Gnawing on a tail

Start collecting tails and try the recipe.

Saving the Dairy Shorthorn

What does a rare breed farmer get for Christmas?

More animals!

We have been incredibly fortunate to source a small herd of endangered traditional dairy shorthorn cattle from Western Creek breeders Betty and Warrick Holmes.

Western Creek is under the Western Tiers behind Deloraine, and Betty and Warrick are reluctantly selling their animals and farm so they can move back to New Zealand to be with family.

The dairy shorthorns are absolutely beautiful beasts, with quiet and gentle natures, and we are so pleased that the Holmes’ have entrusted us with their care.

They’re a dual purpose breed which means they’re good for both milk and beef, and they’ve been around for about 200 years.

In the early 1900s the dairy shorthorn was the main breed of cattle in Britain, and was called the “farmer’s cow of England”. It fitted in well with the routine of a mixed farm.

But in a similar story to the Wessex Saddleback pigs, as farming intensified, the breed began to be lost.

Farmers were looking for either high milk production, or heavy carcass weight, and it’s hard to soup-up a cow to do both.

Around the world the dairy shorthorn genetics have been altered to focus on either of these traits, but we’re lucky in Australia there has been a concerted effort to preserve the original dual purpose genes. There's also good old stock in Ireland.

In Australia traditional dairy shorthorns are on the rare breeds list under ‘endangered’, along with traditional herefords and traditional angus.

Aren’t their coats lovely? Ours are mostly roan (red sprinkled with white) but we also have a pure white cow and a few white calves. They can also come in red.

We think they deserve to be held back from extinction because they're perfect for the smallholder wanting to milk a few cows and produce a decent beef animal for the freezer. They're also docile and calve easily. Dairy shorthorns were the foundation stock for many other red breeds, including illawarras and ayrshires.

Neither of us drink much milk, but Guy's already making plans for a small milking shed, and Eliza's digging out her cheese books. It'll be great to have our own yoghurt, butter and cheese to go with our homegrown meat and vegetables.

Warrick and Betty Holmes say goodbye to their cattle

During the chaos of packaging and delivering Christmas hams last week we received a box in the mail from Fran in Corinda, Queensland.

She knits animal tea cosies for charity and recently designed one for the Wessex Saddleback. When she saw us in December's edition of Country Style she couldn't resist posting one to us - teapot and all.

She wrote, "Treat it as fun, or treat it as kitsch, I hope you enjoy it!"

And doesn't it go well with Guy's new Christmas mug?

Thank you Fran!

Bringing the country to the city - agricultural shows

The Devonport Show's on this weekend, and this year there's a real focus on bringing the show back to its roots - agriculture.

In an effort to get more kids through the animal nursery, the coordinator got school classes from the local area to adopt an animal from the nursery and create artwork and projects about it.

The grade 3/4s from Devonport Primary adopted the Wessex Saddleback and have been investigating rare breeds and the idea of having to eat bacon to save their bacon (some struggled with this idea!).

Guy and I visited the school with a couple of piglets and a bottle of milk to round-off their studies.

Here's the beautiful work they came up with:

Milking in motion

Watching a sow feeding her piglets is mesmerising. It’s a show of sound and movement, of chaos and rhythm. And it shows that, in this case, milk is life.

When a sow wants to feed her piglets she calls them with a low, repetitious grunt. If she’s near other sows they’ll all start grunting too. In the wild this collective grunting makes sure that all piglets in the area can get a feed, even if it’s not from their own mum.

The sow doesn’t let her milk flow till she’s relaxed, and you’ll see a change in the piglets’ behaviour – suddenly they’ll stop bashing her boobs and just settle in for the feed.

These piglets are just a couple of days old and are still getting the hang of who goes where in the drinking line-up. In another couple of days they’ll have their own teats, a bit like having a coffee mug with your name on it.

Our piglets spend their first week in a straw-filled stable, with access to a heat lamp to snuggle under. Tasmanian nights are pretty chilly, and we believe this is the most humane way to bring them in to the world.

Generally the biggest and strongest piglets get the sow’s front teats which produce the most milk, and the smaller ones get the back teats. That’s why the runt is always the runt (except occasionally when they’ve got a touch of Small Piglet Syndrome and they defy nature and take over a front teat).

We let our piglets feed from their mothers for six weeks, and then we wean them. That’s about twice the time of pigs reared in intensive systems, and it ensures their immune systems are well-developed. And milk’s free, too.