@chameleon54 wrote:
@brerrabbit585 wrote:You could always buy a second shipping container.
Don't rely too much on the sheep. They have their ups and downs, even worse than ebay sometimes!
I have thought about buying a couple more shipping container. The trouble is three of anything is a collection isnt it ????
I,ve had a few sheep for the last 35 years. The first mob I purchased was in 1981 when I had only recently left school......................... You may remember the drought of 1982.......
..........The feed ran out and I ended up shooting a number of the weaker ones. The best where sent to market where they made fifty cents with a bill for $1.20 for freight.
I also had quite a few hundred sheep in the wool collapse of the late 1980,s - early 1990,s. and was part of the infamous " flock reduction scheme". In many ways that was worse as the sheep where healthy but totally worthless. . The council sent a big excavator out to dig a huge hole and .........well you get the picture. You cant go through that experience without being affected and it still haunts me.
Then there was the mouse plague where the mice ate every scrap of vegitation in the paddock. At night the sheep would sit down and the mice would nest in their wool to stay warm. There where other things the mice did to the sheep, but I wont mention them in polite company.
Strangely enough, the young blokes today dont want to work with sheep. They would much rather sit in a computersied, climate controlled tractor cab and listen to music or chat on facebook, while the tractor drives itself. Like blacksmithing and video shops the skills of sheep grazing are slowly being lost.
The result of all of this is that Australian and global sheep numbers are at record lows. This has resulted in a shortage of wool and prime lamb, with the result that prices have jumped around 50% in a year to record highs. I have spent the last three years breeding up a nice flock of 1000 young breeding ewes that are just coming into their prime. With any luck I can catch the market peaks over the next few years, pay my debts off and semi retire in around 5 years time. Thats the plan anyway. Heres hoping the seasons hold.
Anyway I,m off now to deliver a new company car to my son, so that he can check the water troughs on our remote property 250 km. away.............A 2000 model Holden Jackaroo 4wd. I found for $200 on gumtree. It cost me more than that to register it.....I,m just crossing my fingers that it gets me there safetly..........
I remember the drought of 1982 all too clearly, made worse by the floods in 1981 ruining a lot of feed. I think dad sold all the sheep in 1977 but we still had about 400 cattle to feed. We used to take the cows out on the road and all the roadsides around us were squeaky clean - something you can't do these days even if you are a long way from town. I remember the days of the sheep pits even though we had no sheep at the time. We had a left-over bale of wool that never got sent off with the rest and after my father died in '86 we took it to the local wool brokers and got quite a pleasant surprise.
My father had two sayings in relation to farming - always halve your expected income and double the expenses; and, when everyone else is running east, you need to run west - both learnt from experience. He had an 'out paddock' of about 600 acres at Terip Terip that he cleared with a massive bulldozer (for its time) and then he grew potatoes. He found out the hard way that if potatoes were a good price you didn't plant any that year because everyone else would and there'd be a glut and they'd be worthless. You waited till prices hit rock bottom and then planted them because nobody else would bother. I was too young to remember him growing potatoes, or even selling that farm. Land was a lot cheaper back then and you could make decent money from sheep, but it didn't last.
