Hello, Summer

Well, this is 2017. I’ve been posting less and less on this blog over the past four years, with 56 posts in 2012 but only 16 by 2016. Hopefully this year it will go up again.

 

The first week of the year has been fairly uneventful. The money situation is slowly improving. This sudden summer heat is incredibly draining and we have no air-conditioning at this house.

 

Farm life is probably the most interesting thing to report on this week and I realize I haven’t said much about it lately.

 

We’ve got bulls in with the milking herd at the moment and they are making things very difficult. Not all of them respect people. Recently I was rounding up the cows on foot and one of the Jersey bulls started roaring and walking towards me. I was able to get to the round concrete water trough before he reached me, and for about fifteen minutes he stalked me around the trough, bellowing, before Daddy came back with the motorbike and scared him off. Now I always take a stick I can smack them with if they start threatening me.

 

There are several cats up at the cow shed, but they are much more wild than the farm cats at Pomborneit.  But still, we’ve given them names like we always do. There’s Fatty Fluffy Catty, Gray, Plastic Cat, Stumpy, and Stumpy’s little black kitten who only just appeared last week and so isn’t named yet.

 

There is a young cow, “Stray,” who got scours last month and within a week had lost so much weight she looked like a skeleton with skin, and for a while I thought she would not survive. She was treated, but her condition went up and down a few times. By December 30, poor Stray looked like she would not live to see the new year. Her eyes sunk in, she was dragging her feet, she didn’t even have the strength to hold her own head up. But she is still here. We’ve stopped milking her but still bringing to the shed for grain, and she’s slowly putting weight back on, getting her strength back. Fingers crossed she pulls through.

 

Yesterday morning at 6am I was on top of the highest point on the farm, looking out at the sunrise. The air was already warm and the flies had woken up early because of it. About a quarter of the herd had escaped through an open gate at the top of the hill, taking an extra half hour to collect. By 8:30am, with milking finished and just the cleaning up to do, it was too warm for my sweatshirt. Another hour and a half, and I’d shed my beanie and waterproof overalls. It reached 37 degrees that afternoon.

Today, it was 30 degrees by 10am. Yay summer.

Still Undefeated

2016. What a year this one has been. Very few positive highlights this time around.

At the beginning January I was in contact with a koolie breeder and on February 3 we made the trip to Melbourne to pick up nine week old Skuggi. Calving season started, and we woke up one morning to find the boss had taken all our new calves to a new home. We never got to say goodbye. On March 11, a cow stood on Freya and snapped both bones in her foreleg. That was a long, long weekend. She came home on March 17 and started the long road to recovery - twelve weeks before she was allowed to run again. On March 23 I went into the city with Sparkie to meet up with some friends, but everyone canceled. On the train home, I recieved news that our farm had been sold and we had four weeks left in our house. On April 21 we said goodbye to our beautiful calves that we'd raised and trained.

On May 1, we went to the Dog Lover's Show with some friends and Sparkie behaved perfectly. Six days later we moved into our new house. On May 17 Sparkie became very ill. It was one week before she was allowed to come home. We didn't get a diagnosis until the end of that week - inflammatory bowel disease. With a careful diet she recovered and was finally able to go back to work a month later.

While Sparkie was in recovery, we brought four calves of our own. We lost one to scours within a week. We brought another one to replace him, and we lost that one to pneumonia within the same time frame. The third replacement calf got coccidiosis and it was close for a while, but he survived.

On July 4, the day before we lost the second calf, Daddy came home from work and said he'd been laid off, because the boss couldn't afford to pay him anymore. We ended up working only on weekends to cover the rent.

Things continued to go downhill. Us kids were told we could have hay, grain, and milk for our calves as payment for our work at the farm. Well of course eventually we weaned our calves so milk wasn't needed. And within a few months he stopped providing hay, and by the end of October there was no more grain either.

We tried to find a new job, but nobody would take us on with our five dogs, four calves, rats, and a cat. Daddy got a part time job on another farm nearby but now they can't afford to pay us weekly as promised, and they're suggesting monthly payments. Which we can't live on.

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I wrote this on a dark, dark day, when everything looked so hopeless. The following morning, we got a call from our boss/landlord, offering us our job back. Maybe this is the upswing, finally. We will see. These last few days of 2016 are hanging on though, and it’s not just us that are struggling. The deaths of people I knew through movies and TV and even books are hard to hear of, gone too young and my heart breaks for their families left behind. May 2017 be better for all of us.

 

VIDEO “2016 || A Year In Review” (click for video)

The Christmas Season

Over the years I've noticed the feelings I have for Christmas changing. What used to be excitement as the end of the year approaches is now relief, and Christmas is less about "Jesus's birthday" and more a celebration that we have survived another year.

The Christmas season signals the start of the end of the year and in recent years, that can never come soon enough.

2011 was crap. 2012 wasn't much better. In 2013 things improved, but 2014 brought it all down again. 2015 was all over the place. And 2016 has been one struggle after another. Each December, I can't wait for the new year to start in the hope that things will get better. Maybe 2017 will be the year that it finally does.

We got our job back this week but it's not in time to fix our bank account for Christmas shopping. Our present pile is very small this year.

But, we are still here. Still fighting. Still hoping tomorrow will be better. And these days, that's what Christmas is about - the celebration that despite everything we've been through, we have not given up.

I’m Still Here

Well it’s been a very long time since I last posted here. Nothing much has changed. We’re still struggling on at the same farm. There’s some crap going on with pay and stuff, but I won’t go into it yet. I will just say that it is a struggle to stay motivated to do anything right now.

 

Sparkie went for her Public Access Test again on September 22 and passed easily. I am thinking, and the trainer said the same thing, that she probably won’t go for a third PAT in two years, because by that time she’ll be nearly ten years old.

With that in mind, Skuggi, now eleven months old, started going into shops with me about five weeks ago. We’ve only done very short outings so far but he’s doing really well.

SKUGGI AT THE SUPERMARKERT << click for video

Our calves are so big now. The oldest one, Spartan, is nearly seven months old and my baby Logan is five and a half months.

 

But aside from that there’s not much to report, which is why this blog has been quiet for a long time.

Dairy Farm Life || "No Doubt" (video)

It's been six weeks since we lost our job. We are still at the farm, and still looking for another place to go with no success. 

We have four calves again and they're all growing so fast. Logan, my Jersey steer, is now eleven weeks old. The two Friesian/Jersey heifers Stormfly and Goldie are both twelve weeks. And our new Friesian/Wagyu/Jersey steer Spartan is eighteen weeks. We got him three weeks ago, hardly handled and never haltered. As you can see in the video below, he is so calm and friendly now!

Working For The Weekend (and every other day as well)

Life got hectic for a while there.

We worked every day on the farm with no days off, for six weeks.

Sparkie was diagnosed with Inflammatory Bowel Disease, which is being controlled with a strict diet. She’s back to normal, now completely recovered from the surgery, and has even gone back at work as an assistance dog.

We brought four little calves from local dairy farms, to raise as pets. Three of them thrived, but the little grey bull struggled, and after a few weeks he passed away. We rescued another calf to replace him, a big patchy boy. He was strong and energetic. But then he got scours, and then he got bloat, and when he was just three weeks old we lost him to pneumonia.

On the same day the second calf passed away, our boss told us he could not afford to pay us anymore. It's because the companies that buy the milk are barely paying farmers anything anymore. For some farms it's not even enough to keep the dairy going.

We can stay here for now, doing weekend work on the farm to pay for rent. The boss sounds keen to keep us here at the house and said that when the milk price goes back up we’ll be able to have our job back. But there are some big issues with this whole thing so I’m not sure what will happen next.

Dairy Farm Life || “If It’s Not Too Late” (click for video)

Say Something

I apologise for not blogging for over a month. A lot has happened in those four weeks.

 

Sparkie and me went with some friends to the Dog Lover’s Show in Melbourne on May 1. It was by far the biggest event we’ve ever been to, but Sparkie was so incredible even around thousands of people and dogs. She got to ride a tram for the first time too and was just so calm and focused the entire outing.

 

On the 6th, we moved into the new house. Ten days later my dad started working on the farm. The following day, the 17th, I woke at 7am to Sparkie throwing up. I took her outside, where she went to the toilet and then I brought her back inside. I got about another hour of sleep before Sparkie started shivering. I took her outside and she vomited again, and then the diarrhea started. She refused her breakfast. She drank some water only to throw it straight back up. Dad had the car at work fifteen minutes away, and as usual he didn’t get home until around 1pm.

We got Sparkie to the vet around 3pm. She was still fairly alert, although tired. Over the next week there was a rollercoaster of good news and bad news. The diagnosis went from gastro, to very bad gastro, to pancreatitis, to pancreatitis/colitis, and when Sparkie continued to go downhill, further tests revealed a mass inside her stomach. They operated on Friday morning, but the mass couldn’t be removed due to its position. They took samples and sent them off to be tested.

 

After the surgery though, Sparkie improved, so much so that they allowed her to come home yesterday. She’s wanting to play already, although as soon as she gets out of bed she seems to remember she’s still recovering. She’s still on antibiotics and pain medication and a bland diet, but she is doing better. We’re still awaiting the results of the test.

Unfortunately with Sparkie out of action we’ve had to cancel our planned trip to Sydney next week.

 

On the bright side though, Freya got her first day of freedom yesterday since she broke her leg on March 11. So much fun to watch! Her leg has completely healed so she no longer has to stay on lead while the other dogs run.