By Judy Barnet
Hi Readers,
Some of you may remember me from the Bush Telegraph – writing rural articles about farming with my lovely young offsiders Clare Ramsey and Holli Powell back in 2010 to 2014.
This wonderful rural paper was published monthly in the Warwick Daily News by editor Toni Somes, to whom I am ever grateful for giving me the opportunity to write.
Since the cessation of the Warwick Daily News and their Rural Weekly Newspaper I have sorely missed catching up on rural news and information.
When Jess Baker mentioned to me that Warwick/Stanthorpe Today was looking to increase their rural content I jumped at the opportunity to help out writing a weekly column.
From 2000 to 2014 I had a small farm (25 acres) at Clintonvale with my partner John at the time. It was a great block of land with fertile black soil and we ran a small Ayrshire Stud.
With the milk from our six cows we contract-reared dairy heifers for a local farmer and also reared dairy heifers for resale as yearlings.
Well fed, each cow would give us enough milk to rear four calves each plus some left over for the pigs and the house. We also had a Large Black Pig Stud, Southdown and Dorset Down Sheep.
Poultry had been a hobby for many years and we bred and showed several breeds of poultry. Together with off farm work, life was always busy, never a dull moment!
Holli, my friend’s daughter, had helped on the farm on weekends and after school since she was about six and Clare, a neighbour’s daughter and now a vet nurse, had helped since about age eight.
From showing cows to attending community events with voluntary animal nurseries, and patiently following me around at farm clearing sales – which I found highly addictive – Clare and Holli were always with me.
We made a terrific trio, the three of us driving along, in the front seat of my old F150 singing Grandma’s Feather Bed on our way to these events.
Life changes though, I wanted more land to expand my Large Black Pig Stud and sheep enterprise. This led me to finding a job at Riverton on the Qld/NSW Border near Texas and purchasing a farm on the reaches of Glenlyon Dam.
Unfortunately John suffered several bad episodes of Bi-Polar disorder and struggled to adjust to life at Glenlyon. After a long spell in hospital John decided to go back to his home town of Warwick.
The next 12 months were very challenging for me with a new job, the death of my beautiful father, farming country that I had no idea about, constantly looking for water leaks and broken pipes on 150 acres of hill country and not knowing anyone in the area to help when things went wrong. Gradually I learned new skills, made new friends and the future began to look a bit brighter. I will be forever grateful to a dairy farmer friend back at Clintonvale who despite huge health problems of his own would ring me up every week to check in and see how I was going.
2015 saw me offered the position of Treasurer and Director for the Rare Breeds Trust of Australia, a voluntary position that I hold to this day. I fundraise and help promote the trust wherever I can.
The trust is run entirely by volunteers and receives no government support. I am also secretary and treasurer for the Australian Stud Pig Breeders Queensland Branch.
In 2016 I met my current partner, Richie, through the Highfields Pioneer Village where I still volunteered with sheep for shearing and an animal nursery whenever they needed me.
Richie is a wonderful man that loves animals, vintage motor bikes and old machinery all of which we have in abundance on the farm. He is Mr Fixit for everything on the farm – it is seriously hard and expensive to get tradespeople out when you live an hour from Stanthorpe on the road to nowhere!
From 2016 to 2018 we expanded our Southdown Sheep Stud and Large Black Pig Stud, however when the drought struck we decided to sell the pigs due to the high price of grain and also cull the sheep very heavily.
Times were tough, we just did not have enough money to feed all of the animals – a lovely English backpacker we had at the time who was an incredibly talented lady – organised a go fund me page to feed the herd of shorthorn cows I had built up and the remaining sheep.
Without this I think I would have given up farming altogether. The farmer that purchased my entire herd of Large Black Pigs donated me a B-Double load of hay and this kept us going.
With no end to the drought in sight I sold all but three cows to my good friends that had a lease of some high rainfall country on the Gold Coast Hinterland. It was a hard decision to make but in the end, the best one – our farm is traprock country and more suited to sheep than cows.
We are currently still building the Southdown and Babydoll flock back up and also now have a small flock of Shropshires and English Leicesters – both these breeds are endangered. To teach people about sheep I also keep a representative sheep from the following breeds – Border Leicester, Texel, Dorset Horn and Dorset Down.
The sheep are watched over by four Alpacas. I also have a few milking goats on the farm and milk from September through to April.
I currently work off-farm for the Endeavour Foundation three days a week and with the help of two backpackers that stayed for 10 months at the start of Covid we renovated our farm cottage and now host guests on Airbnb at Glenlyon Dam Holiday Cottage.
In future editions I look forward to telling you a bit more about the farm and also having a reunion with Clare and Holli. I will be letting you know about some local farmers in our area and catching up with some of my old dairy farmer friends.
If you have any questions about rearing pigs, sheep, cattle, goats or poultry or alpacas please do not hesitate to ask. If I don’t know the answer my fellow Directors in the Rare Breeds Trust of Australia have areas of expertise in most types of livestock.
