The day of the rooster

When Guy was a child he was banned from breeding chooks.

I can understand being barred from the biscuit tin, or taken away from the tv, but how often do parents have to sanction chook breeding?

At his worst Guy had 200 in the backyard. And pocket money wasn’t covering the feed costs.

I think it’s genetic. Guy’s brother Mark has the same trait - it just took a little longer to show. He was in his early 20s before he started to breed unusual numbers. He’s now got one of the best collections of rare breed Japanese bantams in Australia.

When we moved to the farm I was pretty excited that Guy came with chooks. I had pots and pans, a washing machine, two guinea pigs, and two Indian Runner drakes, but they didn’t produce eggs for my cakes and quiches.

However, I was a little surprised when the chooks took more than one ute load to deliver.

Our main types are Buff Sussex (a rare breed) and Rhode Island Reds.

Then we’ve got a few white bantam crosses apparently because they’re good sitters. Very good sitters. So good you think a bit of natural selection’s been going on (the bush is teeming with quolls and devils), then three weeks later they’re back from the dead with a dozen mongrel chickens under their feet.

We’ve also got a breed called “Guy’s Specials”. They’ve got an unusual combination of genes - they turn out grey and speckled - so of course we’ve got to keep them going.

One night I flopped back on a bale of hay, exhausted, and turned my head to the left to see a chook settled on a nest of eggs. I looked up at Guy, questioningly.

“They’re due out next week,” he said.

Right. So he’s deliberately and secretively putting eggs under chooks.

So why does Eliza let Guy get away with it?

Because she knows that every rooster that hatches will end up in her crock pot. And there’s nothing better than a roasted rooster, with thigh meat dark as lamb (see red meat vs white meat blog), served up with veggies from the garden.

When it comes to doing the deed, it’s obviously the man’s job to use the axe. And gutting, of course.

But why is it the woman’s job to take the scales and claws off the feet just because she has finer fingers?

I really should put my foot down.

Savouring pork belly

Last night we shed our farm clothes and found some glitz at the back of the wardrobe to attend Burnie's Savour Tasmania dinner at Bayviews Restaurant, featuring Simon Bryant from ABC TV's "The Cook and the Chef". It was great that such an event was held in the north-west and it was exciting for us to have a high profile chef use our pork on his menu.

This is the moment when we snuck in to the kitchen to see our belly being prepared and Simon said, "Is this your pork?". We were so proud. We believe that it was the first time that Simon had used Wessex Saddleback, and he was pleased with the quality of the product. With him is Bayviews' executive chef Pat Sheriff.

The menu was six courses featuring green lip abalone, ocean trout, (pork belly), angus beef cheek and wagyu striploin, and a pepperyberry vodka chocolate parfait.

Pork belly - yummo!

(About midnight....Simon had been posing for lots of photos and it was well past farmers' bedtime.)

Celebrating 12 months on the farm

It’s been a year since we backed a rent-a-truck up to the garage, unloaded our furniture, and lit the first fire in our woodheater.

And it’s a year since we drove a horse-float of sows up the driveway, and walked our boar Domino down the lane, past a pig-rooting miniature horse we inherited with the property.

(Sandy, 28, had an inbuilt hatred of pigs, apparently common in horses. He now lives with Eliza’s mum, for fear of a heart attack the pigs might provoke).

We thought it would be good to take this chance to look out the window and reflect on what we’ve done over the past 12 months - instead of just looking out and making a list of what we still need to do.

We’ve built our breeding herd from 10 to 20 sows and have been producing pig meat each week for the past seven months. It is amazing to think that with our small herd we are now the largest free range pig farmers in Tasmania, and we believe we have the second largest herd of Wessex Saddleback sows in the world.

With so many pigs breeding, we’re now seeing some of the genetic traits that we thought were lost coming back. Large litters are appearing on a regular basis. Phantom, our star sow, has got 13 piglets at the moment, and last litter she had 12. But while about half of our sows are having these big litters, we’ve still got ones producing only six or seven, so there’s still improvement to be made.

Thousands of metres of wire and hundreds of posts have been set up to keep in the growing number of pigs. The neighbours say we could keep in rhinos.

About 600 native trees have been planted in shelter belts to buffer us and the pigs against the amazing winds that come from the west and to increase the habitat for native birds. Why wasn’t there wind on the day when we came with the real estate agent? It blew constantly for six months after settlement.

Guy squeezed 40 fruit trees into the orchard, with Eliza telling him that if he was going to put them in that close together it’d be interesting to see what his pruning skills were like when they grew a bit.

The veggie garden is providing all our vegetables. Guy has agreed to leave Eliza to it, and not make comment about the ‘artistic’ layout or her extreme water efficiency.

The pigs are still digging up the future berry patch...

We’ve survived our first couple of Business Activity Statements. Just. A good hot meal, beer, and plenty of ham seems to encourage our accountant to wade through our lounge floor filing system.

And we think we’re making a bit of progress on the big goal – bringing back the Wessex Saddleback and teaching people about rare breeds, real food, and ethical meat production.

It’s rare for a weekend to go by without a chef or a family dropping in to watch the piglets run around and scratch a grunting sow.

We’d like to thank everyone who’s helped us on the farm, bought our pork, and heartily promoted what we’re doing. One of the main highlights of the past year has been meeting like-minded, passionate people.

While we’re proud of our first 12 months on the farm, we’re quite aware that this is still just the beginning of the journey.

Tips to warm up: eat chestnuts, shovel pig poo

Evening itinerary:

Arrive home from day job as the sun sets.

Check last night's 13 newborns (when I watched steam rise from their wet, warm bodies).

Shovel out stables where mums and babies are, replace with fresh barley straw.

Pick grass for squeaking guinea pigs and sniffing rabbit.

Pick kale for hungry human (curly and red russian).

Roast chestnuts (from Preolenna, high rainfall area in the far north-west) under hot grill.

Invent kale fritters with chopped, cooked kale, buff sussex eggs, crumbly local cheese, and breadcrumbs.

Autumn is definitely here, there's no doubting it now. Speaking in short sentences also helps conserve energy for warmth.

A morning at funny farm

Feather fascinator

This buff sussex hen was quite put-out this morning when a feather got stuck to her comb. A couple of hours after I took the photo she was still trying to shake it off.

Remember the sow with the funny tail that arrived on the farm in December last year?

We thought she must have had it trod on when she was a piglet, but it appears the shape is heritable. One of her nine piglets is not quite like the others.

We've got a lot of little piggies running round getting in to trouble at the moment. They're just the right size to slide under the electric fence.

So straight to the grain shed they go...

And from her seat on the rock wall outside the stable, Puss observes it all. What a farm to have been dumped at, she thinks.

(More on the cat, and the division she has caused, in a future post).