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.

The reality of farming

For the past 24 hours I’ve had my hand up a sow. She’s been in labour so long the piglets are dying inside her. My hands are raw and ripped from trying to drag out one of the piglets by its teeth – the only bit I can catch on to.

The sow’s on her first litter, so we call her a gilt, and the piglets are simply too big for her. She’s worn out from pushing and her muscles have seized up from the strain.

I pulled out the first piglet yesterday, it was breech, but livened up pretty quickly once it was out and rubbed with a bit of straw. I thought that once the first one was born the rest would follow easily. Sometimes you just need to clear the blockage.

But as the day progressed nothing else appeared. And then over a couple of hours we pulled out two dead piglets. They were huge. They could have been a few days old. Gilts typically have smaller litters, but ideally the piglets are small too.

Before bed last night we went out for a final time to see if anything else had shifted. Guy’s hands are too wide for a gilt, so it’s my job to go digging. I lay on the straw, pressed into the spilt birthing juices, breathing in the unique smell of a farrowing sow.

With my arm fully in, I could just wriggle my fingers to feel a snout. When I put my finger in its mouth it bit down hard. Piglets’ teeth are incredibly sharp. I could feel its tongue moving about.

Over an hour I drew the piglet back and forth through the sow’s cavity. Countless times I had it within a handspan of the exit, and then it would be sucked back in by powerful muscles. It fell back fully out of reach after 11pm and I was spent.

Inside I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror: puffy and red-eyed, snot bubbling at my nostrils, blood spattered on my face. I was exhausted. And I knew that the piglet that was struggling to be born would probably be dead by morning.

This is the worst part of farming. A town-living friend said to me once that farming just seems to be all about life and death. Every day we’re confronted with it. Yesterday we killed nine roosters for the freezer. A week ago a quoll took some of our chooks. In the same week two litters of healthy piglets were born. In a fortnight our sheep will start lambing.

Neither of us wanted to get up this morning to check the sow. The piglets would either be dead beside her, or there would be nothing, which meant they were dead inside.

There was nothing.

I can feel a dead piglet just past her hips. She can’t push it through the last narrow bit, and I’ve been trying all morning to catch hold of the piglet long enough to drag it through.

The vet says there’s nothing we can do but let the piglet decompose and pump the sow with antibiotics every 12 hours to keep her alive. We’ve no idea how many more piglets are inside.

Reality shook me as I strained one last time to reach the piglet. I touched its flaccid tongue hanging between its teeth, and its brother - the sole survivor - nuzzled my shoulder, looking for a teat. Farming really is about the cycle of life.

Chestnut crunching for guilt-free crackling

Tasmania has only one commercial chestnut orchard, and our pigs are fortunate we know the owners.

About five years ago I met chestnut growers Colleen and Daryl Dibley. Their orchard is at Preolenna, up in the hills 20km south of Wynyard.

Preolenna used to be a prime dairy farming area, but now it’s a dark monoculture landscape of tree plantations.

The Dibleys are one of the few property owners at Preolenna still trying to make a living from the land.

Unfortunately this year’s been a bit of a fizzer. Chestnuts are wind pollinated, and the rain during January weighed down the flowers and meant the pollination failed.

But the upside of that has meant there have been plenty of reject chestnuts for our pigs!

The pigs love them, so much that when I take a bucket out to the paddock I have to be quick on my gum-booted feet to avoid being knocked over. The pigs eat the chestnuts shell and all.

It’s been known for centuries that pigs fed on chestnuts taste better. And there’s plenty of science out there on the improved meat and fat qualities. Chestnut-finished pork also has high levels of unsaturated fat, including heart-healthy oleic acid.

In Europe pigs have played an important role each season by cleaning out the chestnut orchards after the main harvest, eating the diseased and over-looked fruit. Chestnut-reared pork is cherished and commands a higher price.

You probably won’t notice a huge difference in our pigs this year, since they’re only getting small quantities as part of a broader mixed diet, but it’s nice to see the pigs enjoying themselves, and making a racket, crunching on such a delicacy in Tasmania.

Personally, I like them roasted with parsnips, beetroot, pumpkin, garlic and rosemary, and doused in olive oil and golden syrup.

Two years of hard work and satisfaction

It’s our farm birthday this week – two years at Mount Gnomon Farm!

It’s been a busy and rewarding year and a rollercoaster ride of emotions. Over the past 12 months we added two more rare breeds of cattle to the farm, a rare breed of duck, a couple of rare breeds of chooks and we reintroduced a rare breed of sheep to Tasmania. It was also a year that saw us double our number of Wessex Saddleback pigs, encouraging us to find new markets. Last Christmas we somehow managed to survive the distribution of 200 hams and while it was stressful, it was a great thrill for us to see families enjoying something that we produced, on one of the biggest days of the year.

One of the highlights was being invited to Sydney by chef Alex Herbert who manages and operates the award-winning restaurant Bird Cow Fish. Alex is a big supporter of ethical food and was keen to hear our story and help us establish connections with other restaurants in Sydney. Alex gave us room in her fridge for our samples while we travelled back and forth from appointments with places like Tetsuya’s, Four in Hand, District Dining, Marque Restaurant and Quay. The response to our product was fantastic, but the realities of actually supplying some of these restaurants on a regular basis hit home. A place like Quay, where head chef Peter Gilmore has a signature pork belly dish, goes through 30 pork bellies a week. That’s about 15 pigs’ worth, or 90kg. In Tasmania the restaurants we supply use only a couple of week. There’s a lot to be said about population and running a booming restaurant business.

In November we had enough spare produce to have a stall at the local farmers’ markets in Burnie, Devonport and Evandale. Despite the early starts (a challenge for me, not so much for Eliza who’s used to it), we’ve really enjoyed the markets, as we get to talk to our customers and raise awareness about farming free range and the plight of rare breeds of livestock.

While it’s all been pretty exciting, farming has a way of quickly bringing you back to reality. The same day our first box of pork arrived at Tetsuya’s restaurant, one of our sows lost 9 out of her 10 piglets overnight. We went to bed after Marybelle had given birth to 10 healthy piglets who’d all had a good feed and looked content. But we woke to the horror of finding all but one of the piglets had lost so much weight in a few hours that despite our best efforts to feed them with a dripper we couldn’t save them. Piglets are so small and fragile and need to be fed every couple of hours to survive. In this case their mother had developed mastitis and stopped producing milk, and before we could treat her it was too late.

While the loss of piglets is an emotional blow for both the mother and us, it also hurts our small business financially and six months later puts a dent in our ability to supply our regular customers. Marybelle has made it up, fortunately, and is currently rearing a bouncy litter of 12.

At Mount Gnomon we’ve begun to realise that in farming some things are beyond your control. Just recently we lost our second sow to a snake bite. When we choose to run our pigs free range next to the bush we have to accept that sometimes snakes will come in contact with our pigs. As nature-lovers we respect that snakes are native to the environment and it would be wrong to harm them or remove them. And since they’re territorial the removal of one snake will only see another snake take its place.

The biggest change this year came when I resigned from my job with the Tasmanian Institute of Agricultural Research to take on the role of managing our growing menagerie and developing the business. After nearly two years of working full time while establishing the farm, it was a big leap of faith. If you buy a farm and have a big mortgage, you really have no choice but to work off-farm as you purchase the necessary infrastructure to get the business going. First we bought the animals, then the water infrastructure, pig housing, fencing, a four-wheel motorbike for feeding, a ute for taking the pigs to market … the list goes on. A farm is certainly a great way of spending money. Our accountant mentioned to us that at some stage we’ll have to stop spending and start making some money (Eliza’s mother agrees).

Giving up the luxury of regular payslips was a big step, and when I rang my grandmothers to discuss the move, they thought I was a bit crazy: “You’re giving up a good job to become a pig farmer?”. Both my grandmothers have spent most of their lives on farms and are aware of the struggles facing Tasmanian farmers today. While we might have a reduced cash flow, we’ve now got the time to expand our business, do our own packaging, shuffle the dreaded paperwork, and show more people around the farm. Hardly a week goes by when we don’t have a group descending on the property for a sticky-beak. The biggest highlight for me this year was having more than 35 people accepting our blog invitation to plant native trees to create shelterbelts on the farm. People travelled from all over the state to work alongside each other, and as a result of their community spirit 600 trees were planted in just a few hours.

Thank you for your continuing support of our adventure.

Sourdough obsession

You’d think there were enough mouths to feed on this farm, but I’ve added another one to the menagerie.

Fortunately this one only needs feeding once a week. It’s wild, but hasn’t escaped yet.

About three years ago I went to a sourdough-making workshop at a friend’s house. I came home, inspired, with my little jar of frothing flour and water. Some months later I found that jar in a forgotten corner of the fridge, containing a dark green slime swimming in black liquid.

But a couple of months ago I started thinking again of wild yeasts when I was flicking through a bread-making book. The thought of capturing my own yeasts, and keeping the starter like a pet, inspired me again.

Guy says I’ve been neglecting the blog since I’ve been bread making, and I apologise. He hasn’t, however, suggested I stop baking.

I began with an incredibly simple mixture of organic wholemeal flour and water – one cup of each in a plastic honey bucket with a tea towel over the top. I let it sit for a couple of days on the kitchen bench and it started to bubble.

I fed it another cup of flour and cup of water, and it bubbled again. I’ve read that wholemeal is the best flour to get a starter going - it’s the most vigorous fermenter. I’m also planning to make a rye starter for a different flavour.

After the first feed you need to throw out half the starter (in the compost) and feed it again. When the starter is in its infancy you should do this every day for a week, and you’ll notice the smell becoming richer and more complex.

It’s great getting to know the habits of your starter. Now mine’s established I keep it in the fridge in the garage (putting the starter in the fridge slows down the fermentation, but you still should feed it once a week). When it’s hungry it’ll look flat and won’t have many bubbles. It might even have a bit of darkish liquid on top called hooch – it’s a by-product of the fermentation. After you feed the starter it comes to life in about six hours: it bubbles and rises a couple of centimetres, happy again.

My routine now when I’m baking is to take the starter out on a Friday night and mix a big ladleful of it with 600ml of warmish water. I then stir in 500g of flour (any sort you want, but I usually do this stage with white) and I leave this gluggy mix overnight covered with a plastic bag. Some books call this the ‘sponge’.

Next morning the sponge will be really bubbly and light. It’s like you’ve given your starter a massive feed. Now I add 600g of flour – I’ve been experimenting with mixtures of white with wholemeal or spelt or rye (don’t be too heavy-handed with the rye though, it’s pretty dense) – and 25g of sea salt.

It’s important to rest the dough now, and let the flour soak up all the water. After half an hour I knead it for 5-10 minutes. I’ve read lots of complicated recipes involving long kneads and lots of re-shaping, but for what I’m doing, it’s really not necessary.

The wetter the dough is the bigger the air holes will be. It’ll also spread out more sideways than up. If the dough’s drier it’ll keep its shape better while it’s rising, but it will be denser.

I’ve been splitting the dough in two and shaping it into rounds. Then I leave them on trays covered with cotton cloths and flour for about six hours. That’s enough time to get heaps of jobs done on the farm, or a full day of brass band practice (we competed in the Nationals at Easter!).

Close to cooking time the dough should have just about doubled in size. Your oven needs to be really hot. I crank mine up to 260 degrees Celsius. There are all sorts of fancy baking stones and ceramic containers you can bake in, but at the moment I’m just using a couple of pizza stones. I pre-heat them too.

When the oven light’s gone off I slash the tops of the loaves with a bread knife, down to about 1cm, and then I spray with water.

Then comes the bit where I get a bit stressed: I worry about losing too much heat out of the oven while I’m mucking about getting the dough off the trays and onto the stones, but I’m getting quicker as I become more confident.

Bake the bread for 10 minutes at this high heat, and then check to see how it’s browning. If it’s looking pretty dark I turn it down to 170, if it’s only a little bit brown I’ll keep it at 180-90. The rest of the cooking takes about 30 minutes. It’s ready if it sounds hollow when you tap it.

Problems I’ve had so far that I’ve managed to solve:
- Starter not rising after I fed it – I was being too stingy with the feed and it was a bit too watery. Boosted the flour ratio.
- Not enough air holes in the bread – made the dough moister. I think the holiness has also improved as the starter has matured.

So far I’ve made different combinations of white, wholemeal, spelt and rye breads. I’ve also made a tasty combination of quinoa and spelt. I made an accidental ciabatta too, but so far the Turkish bread has been the biggest hit.

Photos from top:

- Rye and white

- Rye and white cross-section

- Established starter

- Turkish bread

- Quinoa and spelt

- White (decadent!)