A shaky start…

Hello all, and welcome to my very first blog post!

Let me give you a quick rundown of my life so far – I currently live in Australia, but I was born in the UK in the early eighties…I spent my formative years there on my parents pig farm where I passed my days curled up under the heat lamps with the piglets while my parents were working, eating the weaner pellets and just generally getting myself into trouble.

At aged five my parents decided to leave the rocky shores of England, and head to Sweden. Northern Sweden in fact, to a little town called Norrfjärden where they had bought themselves a small (by today’s standards) dairy farm. It was a farm of about 80 milking cows, and the cows lived indoors all year round on account of the metres of winter snow, followed by metres of autumn and spring permafrost which prevented grass growth for all bar about 6-8 weeks of the year. Silage and hay cutting season was pure madness (the grass could grow an inch in 24 hours due to the midnight sun) which involved cutting and baling for anywhere up to 60 hours at a stretch before falling exhausted into bed for a four hour nap, before getting up to do it all again until the job was done. This was a community endeavour, with local farmers sharing equipment and labour to complete this onerous but essential task. I learned a lot about camaraderie and community spirit in those days, and have always hoped to find a place where I can emulate it. After three years of backbreaking, soul destroying labour, a recession and a change in government, my parents threw in the towel – and my dad made me promise that I would never stray into the world of dairy farming…

Onwards we ploughed, this time to the sunny island of Malta in the Mediterranean, where, for some unknown reason my parents decided we should live on a small sailing boat. I’m certainly not complaining – what more could an eight year old dream of? Ten years we lived aboard our little sailing boat, and the first few years we sailed all over the Med – from Sicily and Italy, to Greece, Tunisia, Sardinia, Corsica and a host of small Islands like Lampedusa and Pantelleria which many will never have even heard of. Again, I took valuable lessons from these times – about trust, family, personal responsibility and the importance of personal space, which I still adhere to to this day. Getting too heavy for you yet? Apologies, I shall move on…

At age seventeen, I graduated from High School. Strangely I always enjoyed science and art the most (not very compatible I know) but I had selected the hard sciences as my 3 A level subjects – Chemistry, Biology and Pure and Applied Mathematics. I had aced them all, but what next? Feeling lost and depressed, I decided to venture overseas for a year to make up my mind – and found myself on a kibbutz in Israel, and where else should I wind up but working on the Kibbutz dairy? I recall my first morning of work as vividly as if it were yesterday – 3.30 am, heavy fog and me blearily stumbling up the road until I crested the hill overlooking the farm and the smells and sounds met me head on. It was an epiphany, that moment; I had come home.

All of the myriad winding paths I have taken since that moment have inexorably led me to this point. I am a passionate dairy (share) farmer in one of the drier regions of South Australia (how I came here is another story!) on a 5000 acre non-irrigated farm milking 450 cows at peak. I also have a passion for art and photography, reading and a host of other endeavors….so hopefully you can find something in my posts to entertain and inform you – because boy do I have some tales to tell!