Daramalan/Logancrest Ram Sale November 12th

So, here are the Daramalan Border Leicester rams for sale on Monday November 12th at Logancrest, 5 minutes from Crookwell and 25 minutes from Goulburn on the Crookwell-Goulburn Road. Viewing from 12:00 and auction at 1:00 pm with Steve Ridley from Elders holding the gavel as always.

The rams are as good as they come and the best we have produced so far. We hope you can make it to our third sale and that you are impressed enough by the condition and breeding of the rams to bid for them. We are sure they will work well for you in your enterprise. Thanks to all of our old and and new clients - we very much appreciate your support and feedback. Thanks also to Sharon and Craig Coggan of Logancrest Poll Dorset Stud for hosting the sale.

See you next Monday!!

Renault Print Ads

I have never driven a Renault Twingo but I like their whimsical advertisements particularly as they feature sheep!! I really like the print ad shown below and keep asking my shearers to have a go!!

For what it is worth Top Gear said "Far better styled, and available in right-hand drive, the new Renault Twingo is a really decent stab at the city car market. The only catch is the price, which may not seem far enough off the bigger, better Clio." Seems to be about 6/10. I'll stick with my Subaru Outback and the old ute.

The Ram Class of 2011 - Ready for sale November 12th

Here are the flock rams in the yards before shearing in August - they are really filled out now and will be ready for the sale on November 12th at Logancrest, Goulburn Road, Crookwell.
There is also a short video of the rams from late September on the website (http://www.daramalan.com.au/ram_sale.html) - not great quality but good enough to see their structure and condition.

Etna, Vico and Rivelin arrive at DBLS!!!

Etna (#4) and Vico (#7) with Ashley Corkhill of Normanhurst Border Leicester Stud, Boorowa

On 27th September we bought three new rams from the Corkhill family's Normanhurst Stud in Boorowa. The two stud (Etna and Vico) and one flock (Rivelin) rams were sired by Cadell Stud rams and Normanhurst ewes and all had good bloodlines with Cadell and Retallack influence. Rivelin and Vico are also registered $uperBorder$ meaning that any First Cross Ewes they sire can be marketed as such and hopefully for a small premium. All up three very good purchases, genetically and financially. They will all be working very hard next year at joining time.

Not the best day though as my car broke down halfway between Crookwell and Boorowa. If it had not been for the kindness and genorosity of John Rankine (http://www.jrdistributors.com.au/) and Brad Croker of Elders Crookwell the whole day would have been a right off. Now I have to just be patient about the car getting repaired.......

Ear tag colour codes - Purple for 2012

"The ability to trace livestock from property of birth to slaughter is crucial to the safety of red meat.
The Australian red meat industry has implemented a national system to ensure the quality and safety of beef, lamb, sheepmeat and goatmeat.

The National Livestock Identification System (NLIS) is Australia's system for identification and traceability of livestock. It was introduced in 1999 to meet European Union requirements for cattle exports. Since then it has expanded to enable cattle, sheep and goats to be traced from property of birth to slaughter for:

• Biosecurity
• Meat safety
• Product integrity
• Market access

NLIS is endorsed by major producer, feedlot, agent, saleyard and processor bodies. In addition to this it is underpinned by State/Territory legislation, which forms the regulatory framework for the system.
NLIS Ltd operates the central NLIS Database on which the livestock movements must be recorded. "

From www.mla.com.au

Naturally I am as interested in the colour sequence as I am in biosecurity. Is there any significance to the colour order? Not that I can tell or find out from anywhere. It is a clever system though and makes identification easier when drafting out the oldest sheep. Also I was taught that ewes are tagged in the right ear and rams in the left....because 'women are always right'. Boom tish!!

The 2012 Lambs are here!

We started lambing about three weeks ago and the Border Leicesters are about three quarters done. Plenty of twins and some triplets will make for a busy lamb marking day next week. We expect to have over 125 lambs to mark so it has been a good season. Purple tags this year, green last and orange the year before - I'll post the sequence at a later date.

The Merinos started early last week and so by end September we can mark the first cross lambs. Don't have a photo (yet) but there is one lamb with a black saddle - very unusual and very cute!

Shepherds from the Landes region of France

The region of the Landes is an immense plain situated in south-west France delimited by the Atlantic Ocean to the west, by the banks of the Adour to the South and by the ones of the Garonne to the north-east. Today it shelters the largest forest in Europe, constituted essentially of pine trees planted in the middle of the 19th century on Napoleon III’s initiative or decree.

The department of Les Landes, the second largest department in France, with an area of about a million hectares, was created in 1790 by uniting administratively a mosaic of fourteen small local pays.

The low population in Les Landes, about 300,000 people, has not changed much for the last 150 years and before becoming the greatest area of forest in France during the nineteenth century, this infertile land of moving sandy ground, becoming marshland in winter when the rivers swelled and flooded,  truly merited the name of moor - la lande in French. It was known as the French Sahara. It attracted neither immigration, nor commercial traffic. There were various experiments to control the sogginess of this desolate region, together with agricultural experiments - rice, mulberry trees, tobacco, peanuts - which all failed.

My interest (as always) though is with the shepherds who had a unique way of moving around the region with their flocks. There were few ways to earn a living in this unhealthy, temperate desert, keeping flocks of sheep being a major occupation. In 1850, there were 1 million sheep; by 1862, there were 527,000, and by 1890 this had reduced to 295,000 as forest replaced the frugal moor pastures. The land was so poor that it would only support one animal per hectare. Thus, the shepherds and their flocks roamed widely over the area, moving up to 20 kms a day over communal moorlands to find sufficient grazing for the flock. At night, the sheep were penned in a sheepfold, which ensured that the animals’ manure was not dispersed unnecessarily. The manure was the main crop from the sheep, being used on the fields. The output of twenty to thirty sheep was required to adequately fertilise one hectare of the the poor, acid Landais soil.

• 1 kilogram of rye bread fed an adult, a family of eight to ten people would eat 4,000 kg rye bread a year.
• 3,200 kg flour are needed to make 4,000 kg bread.
• 4,000 kg rye grains are ground to make 3,200 kg flour.
• 4 hectares of land are needed to produce 4,000 kg rye grains.
• 60 tons of manure are needed to fertilise 4 hectares of land.
• 100 sheep will produce 60 tons of fertiliser.
• 100 hectares of moorland provide food for 100 sheep.

Stilts first appeared well before the forest, when Les Landes was an immense marshy country with the vegetation primarily consisting of grass and undergrowth. Principally, it was shepherds who lived in this landscape. The shepherds had several reasons for using stilts in order to more easily make a path through the vegetation when the shepherds travelled the long daily distances required by their sheep-tending to avoid wetting their feet in the marshes but their main use was to be able to supervise their flocks of sheep from afar.

The first records of stilts in Les Landes date from the beginning of the 18th century. However, it is not known whether using stilts was invented locally by the shepherds, or whether they were an import, say from the Flemish region of Belgium, where stilts had been used since the Middle Ages.

Landais stilts were made from two pieces of wood:

• the escasse (“leg” in landais patois) from where comes the modern French name for stilts: l’échasse; and
• the pé paouse (“foot rest” in landais patois), which is fixed on the escasse, generally giving a stilt height ranging between 90 cm and 1 m 20.

The stilt user attaches the stilt to his (or her) leg with two leather thin straps.

The use of stilts by the shepherds for work purposes disappeared gradually between the middle of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century with the establishment of the forest, which drained the marshes and eliminated the pastures, and thus the sheep and their shepherds on stilts.Today none of the original marshy Landes remains.

Salvador Dali Ted

The farm dogs are working dogs and an enormous help....except in the shearing shed when they are a nuisance unless chained up. Blue is pretty good overall, Jess sleeps in the fleeces (she is almost 12 years old) and Ted.....well Ted just likes impersonating Salvador Dali whenever he can!!

Lick Feeder and ELMS Blocks

In an effort to get the flock rams in top condition for sale later this year (November 12th) we are supplementary feeding this year. We have posted news about the Bromar lick feeder previously but we are also using Elders Livestock Management Solution (ELMS)  lick feed blocks. The blocks provide a mineral supplement for the sheep.

"As green feed can contain a poor balance of nutrients critical to maintaining optimum health and productivity it can significantly reduce an animal’s ability to efficiently convert the available feed into meat, milk or wool. It may also contribute to metabolic conditions such as grass Tetany and substantially reduce an animals natural ability to resist infections including parasites."

The ELMS block contains  "an appropriate combination and level of the nutrients required by sheep and cattle to perform at their peak whilst grazing green pastures and fodder crops
including high levels crushed grains, carbohydrates, and bypass protein and a specially prepared blend of both normal and high availability forms of vitamins and mineral."
They are designed to stimulate the rumen to allow animals to deliver higher levels of feed efficiency. 

Let's hope the extra cost and work is repaid in November!

Weed alert

It's that time of year again to try and eradicate serrated tussock (Nassella trichtoma) from the property. It's an almost impossible task as not everyone in the area is as vigilant despite it being listed under the Noxious Weeds Act 1993. So it continues to be a major environmental concern in the Southern Tablelands.

Now is when they are easiest to identify and kill before they can set seed in November. We use a combination of herbicidal spot spraying and, an old favourite, the mattock. We always carry a mattock on the quad bike when we inspect the sheep and a couple of big hits is all it takes to physically remove the plant.

Mostly we are winning but we also have all four thistle species, some blackberry (under control) and plaenty of horehound. The latter used to used in brewing a non alcoholic and bitter 'root' beer. Don't care fort the taste myself but some of the beer labels were fabulous.

The Devil's Rope

After some more research I have discovered that there are not only barbed wire collectors but also barbed wire museums in the USA.  Apparently there are collectors living all around the world and seeking new designs to add to their collections. There are swap meets where collectors bring lengths, minimum of 45cms, of barbed wire fence to trade and even books and magazines devoted to the infernal wire of which there are over 500 different variations.

Barbed wire is often incorporated into 'art' projects - the light above is from the store Mulbury in Fitzroy, Victoria. It has been made into picture frames, crosses, wreaths, sculptures, license plate frames, mirrors, key chains, and jewellery to name a few. The barbs, spurs, stars, plates, points, and other sharp protrusions found on the varieties of barbed wire are decorative and extremely varied. So maybe I should start to take a second look at all the odd pieces of wire that seem to accumulate around the place.

Shine by Three fashion Shoot

Well it's not every day that the farm gets to be the backdrop for a fashion shoot but recently glamorous fashion blogger Margaret Zhang (http://fellt.com/shinebythree/2012/07?page=2) visited and took some amazing photos around the place. She even tried to disguise herself as a sheep in this woolen number. Luckily she was not mistakenly sheared!

Barbed Wire Hedge

With all the fencing that we are doing I have inevitably cut my hands to ribbons. Really between farming and glass cutting my days as a hand model (!!) are well and truly behind me.....

So I thought I would research (ie wikipedia!) barbed wire and who thought up this clever but dangerous  invention. The first wire that was not just a single strand was made in France by Leonce Eugene Grassin-Baledans in 1860. His design consisted of bristling points, creating a fence that was painful to cross. In April 1865 Louis François Janin patented a double wire with diamond-shaped metal barbs.

More patents followed, and in 1867 alone there were six issued for barbed wire in the US. Only two of them addressed livestock deterrence, one of which was from American Lucien B. Smith of Ohio. The movement westward across the American Great Plains meant that ranchers needed to fence their land in against encroaching farmers and other graziers. The railroads throughout the growing West needed to keep livestock off their tracks, and farmers needed to keep stray cattle from trampling their crops. Traditional fence materials like wood and stone, were expensive to use and hedging was not reliable.

By the mid 1870s there were as many as 150 companies manufacturing barbed wire in the US to cash in on the demand in the West: investors were aware that the business did not require much capital and it was considered that almost anyone with enough determination could make a profit from manufacture of a new wire.  There was then a sharp decline in the number of manufacturing firms, as many were consolidated into larger companies, notably the American Steel and Wire Company, formed by the merging of Gates's, Washburn's and Ellwood's industries.
Smaller companies were wiped out because of economies of scale and the smaller pool of consumers available to them, compared to the larger corporations. The American Steel and Wire Company established in 1899 employed vertical integration: it controlled all aspects of production from producing the steel rods to making many different wire and nail products from the same steel; although later part of U.S. Steel, the production of barbed wire would still be a major source of revenue.

So barbed wire has become the choice of almost all graziers for fencing in animals....if only we could develop fencing that kept the native animals out effectively!!

Wild Weather

There was some wild and windy weather in mid June and we lost six mature gum trees which while not a disaster is a great shame. The pictured tree was behind the shearing shed and gave great shade to the sheep when in the yards. It must have been quite a storm as this tree had been there for over 60 years. As it fell it narrowly missed the power lines that run to the shed so we were lucky. It did however fall full square on a fence so yet another job to do. Our neighbours lost a greenhouse (completely and nowhere to be found) and further up the road a tree fell on a shed levelling it.

First we will have to cut the tree off the fence and then drag away the main trunk. Perhaps this is another one destined for the local mobile saw mill guys? Then we can get to the fence wires and re-strain and most likely re-wire everything.

We have been busy re-fencing the river alfalfa paddock - over a kilometre - so fencing seems to be our winter job of choice or, rather, necessity. All I can say is that putting a fence up is much more 'fun' than pulling an old one down!!

Silo Surfing - Do Not Try This at Home!

We would not recommend doing this without a great deal of experience and a certain lack of sense! The grain silo holds our supply of Triticale grain that we use to feed the rams over the winter. As the amount of grain goes down it becomes harder to get out of the silo and someone needs to climb down the ladder inside and use a shovel to push the grain towards the out pipe. Dusty and unpleasant job and not for the fainthearted.

The 70 rams get about one metric tonne of Triticale per month (13 MJ/kg fed Metabolisable Energy and 12% crude protein) between them and are fed via a Bromar lick feeder that holds about just that. A key component of this feeder is the 11 hole plastic inserts that are on both sides of the feeder. The sheep must lick the grain upwards and use the saliva on their tongues to get the grain out when closed down for supplement feeding. This prevents overfeeding which can lead to bloat and means that the rams have to 'want' the extra feed over and above what they can get from the pasture.

We hope that the extra feed this year will see the rams gaining weight through winter and being in top condition for the November 12th sale.

Garlic Shooting

We have planted over 100 garlic bulbs of about ten different varieties so we are having a mini field trial this year. So far the strike rate has been high but the heavy frosts and cockatoos/rabbits are a major concern.

Garlic should be okay to overwinter in the ground and come spring will shoot up and we expect quite a crop later in the year. Perhaps enough to supply a local greengrocer or even to have some at the Savitrine Glassworks stall at Paddington Markets every Saturday. I may become known as a garlic seller who also produces some glass art!!

Elsewhere the gardens are bare of much else edible. The artichoke plants are well established and the herbs are doing well. This spring will see us planting some more fruit trees and there is talk of a half acre of pumpkins as a small 'cash crop'. Now that we can plough to our heart's content there is no bare patch of earth safe from some sort of crop production!!

Minus 5 Overnight

It looks quite beautiful and idyllic but at minus 5 it was bitterly cold in June and early July. I guess in a way it keeps some moisture in the ground but hopefully the grass and clover will be able to withstand the below freezing conditions.

We have pruned most of the roses and the fruit trees and so it is looking a bit neater if bare around the place. A major few days of work are ahead as we cut wood for the fire. The stove eats wood at this time of year and seemingly we can never have enough dry wood ready to go. Chopping wood is good karma yoga so is a pleasant way to spend a day!!

Goulburn January Sale - Daramalan Progeny Top Prices

There were about 16,500 sheep for sale at the Goulburn saleyards on January 6^th. The vast majority were first cross ewes and buying interest was strong with the yards absolutely packed. The average sales price was $188 and a highest price of $262. Ewe lambs made a top price of $168!!

Daramalan was not directly a seller, as we are not counting the last (and worst) ten Border Leicester rams that were sold to clear the pastures for 2012. However, three of the top six first cross ewe sales had a connection to Daramalan as the ewes were from our rams sold in 2010. That is a great result for the ram buyers and good ‘referred marketing’ for Daramalan. It demonstrates the quality of our rams and how well suited they are to local producers and conditions. Also a big ‘thankyou’ to those ewe sellers that marketed them as ‘from Daramalan’ – we are so pleased you had a successful year and sale.

In 2012 we will produce about 55 Border Leicester rams for sale in November. We could sell 90 but would rather have fewer rams of a higher quality. So far the season has been good, if wet, and it is time for fencing and maintenance. It is also time to sow a crop of oats in the alfalfa paddock for some feed and choke out the weeds.

It is also time to plough up the house paddock, put in the irrigation pipes and plant the orchard and garlic bulbs. There will be apples, pears, quinces, olives and four varieties of garlic as a trial and to grow seed bulbs for next year. It has taken longer to get organised than we hoped and will be all the more satisfying when we harvest. The medium term plan is to become self sufficient in fruit and vegetables and fully embrace seasonal slow food principles.

Successful Ram Sale #2

Daramalan Border Leicester Stud’s second annual sale, held in conjunction with Logancrest Poll Dorset Stud on property at Logancrest, Crookwell, was held on a hot and extremely windy November 14^th – at least the rain stayed away on the day!

Despite the positive outlook for sheep meat and the prime lamb markets 25 of 40 Border Leicester rams offered were sold at auction for an average of $636 with buyers getting great value for money.

The top price of $900 was paid twice by Daniel Tarlington from repeat buyer Veolia Environmental Services, Collector. They also bought six other rams and were the high volume buyer on the day.

Other volume buyers were Ian Cusack of Bywong Holdings, Sutton buying 5 at average $570, Rod McCarthy of Akoonah, Middle Arm buying 4 at average $612.50, EG, R & DE Robertson of Binda buying 3 at average $616 and Gunning Grazing Co. buying 3 at average $633. Brian McCormack of Apsley, Laggan and BJ & KN McIntosh of Crooked Corner completed the list of buyers at auction.

Daramalan Stud owner David Dawes said after the sale that he was “Somewhat disappointed by the lower clearance rate but happy enough with the prices as buyers got exceptional value for money.” He also noted, “The results reflected the increased numbers of Border Leicesters for sale and a reduction in demand as Merino farmers rebuilt their Merino flock sizes.”

David would like to thank all the buyers and under bidders for their valued support, Craig and Sharon Coggan for hosting the auction, all the hardworking helpers on the day and looks forward to the sale next year. Mark Watson and Denis Hewitt of Elders Crookwell with Steve Ridley of Elders Goulburn as auctioneer conducted the sale.

Logancrest Poll Dorset Stud, Crookwell, sold 33 of 34 selected Poll Dorset rams to a top of $1150 and an overall average price of $766, up 38% on 2010.

Owner Craig Coggan was “Extremely pleased with the prices paid and would like to thank all the buyers and underbidders. Our rams were in immaculate condition and are ready to work now for their buyers.”

Craig and Sharon would like to thank all the buyers for their continued support, all of the helpers at the sale and look forward to welcoming you to the sale next year. The auctioneer was Daniel Croker of Landmark, Goulburn.