’ll try to cover the whole paddock. But as she demonstrated yesterday, sometimes thinking big is really inefficient.

My ideal casting dog is Fred. Back when he wasn’t thirteen, deaf and pigheaded, he could reliably gather all sorts of tricky paddocks, over hills and into scrub without missing anything. I tried to video him once, but made the common novice parenting error of tying a young dog to the pram so I could operate the camera, and when I sent Fred the young dog tried to go too, taking the infant Farmboy with her. The quality of my subsequent filming was understandably poor. Anyway, you’ll just have to trust my description. Fred would start his cast not dissimilarly to Bill- fairly directly from handler’s feet- but he’d run out with his head up, looking and, I’m sure, smelling for sheep. If he suspected some outside the line of his cast, he’d kick out to include them, so his line would end up being something like an inverted pear, but with lots of little bumps. An inverted head of broccoli, perhaps.

Interestingly, Fred started life as a very straight casting dog, just like Bill. And apparently R’s approach to widening him out was… nothing. He worked him on the farm, and Fred figured it out.

I know I could teach Queani to come in on command, but I can’t be bothered, and of course many direct dogs are taught to move out, but Bill doesn’t do training. And with the two of them I have it basically covered.

2) I am far too feeble to lift an average merino ewe onto a quadbike.



And this is a necessary skill for any Novice Farmhand. I need to hit the weights.

The Last Shed

The night before the last day of shearing. The last mob of sheep need penning up in the shed.

Some of us have maintained our enthusiasm.

This is the fun of farming. All of us together, kicking up dust and chasing shadows, the residue of the summer heat fading under the clear starry sky.

Shearing 2011- or, A Bug’s Life Part 3: The Final Solution

I love shearing.

The atmosphere, the sheepwork, the process of reaping what we’ve grown all year.

The challenge of trying to capture it all on a camera.

I‘ve tried before: Last year, the year before and the year before that (more than once)

The Farmkids love shearing too.

Two fun-filled weeks or so of hanging out together.

The excitement and energy of the shed.

Sheep, sheep and more sheep.

Creating their own entertainment

Hide ‘n seek among the wool bales

This year the kids helped me out with some photography.

They documented things from a new perspective.

Some shots I would have taken…

Some photo opportunities I hadn’t ever noticed.

So we start with woolly sheep by the shedful.

They come into the yards and shed early to empty out and stay dry.

The shearers set to work, just a few minutes per sheep and the wool comes off

The fleece is collected by the rouseabout (or shedhand)

It goes onto the classing table to be skirted (all the dirty, scrappy bits around the edges taken off) and classed (assessed for important traits like fibre diameter, length, strength, cleanliness and colour)

The sheep head out five kilograms lighter

Some stay around for a quick drench

The end product, classed and collected up

Pressed into bales (and I think R would like me to point out that this is the old, semi-retired press, not the nice new one with all the bells and whistles and safety gadgets. Of course we only let the kids play with the old one. We figure that if they survive with all limbs intact they are qualified to use the new one)

At nearly 200 kilograms a bale, it’s serious business when you have to move them around…

for example, to retrieve the boss’s sunnies:

Three years later, Farmboy and his dad’s sunnies just slay me

Yep, we love shearing.

Bringing in a mob

Innovation! Experimentation! I'm trying all sorts of new things lately- carrying a whacking great big camera on a farmbike (but not a whacking great big lens, sorry), adding groovy and annoyingly intrusive arrows and text, making a slideshow, and straight Blogging This rather than doing the Youtube thing (edited to add: unsuccessfully).



It's shearing time (onto the second week now), and here we're bringing in a smallish mob (~400, I think) from a nearby paddock. Three dogs was probably overkill, but I like to have at least one extra as a back-up, and I just felt sorry for Muddy because he's always so desperately keen, bless.

Queani does the mustering cast, because she's wide and will usually look around. Bill should have waited his turn but jumped the gun, so he had to stop and wait. He's sent next for support. Muddy was supposed to stay on the motorbike at all times but the pathetic whining got to me and I let him go and help at the end.

The sheep came all the way in to the yards with their resident Willie Wagtail, which I thought was quite cool. The extra-observant among you may be able to spot it in one of the photos (hint: look for the enormous orange arrow).

Up to Date

So... since I last was here:

It didn't rain.

I got around to finding my Kendenup trial photos, wrote a blog about it, didn't post it. Will do eventually.

We ran out of house water, R spent many hours driving back and forth to town with the tank for more water.

It still didn't rain.

The paddocks all around went as dry as I've ever seen them, with not a blade of grass or even weeds surviving uneaten.

We started having to shut sheep out of paddocks where the dams had dried out.

Our ancient kero water heater finally gave up the ghost and disgorged its contents all over the back verandah, thus emptying the house water supply yet again.

Back into town went R and the tank truck.

The cracks in the plaster in the front of the house followed through with their threats.

Still no rain.

All the sheep got drenched. Mike Scott came up to help with Tig and her daughter Badger.

Charlie died, suddenly, of kidney failure.

It was Easter. And then it rained. Not a lot- maybe a total of 25mm over a week. But it's made all the difference.