Posts Tagged ‘small farming’

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Separating the Sexes

Wednesday, April 8th, 2009

I still had Moz and the Rookie Buckling to deal with, and little as I wanted to do it, I knew it was essential to remove them before winter if we were going to have some peace and a manageable herd. Mating and kidding were not on my agenda for the coming year.

Everyone was running together in the far paddock over the back, and I had absolutely no idea how I was going to achieve the first step of splitting the females off from the males, without having to bring them all down to the shed, yard them – and then what?  Moz is a handful at close quarters and the wild Rookie buckling – well, getting him into a yard to start with would be a mission, let alone anything else.  The one thing I definitely did NOT want was to have a mishap and lose either of those boys back into the bush.

Without any great plan in mind, I decided one afternoon to slip up there quickly and see how things were.  The paddock is probably my largest, the main gate is at the top end, and about a third of the way down it drops off quite steeply to the road, so you can’t see the whole paddock from the top. There was still quite a high growth of feed on the ground, too.

I went through the gate and over to my right I could just see the backs of a couple of does about 50 yards away with their heads down, grazing near the brow of the hill.  I called out quietly.  They heard me and came – and what’s more the 4 kids and the 2 new youngsters appeared over the edge of the hill, following them.  Glory Be!  There were no bucks in sight!  That in itself was a miracle, because those guys usually stick close to their women.

I got the females through the gate and realised I was missing Dawn.  Hmmm.  Pushing my luck a second time, I went back into the paddock.

Some instinct led me to the left this time, towards the bush boundary, and as I moved down the hill I saw her further down near the fence.  I couldn’t believe it : she was on her own and still no boys in sight!  She looked up and – always ready to come, bless her – she started up the paddock towards me.

I held my breath, watching out of the corner of my eye for the males to put in an appearance, but miraculously they didn’t.  So we sneaked up the hill together and a few minutes later, as she followed me through the gate to join the others, I sent up a heartfelt prayer of thanks.

Against all the odds, I’d accomplished an almost impossible task alone, with an absolute minimum of effort.  That was a miracle!

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Upgrading and Maintenance

Friday, March 27th, 2009

While all this was going on, I was also dealing with the fencing around my shed and on the road frontage, which I hadn’t been able to give much attention to for years. If I was going to start using my facilities again, the place needed to be as watertight as possible all round.

Most of my road frontage near the shed is a steep bank covered in shrubs that drops down to the highway. The fence is an old sheep netting fence put in by my father, with 2 rows of barbed wire on the top – but it is deteriorating a bit in places.  I was pretty sure the goats got out there on occasions and whenever they did, it was only a matter of them taking a leisurely walk of less than half an hour round my boundary to be back in the bush again.

The first thing to be fixed was the mysteriously rotted-off tie-down post on the shed side of the lower paddock.  I drove a waratah down beside that, hooking the top of the post under the top lip of the standard, and wiring the fence and post to it in several places.  It pulled the wires back down nicely, and felt good and secure.  I reminded myself to add a second waratah when I had one to spare.

The Big Shed

The Big Shed

Next came the internal fences around my shed, some of which had never been fully completed. One length of fence needed a capping rail and some repair work on the netting.  I didn’t have any proper capping rail, but I had some long lengths of 1″x1″ which I’d bought for another project and never used, so I put them up to serve in the meantime and tidied up the netting on that fence.  There was one part of it where the goats had been able to jump over for years – that was not going to happen any more either.

When I got round to the road fence I found a nice big hole I didn’t know about – aaaah!  That explained a lot.  No wonder Moz seemed to appear and disappear like a ghost sometimes.

Hadn’t I mended that one before? If so, the hole was as large as life and needed to be fixed again. I can remember one time a couple of years ago getting that very eerie feeling of being watched while I was doing something in the kitchen garden.  I had looked up to find Moz standing there outside the fence, still and silent under the bushes, looking at me from beneath those curls.

Mozilla

Mozilla

And that explained why I’d noticed Rheema, several times since she came home, standing looking across in that direction from the paddock they were in.  When I saw her doing that, I had a feeling she might be thinking about an escape route, and sure enough – there it was.

It was not till the afternoon that I figured the outcome of the buck fight.  I heard some calls coming from the top paddock and could see The Pretender up near the bushline.  Was he the sole survivor, I wondered?  Was Moz lying exhausted somewhere?  Or worse?  I had walked up and down that hill so many times in recent days that I didn’t feel like going up again to investigate – and I had work to get on with.  Late in the afternoon, it all became clear.

Moz had given his son a trouncing, and The Pretender was now on the outer, while Moz retained posession of lower portion of the paddock and the fenceline boundary between the two of them and the does.  Though Mozilla’s days were numbered too, I was glad he had retained his sovereignty and that his guts and fighting skill had kept him on top. So far at least – would this be the final outcome, or would there be a war of attrition?

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Buck Fights

Sunday, August 10th, 2008

Buck FightsWe left the goat story with Rheema safely contained in the lower paddock, and her progeny still outside the boundary fence in the bush.

Next morning as I was preparing to go up I thought I could hear kids calling nearby.  Sure enough, they were in the upper paddock as close to mom as they could get.  To my surprise the two big boys were there too – I had the folorn hope that they might not have been able to get under the fence, but I should have known better – they had.  I opened the gate and let the two kids down to mom.  My next job was to repair that back fenceline.

Actually doing the job is one thing – getting the materials up there is another, on a hot summer’s day, to boot.  I spent some time down below cutting long pegs from some deformed steel rod, and then walked up there with my heavy hammer, a couple of short waratahs, the steel pegs, a quarter-round post and several other lengths of timber. Hot work. By the time I’d fetched a few other pieces of timber and finished the job, with steel pegs and waraths front and back, I felt it was the best I’d ever done with this fence and it should hold.  It was a good feeling that night to think that all my stock were on home ground: now I needed to think around what I was going to do with them – those 2 young males were definitely surplus to requirements, and wild with it.

Next morning I went up to take stock of the situation.  It wasn’t good.  Mozilla and the does had camped for the night in a great spot in the gorse and tea-tree alongside the fence between the upper and lower paddocks.  The two boys had camped on the other side of the fence.

A curse on male testosterone – the two big bucks had been fighting through the fencewires, and had smashed two or three battens, as far as I could see.  I came back down and grabbed a waratah (my last), the heavy hammer and some wire, and went back to mend the worst break – up near the top where they had slept.  I tried fruitlessly to chase the two boys back up the hill and into another of my fields where they would have had no common boundary with the others, but though they put their noses in, they finally doubled back, and the young buckling, who seemed to have a crush on one of the doe kids, broke through the smashed fence, leaving The Pretender alone in the top paddock.

The Buckling

Things were not looking good.  I knew those 2 boys had to go, and rang a friend from my deerstaking days.  Dave and Cynthia are both top shots, on the range and in the outdoors, and I knew they had plenty of experience with culling goats. I explained the situation, and he said they would sight in Cynthia’s bigger rifle and come up and she would do a sniping job for me – probably within the week.

So far so good, but my fences had to be protected meantime.  And I didn’t want the doe and kids breaking back into the upper paddock either.  So I drove down to town and bought some more waratahs, and some more feed, and followed that with anther hot walk up the hill with steel standards and my trusty heavy hammer.

As I crouched on the hillside in the tea-tree, the gorse and the heat, hammering and wiring in standards to repair as many as I could of my broken battens (seven in all, I discovered), I roundly cursed the bucks.  The last thing I needed was a few more days of this fence-fighting, and I could hear now and then a clash of horns through the fence lower down.  I resolved to let The Pretender down with Moz and the rest and just let them fight it out.

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The Airborne Billy Goat

Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008

PatriciaWhile these events were taking place in the pig world, another drama was unfolding on my farm, and perhaps I need to set the scene for this part of the story. Of the many dairy goats I bred in the nineties, I had only three left – Mozilla, the buck, and two does, Dawn and Rheema – and I had problems with them escaping from my place and going into the forest on the hill above us. Thanks to the hot, dry weather, a post on my back fence-line had eased and they could squeeze under the wires. I didn’t approve of this arrangement, but with my mother’s illness over the past few years, the niceties of fence maintenance hadn’t been uppermost in my mind.

Here is a shot of Dawn, Mozilla and Rheema behind:

Dawn, Mozilla and Rheema

My remaining buck – Mozilla – is different from any I’ve ever had. He is a Toggenburg / Nubian cross of my own breeding. His coat is tan, with black long boots and a black stripe along his backline. He has a fairly long, sweeping pair of horns, never having be dehorned as a youngster like all my others, and they seem to be getting longer by the day. Actually he’s a fine-looking animal with a top-class pedigree, a good solid body and all the maverick qualities of the Toggenburg breed. He has a mop of beautiful cream curls on his brow that hang down over his eyes, so you can never see where he is looking, and you never know what he is thinking. He is a highwayman. When he was younger I used to wrestle him to get drench down his throat, but I’m wiser than to do that these days. I did not hand-rear him, and he is not tame.

I have had one or two episodes with him, at times when he thought he was being cornered. The first occurred in my big shed when he happened to be in an open corner pen area and without a second thought I went to go in there. He simply put his head down and charged me full bore in the stomach, much to my surprise, sweeping me backwards about 5 feet down a short narrow alley between the rails. Fortunately, I braced myself on the fence and kept my balance, and was able to slide sideways and let him past when we reached the end of the fence. It was a huge shock, and would probably have looked quite amusing, had anyone been there to see it happen.

Stupidly, I approached him again with some feed in a big plastic fish-bin. He took to me a second time. I rammed the bin at him and he cracked it. The problem was, over the years I’ve been so accustomed to having hand-reared bucks that are basically “tame” that it took me a couple of lessons to realise he definitely is NOT!
Mozilla in 2005

One day in 2006 at a time when they were out wandering, I came home from shopping to find that Mozilla and Dawn had come down from the hill and were in my drive close to a set of double steel gates that I normally keep closed. “Aha,” I thought, “here we go.”

I drove through the gates and called them – and they followed me. Dawn is great: she will come, hoping for food, and where the female goes the male will follow. (Don’t we all know that?) So I hopped out of the Ute and walked round to get the gates closed. I forgot that my young black labrador / ridgeback cross was running loose.

Grabbing one of the gates, I stepped across the drive to reach for the other one and close them. The buck had turned to watch me. Suddenly – it may be that the dog spooked him from behind, or maybe he thought he was being trapped again – he launched himself into the air down the slight slope and came literally flying towards me at head height. If the gate had been there, he would have cleared it, but I instinctively let go of it and it swung away from me – thank goodness.

All this happened in a flash. I saw his head come down as he began to descend, and he struck me across my right upper arm, left thigh and hip, spinning me round and throwing me down on my left hand in the driveway. When I sat up, he was standing about 25 feet away, looking at me from under his curls. I had bruises for days, but I guess I was lucky that was all I had. You don’t come off scott-free from an encounter with an airborne billy goat.

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