A day in the life of a farmer

This month, Dave Costigan and I visited farming clients Norman and Pip Smith of Glenwood Merinos just outside Wellington NSW to attend their annual ram sale. Arriving the day before, we were both put to work and gained an insight into the sheer effort and passion our clients put into their businesses.

Source: https://www.theland.com.au/story/5700830/glenwood-merinos-to-5000-av-2272/

Our duties started with putting up the information cards for the 120 rams to be sold the next day. A simple enough job but, with the pressure of someone buying the wrong ram, we took our time to get it right.

The next job was to get our hands dirty sorting the rams into different lots and moving them into the sale shed. Here we got to experience the full power of these animals as they charged toward a closing gate head first and the bang of horns crashing when they didn’t stop in time. While Dave (an ex-sheep farmer) was quite relaxed, for the untrained it certainly put me on notice not to get in the way of these furry friends.

After a great dinner (you’ve guessed it: Lamb) and an early night, it was up early the next day and back into the shearing shed. Now it was time to sort the rams by their numbers and get them into their respective pens. Dave seemed to enjoy wrestling with the rams, with some being more compliant than others.

Over the next few hours, clients arrived to inspect the rams and chat with Norman. We were also lucky enough to talk with a lot of these people and it was clear to see the respect they have for Norman and what the family is doing with their product.

After a great lunch served up by the ladies from the Australian Red Cross the auction began.

With a combination of great wool prices, and some rain greening things up in the area, the bids came in thick and fast. As you can image it took a bit of time to get through 120 rams but with the average prices well up on last year Norman and Pip finally looked relaxed.

All that was left to do was load up the sold rams and sink a few well-earned beers.

You can read more about the auction results here: http://www.theland.com.au/story/5700830/glenwood-merinos-to-5000-av-2272/

Spare a thought

While you may have read some parts of NSW have had some rainfall lately, there are still large parts of the state suffering under drought conditions that continue to incur the escalating feed costs. Despite much gesticulating from the government, with various grants now on offer, these are doing little for the larger commercial ventures; low availability of feed and increasing freight costs continue to put many under extreme financial pressure. Our thoughts continue to be with those families.