A Farming Life by Liz Harfull

Author:Liz Harfull [Harfull, Liz]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2023-05-10T00:00:00+00:00

Ruth is visiting her favourite place on the farm. Most days the rocky ridge gives her a clear view of the entire Mannanarie district and its surrounding hills. The seasonal break hasn’t come yet even though it’s now May. The paddocks remain brown, scudding clouds casting dark shadows as they roll across the open valley. The sun is out but a wind has sprung up, fierce and cold, so Ruth has swapped her baseball cap and sun protector for a navy wool beanie.

The viewpoint enables Ruth to take in at a glance the 945 hectares she now farms. Spread across three separate holdings, they include the original Robinson farm of around 510 hectares, which she renamed Manangari; a block of 138 hectares across the road purchased in 1977; and another 297 adjoining hectares, which John and Ruth bought in 2007. They seized the opportunity to make this last purchase when the remaining Mannanarie station block was further subdivided and put up for auction. They bid successfully for two sections, incorporating the original station homestead, built around 1847, which they restored and then rented out.

From her perch on the range, Ruth can also clearly see the outcome of years of her own work planting shelter belts, with advice on species selection from Wirrabara vegetation consultant, Anne Brown. Her grandmother planted trees for shade and so did her father, but they were mostly single plantings or rows placed along roadside fences to help define the property’s boundary. By comparison, Ruth has established wide multi-species corridors along internal fence lines to protect her sheep from the most severe weather conditions, while also encouraging native birdlife.

The windbreaks are up to 700 metres long, with five staggered rows of trees and shrubs indigenous to the area, supplied as seedlings by Trees for Life. The middle and tallest row is a local blue gum. On either side are casuarinas and mallee box, which generally grow slightly shorter and have a wide canopy, and the outer rows are shrubs. This combination is slightly permeable to the wind, slowing it down without creating turbulence, unlike a single row of dense plantings.

Getting the windbreaks established can be a heartbreaking exercise, given the hard frosts in winter and the hot, dry summers. Choosing what she hopes is the lesser of two evils, Ruth plants her seedlings in July. Her theory is that the tough ones will survive and won’t need as much watering over summer because they have had longer to establish.

Behind Ruth, the hillside is carved with shallow swales of contour banks created by her father to reduce erosion. It’s much less of a problem these days, given enormous changes in the way farmers in the area now grow their crops. Many use no-till or minimum tillage practices, sowing in a single pass with little disruption to the topsoil. When Ruth was young, paddocks were cultivated after spring rains ready for sowing the following autumn. ‘Then every time it rained and the weeds grew you’d cultivate it again, and

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