My Father and Other Animals by Sam Vincent

Author:Sam Vincent
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Schwartz Books Pty. Ltd.

I tried to school Dad with some of the techniques I’d learned at grazing school, but he schooled me with some of his own. My father had never done a course in holistic management (he didn’t like the emphasis on wider decision-making; like Rudolf Steiner’s more radical biodynamic teachings, he considered it ‘mumbo-jumbo’), but he read widely, attended field days and observed what worked on his own farm. I learned more about how his mind worked when he read the landscape, the clever tools he used to manage it wisely. He knew about the ‘dung scoring’, and about the lawnmowing gauge (it had occurred to him independently). He had even adopted a plant, even if he hadn’t given it a name.

Around the new millennium, he told me, he’d sown some chicory seed in the easternmost paddocks of Fernleigh. Chicory, a long-lived perennial, is about the most palatable of grasses to cattle. Every time the cattle were in those paddocks, he told me, he was pleased to see the chicory wasn’t just surviving; it was spreading. As the first plant cows will go for, if he had been overgrazing those paddocks it wouldn’t still be there. It was an important lesson: a paddock is not ‘eaten out’ when it is devoid of grass, but when its best grass – at least in the eyes of the cattle grazing it – has been eaten. The cattle will only move on to other grasses if forced to, by portable fencing, for example. Otherwise, as soon as the palatable grass begins to regrow, it will be chomped again, irrespective of how much other ‘feed’ is available.

I was finding ‘feed budgeting’ hard: looking at a paddock and telling how many days of fodder were available in it – what Dad called ‘the judgement thing’, the mental alchemy of timing and decision-making. It was reassuring to know that Dad used reference points in the paddock to make his decisions; he wasn’t moving cattle on intuition alone, but by reading the signs in the environment.

Often when rain was forecast, Dad (used to empty promises from the nightly news) would walk over to a rock, crouch down and say to me, ‘Let’s see what the ants are doing.’ He’d then turn over the rock and comment on how manic the ants underneath were. They always looked manic to me, but when they are especially manic, he assured me, it meant that rain was on the way. ‘Animals know these things better than any weather forecaster.’

One day in the paddock I prodded a cowpat with a stick to see how firm it was and Dad asked me from the ute if I could see any dung beetles.

‘You know, when Darwin visited Australia,’ he said, ‘he claimed that dung beetles had evolved since 1788.’

‘To process cattle and sheep dung?’

‘Yeah.’

When he got out of the ute and inspected the dung himself, Dad confirmed that these were native beetles.

‘Still good,’ said Dad, ‘but smaller than the introduced ones.’ He dug around in

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.