The weather has certainly kept us busy this season. We usually take a short break to recover from the hectic pre-Christmas rush of packing and sending hams and eggs but an enormous storm cell on Boxing Day prevented it. The damage was severe, so no rest for us!
The winds flipped and damaged six of our chicken houses with some of them being thrown 30-40 metres. Fences were broken, trees came down and sadly we lost some chickens and a heifer.
Thanks to our hard-working team we were able to get four out of six of the chicken houses up and running quite quickly but two were extensively damaged and we are still working on the repairs.
The loss of birds and the stress on the animals, followed by super-hot weather has affected production temporarily. We have had to purchase extra hens and join flocks which is disruptive to the animals. Our newest bird house fits 1500 chickens and we have introduced several flocks since January.
The constant rain has also had an impact on the efficiency of our egg picking as we have had to use a 4WD buggy which doesn’t fit as many eggs as our usual vehicle.
The upside of the rain is that there is now plenty of feed but we are low on cattle, so we are stockpiling the excess in preparation for the next dry spell. The 120 bales of silage will also come in handy if it gets super wet and the cattle can’t access the low country.
As part of our commitment to educating the next generation of farmers we have welcomed some new faces to the farm. Alex, a Year 11 student from Victory College is doing the practical component of a Certificate 3 in Agriculture and is enjoying the hands-on experience. As well as Kasey, who is looking to start her farming journey. Kasey, is interested in learning how good quality food is produced. Her dream is to become a farmer herself so she is keen to learn as many skills as she can. This is a particularly satisfying part of our job at Forage Farms.
So, it’s all hands on deck as usual. Hamish and Lachie are running the farm and Megan and Stuart are travelling throughout New South Wales, Victoria and Tasmania hosting courses and attending field days to spread the good word about Natural Sequence Farming. There was no chilling at the beach for us this year. Nature had other plans.
Update following our Spring Blog
As we discussed in our spring blog we were charging our contours and getting the landscape ready for summer rains. Well a couple of weeks after we took those photos the rain arrived, and just like we wanted the response was immediate, have a look at the photos below.
