Milking sheep in Millau

Ever wondered how a sheep is milked? As you watch, imagine going through this process twice a day - both the farmer and the sheep!

These Lacaune sheep were on the Cassan family farm where we stayed at Millau, southern France. Their milk is used to make the famous Roquefort cheese.

Footage shot by Mount Gnomon's Eliza Wood. Editing by Bronwyn Purvis.  

Thank you to the fabulous Chiara and Diodorim Saviola (you met them in Italy at the Agritourismo Casa Nouva). They are not just farmers and agritourismo operators, they are also very talented musicians. On this film you hear their track "Miniature, Andante". Chiara is playing flute, and Diodorim the harpsichord.

Annie's flock at Camarès

Annie Bernat has been welcoming the public to her sheep farm in France since long before it was trendy, and decades later she still loves it.

Annie and her brother's property is in between the narrow roads at Camarès, in central southern France. They've got about 600 Lacaune ewes - the sort of sheep that produce milk for Roquefort cheese.

The soil in this area looks really strange. It's red like ours, perhaps a bit more maroonish, but instead of being made up of soft lumps it's rocky and shard-like. (A bit of research tells me it's a clay saturated with iron oxide, and it's full of the skeletons of corals and marine critters from 250 million years ago).

The dirt seems to grow good grass though, because the ewes are excellent producers (350 litres per girl per season) and the barns are packed with giant fresh-smelling bales of hay.

When we got to the farm the school holiday crowd was taking off its blue shoe protectors after touring the sheep barns, and was headed towards the soft and squeezable animals.

As the mothers gathered up their young and the squishy protectors, Annie tossed grain about for the chooks who came running for the finish line from the ground floor of the stone farmhouse.

Around the corner we stopped to get out the rabbits, and once everyone under 10 had held one we poked our heads into the stable to say hello to the horses.

Then up we went past the tractor sheds, past the Jenny Craig Shetland pony pen, into a simply, but  rather nicely, restored barn.

Annie told me (through my translator and friend Marion) that she got some funding to help with the glass windows and doors, and also for the three-legged stools around the tables.

As the parents lifted the kids onto the stools, Annie rushed about putting baskets of bread on the tables and started sharing the cheese. The chunks of Roquefort were the size of lunch plates and had the ripe smell of room temperature. Jam was also passed around, and the weary parents welcomed the red wine that was poured for them.

There was a lovely feeling of chaos - a bit like a flurry of warm wind between us - but Annie had done this hundreds of times and knew what a lovely feeling it was.

After the families had paid up (a tiny five Euros per adult), Annie sat with us and the left-overs, talking about how she and a handful of women sheep farmers had got together to organise the farm tours. They got some help with printing brochures, and eventually convinced the cheese companies to let them sell Roquefort from their farms (albeit at a higher price than at the factories).

Annie makes barely anything from the tours, and she doesn't have a farm shop to divert the visitors through on their way to the car park, but you can see she just loves sharing her lifestyle and animals with families who are willing to drive out to Camarès and get a bit dirty.

Annie's flock at Camarès, France, a set on Flickr.

Pig farmer visits a shepherd

Pecora Cornigliese, a set on Flickr.

While we were staying at Agriturismo Casanuova, in the Province of Parma, we heard about a rare breed of sheep that was making a comeback in the area.

The Pecora Cornigliese is an old breed native to the mountains near Parma. It's useful for milk, meat, and wool.

The breed has become rare because of a shortage of shepherds. In the village I visited, Rigoso, there used to be about 20 shepherds. Now there are less than a handful - including the one I met, Onorato.

The shepherds receive support from the EU (15 Euros per animal, per year), but there doesn't seem to be support to help them get their products to the markets.

Italians don't actually eat much lamb, so the future of this breed may be determined by how well it is marketed.

Shopping for Shrops

“I don’t eat anything unless it’s got a black nose,” says Neil Neilson, third generation Shropshire sheep breeder from Victoria.

Neil’s in his mid-80s and still farming the unforgiving soil at Baringhup, to the north of Ballarat.

“When we have visitors and we have a roast they all say, ‘oh that’s the best roast we’ve ever had - it’s so sweet’, but it is.”

Neil’s family has had Shropshires since around 1860, when his grandfather bought 20 of the first ewes introduced to Australia from England.

Once in Australia, Shropshires took off, particularly in Tasmania. In the 1890s three ‘elite’ Shropshire breeders immigrated to Tasmania with their flocks.

The Shropshires had a big impact on the sheep meat industry. Before 1900 about 20,000 lamb carcasses left Australia each year. Ten years later there were several millions, and 70 per cent of them were sired by Shropshires.

The boom in popularity was unfortunately followed by a sharp drop after the First World War. It seems European housewives wanted smaller joints as they balanced their budgets, and the Shropshire was too big. Neil Neilson says he can also remember the Shropshire hides being unpopular because they had black skin around the head and legs.

There are now only about 10 registered flocks in Australia, and after many months of planning we have bought a little flock and reintroduced them to Tasmania.

We bought 27 ewes from the Neilsons, and we sourced a ram and another ewe from Fiona and Nicholas Chambers of Daylesford, Victoria. We carted the ram and single ewe home on our ute on the boat, and had so much pleasure telling the other passengers about our special cargo. A couple of months later a transport company brought over the rest of the flock.

Neil has been reminding us how important it is to keep the sheep pure, and cull the ones that aren’t up to standard.

“My dad always used to say to us, ‘if you want to keep something pure you’ve got a big job. You’ve only got to make one mistake and introduce one ram that’s not as good as it should be, and you start back to scratch again’.

“We’ve all been very careful with the Shrops and we’re proud of that.”

He says it’s hard to find pure flocks in Australia, and many have been crossed with other breeds. It will be a challenge for us to source rams of good type.

We feel a deep sense of responsibility now we’ve got the Shropshires. It’s raining at the moment, and the sheep are out in the paddock sheltering their young lambs. There are a couple of ewes still with bulging, low tummies waiting to give birth.

We have a responsibility both to the breed and the Neilsons. This is the first time they’ve sold a group of their ewes as a flock. It’s such a credit to them that they have kept their stud going for so long.

“They seem to have a better constitution than most sheep, and that’s really why we’ve stuck to them,” Neil says.

“They seem to be able to turn their tucker into fat and meat quicker than anything else.”

Listen to Neil tell the story of when he almost lost all his Shrops, and see the photos of our new lambs.