Clover Hill Diaries – Join Me and Be the Change
#Strongwomen. "I write about the power of trying, because I want to be okay with failing. I write about generosity because I battle selfishness. I write about joy because I know sorrow. I write about faith because I almost lost mine, and I know what it is to be broken and in need of redemption. I write about gratitude because I am thankful – for all of it." Kristin Armstrong
Archive of Action4Agricuture introduced young people to agriculture through art (
Yesterday Michael and I went to get the cows in for the midday milking and I captured these touching moments between one of our cows and the next door neighbour’s horses
A little banter over the fence
Com’on girl time to go home for milking – OOh cant she stay
Not listening?
Kiss goodbye
Long forlorn looks
Till next time
In 2000 our dairy farm was a one man operation milking 80 cows twice daily.
In 2005 our cow numbers had increased to 180 and we moved to milking three times daily
In 2008 we took on a second lease farm and milked a total of 400 cows three times daily
Today we employ ten people and milk 500 cows on two farms
The home farm never ceases to amaze me.
In the last 35 years the amount of land we farm on has stayed the same.
The number of people working and the cows being milked keeps increasing.
Clover Hill cows coming home for milking Boxing Day 2011
In 35 years the dairy has grown from a 6 bale walk thru to a 5 aside herringbone to a 14 aside double up herringbone.
Michael reflects on the milk biz changes in his lifetime
And the milk vat. More than anything I think the milk vat gives the most visual story of the growth of our milk business
This week we installed a 30,000 litre milk vat.
When we installed the 5,000 vat in 1995 we never dreamed we would fill this let alone get to the stage were we filled it twice a day. Its hard to believe 30 years ago our daily milk production fitted into a 1,000 litre vat.
Its no mean feat getting a 30,000 litre vat up our hill let alone finding enough room to put it at the dairy
The vat would replace two x five thousand litres vats we currently have
Inside
Outside
As you can see room isn’t exactly abundant
So the sacrificial lamb was my garden – but all in a good cause
So now we had found the spot. The next thing was to source a vat, only to find it had to be made in New Zealand and that took 16 weeks. Then it needed 2 cranes and a team of specialists all available on the same day at the same time to make it all happen.
Between the farm team we managed to capture this historic day via mobile phones and camera/video footage.
You can watch the video footage here
and see the photographs here
Not one but two cranes
The truck driver looked pretty pleased to get it there all in one piece. The trip from the dock wasn’t exactly a walk in the park with the vat shifting quite a bit to one side on the way as you can see
But its amazing what team work can do
or at least what Ozzie team work can do. Soon found out half the parts to make it work were still sitting on the dock in NZ
It always amuses me when people assume the cows get a day off for Christmas. Do breast feeding mothers get Xmas off? I don’t think so.
After all when you take on the responsibility of caring for other living things whether they be animals or children it is 365 and 24/7.
No-one is complaining at Clover Hill – though Michael is not quite sure how he scored the midday shift at the home farm but then that still leaves 21 hours to celebrate.
On our farm Louise coordinates the Xmas cheer.
Louise is just one of those people everybody loves having on their team. Louise brings the festive spirit to the dairy like no other
For the babies she looks after
and this one just 4 hours old
for Sean
for Martin
There is also rumour Louise has pictures of Michael and Nick with antlers on. They are yet to surface but rest assured I am on working on it. WATCH THIS SPACE
The girls waiting to be milked think all of these hijinks are highly amusing.
Though they are a bit jealous when they find out Louise has Antlers for Eileen but not for all of them!!
But then Eileen’s face is adorable and lends itself to superb photo opps don’t you think?
Its not all play and no work. The babies still get fed and weighed to make sure we are taking just as good care of them as their mums do.
and back at the Chook pen new life has arrived for Christmas
But the girls got off the eggs before they had all hatched. So the farmers took over from nature and bought a few more into world
Which we will give back to their mums in a few days
Craig saved Christmas for our next neighbour by finding and fixing her broken water pipe
Michael said thanks Craig with a few beers.
The grain arrives and gets unloaded and Col is still trying to find out why all the parts haven’t arrived from NZ to install the new 30,000 milk vat. OMG Can you believe someone can put a vat this size on a ship and let it sail it across the ocean and left all the other bits that make it work sitting on the dock which now all have to be put on a plane and flown over. All that CO2
And what do you know? Its dawn and its all happening again.
The girls say “Do we really have to go down that big hill this morning?
and Nick and Sean bring the springers (cows calving in the next 3 weeks) home
And next thing you know the girls are back in the dairy waiting patiently to be milked.
Sean’s on the job
Wouldn’t give it up for quits.
People say farmers are always complaining about the weather. When it’s supposed to be sunny farmers say it should be raining and when it’s supposed to be raining it’s supposed to be sunny.
So when I got a call from the local radio station wanting to do a story on the weather with the opening line “ Surely all you dairy farmers must be happy this rain will be making the grass grow” you can imagine little Ms #Agvocacy thinks to herself the last thing I want to do is a “whingeing farmer story”
But I thought no this is a good story to tell – there are many very good reasons for farmers’ preoccupation with the weather.
Farmers after all are no different to anyone else in business. Everyone likes to feel they are in control and the weather is one of the key things farmers want on their side but it is the very thing they have no control over. But whilst you can’t control the weather you can certainly control how you are prepared for it.
Rain is topical this year right across the country. In our region we had our so called 1 in 50 year flood in March when 500 mm or 20 inches of rain fell in 48 hours. So what does that look like?
Well here is a typical sunny day at Lemon Grove Research Farm for the cows
This is what it looked like in the same place at 10am on March 21st during our 1 in 50 year flood
The same spot one hour later. The water rose in front of our very eyes. So fast we almost didn’t get cows onto higher ground quick enough and five cows washed away and sadly one drowned.
And what was happening at the home farm?
This is our neighbour Viv determined to get “that shot”.
This was almost repeated two weeks ago when we had 8 inches (200mm) in 8 hours
This year we have had at total of 110 inches (2500mm) of rain. This is 65% more rain than our average good year but it is a “drought” compared to 1950 and 1974 when the farm had a whopping 140 inches (3500mm)
So what about all that green grass you ask?
Grass for cows (or should I say pasture) is all about quality not quantity. Cows are discerning diners as my good friend Milk Maid Marian says. They like grass that is short and sweet.
It doesn’t get much better than this
Short. sweet grass is full of sugar. For plants to produce sugar they need plenty of sunshine.
Chocolate for cows
In fact growing grass is a fine art that all good dairy farmers have perfected to a tee and there is a saying in the industry that the difference between a good farm and the rest in just two weeks.
In fact we are doing pasture trials at the Lemon Grove Farm just to prove the anecdotal evidence.
Michael is a bit of a pasture guru as you can see
There is a great little story on how we grow grass at Clover Hill Dairies as part of the Jet and Emma Farm Management Series here if you would like to know the nitty gritty.
This is also time of the year when farmers often take advantage of the excess of grass to store some fodder for winter by cutting high quality pasture to make hay and silage.
It isn’t a myth. You do need to make hay while the sun shines but for that you need a 48 hour window of dry weather
Making Hay on Jamberoo Swamp (Photograph courtesy of Linda Faiers copyright)
As I said earlier dairy farmers can’t control the weather but we can prepare for it and often that is just simple things.
For example cows are no difffrent to people when it comes to wet feet. Just like standing in water makes your feet soft and wrinkley so does standing in wet soggy paddocks for cows. So we do things like add extra zinc to the cows feed to help harden their hooves which helps reduce the incidence of sore feet.
Each cow gets fed a specially formulated ration in the dairy at every milking. This is a perfect way to fine tune the diet when weather conditions and pasture growth aren’t ideal for cows.
We also make sure our laneways are super smooth highways and the team are very mindful of the cows and move them at very gentle pace during the wet especially on the home farm where the hills become very slippery.
The mountainside that looks so pretty can be turn into a cow slippery slide nightmare in a couple of hours
The perfect place to dairy
Jamberoo is the birth place of the Australian dairy industry and its still a great place to dairy for all the right reasons. We have great volcanic soil, which means despite all the rain the drainage is still excellent and the water moves away very quickly. Our cows aren’t whingeing as you can see.
There is always plenty to eat Rain Hail or Shine
What about the radio interivew you ask? Well except for managing to move the flood back a whole month ( cant believe I said that) it went off okay. You can decide here
Recognising all food fibre industries share common ground we have designed the Archibull Prize as a cross industry partnership.
This year we showcased grains, beef, sheep, wool, dairy and the egg industry.
There are some superb dairy entries with Model Farms High School coming second overall.
This post is a tribute to all the schools who studied the dairy industry and showcases the winning dairy entries.
A special thank you to our Young Dairy Farming Champions Emma Visser, Erin Lake Stephanie Tarlinton, and Naomi Marks. You are all absolute stars
By the way just to reinforce that this month alone Emma has won her section of the Heywire competition and Naomi has been named Ms Dorrigo Showgirl !!!!!!!
THE ARCHIBULL PRIZE 2011 HONOUR ROLL
Archibull Prize 2011
Runner Up
Model Farms High School
Secondary School Winner
Model Farms High School
(Dairy Industry)
Secondary School Winner
Best PowerPoint
Model Farms High School
(Dairy Industry)
Primary School Winner
Best Video
Schofield Primary School
(Dairy Industry)
Technology Award of Excellence
The Archibull Prize was developed with the support of the Department of Agriculture Fisheries and Forestry, Woolworths Ltd, Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation, NSW Department of Primary Industries, LandLearn NSW and Hawkesbury Harvest.
Want to join the Archibull Prize Team in 2012?
Opportunities are available for other organisations who share the same passion and vision as we do to be part of the Archibull Prize 2012
For more information please contact
National Program Director
Lynne Strong
105 Clover Hill Rd
Jamberoo NSW 2533
Phone 02 42 360 309
Mobile 0412 428 334
Email: lynnestrong@art4agriculture.com.au
Web: www.art4agriculture.com.au
Join the growing list of supporting partners for 2012
When we called this cow Mandelyn Fabulous Mary this wasn’t quite what we had in mind as her claim to fame.
At Clover Hill Dairies we milk 500 cows three times daily on two farms.
Milking three times a day is not the norm but we do it for a multitude of reasons which are good for people, cows and the planet.
Milking three times a day means lots and lots of health benefits for our cows but those health benefits rely on good time management.
Good time management is essential because cows need at least 12 hours a day to sleep. ( If you want to read the heavy science you can find it here.)
So as our cows walk backwards and forwards to the dairy three times daily we need to make sure they do that with as much cow comfort as we can provide so they can do it as quickly and efficiently as they can.
Cows travel super highways at Clover Hill (special thanks to Penny Scott who took this gorgeous photo)
To help them do this we have created a series of “supermoo highways” on our farms.
Like this and this – Cars and people like them too. We get lots of the “keep fit” crowd walking up this road
50% of our farm is rainforest and part of our role as land stewards is to make sure our farming practices do not impact on the native vegetation or the wildlife.
So we have supermoo highways through our rainforest as well .
Here is a great example of development of one through the rainforest
This one was fine like this when we milked twice daily but it looked like this when we got a lot of rain and the cows started using it three times daily
So what did we do. We got some advice from rainforest experts and some cow comfort experts and we did this
Picasso Corner
Firstly we separated the cows and the rainforest with a fence.
Then we poured concrete on the laneway. We had happy cows and a happy farm team who found the cows liked the new comfortable road and were very keen to come back to the dairy for milking.
Then we needed to spend some time nurturing the rainforest. So we found some more experts to give us the right advice like Erin and the team at Landcare Illawarra
Erin with Tony Hepworth and Mike Swanson from South East Landcare
The troops came in and did their bush regeneration thing and achieved some great outcomes like this
What about those cows getting their 40 winks!!!!!!!!!!
Yesterday I went for a walk and it gave me great pleasure when I came across the cows in the paddock at the end of the laneway we call Picasso Corner (another story) and saw this paddock full of very happy cows RESTING
Great outcomes all round me thinks
It was a huge day at the farm on Wednesday with our eco warrior Erin Lake leading a team of volunteers in revegetating an important area of our riparian (areas around our waterways) zone.
Little aside on Erin – Erin has passion for biodiversity like no other and she takes every opportunity to share her passion with the world
In her role as a Art4Agriculture Young Farming Champion
Here is Erin with the Castle Hill High School Archibull Prize entry team. See the video she made for her school presentation to Castle Hill High School here. Its awesome
Out in the streets hunting down and eradicating the dreaded evil Madeira Vine
or waging the war against the nasty environmental invaders on farms across the Illawarra and south coast
Here she is with fellow A team bush “regener” Jake Proust
Or organising community events like Dune Day
Erin Lake event organiser
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or spreading the good eco messages thru the media
Or engaging with and encouraging young people to have a greater appreciation for the landscape
Now back to today’s story – the volunteers hailed from the National Green Jobs Corps– a youth training and employment program encouraging young people to be involved in the NRM ( natural resource management) industry.
Erin identified an area in one of our creek lines as an important wildlife corridor which links together two significant stands of Rainforest on the farm, and in need of a little help to get re-established.
So the wonderful Michael (Strong) arrived at the site before any of us were even awake, to slash the Kikuyu to make it easy for the volunteers to plant into. And what an amazing job he did! Oh and as usual- he did it with a big smile
Michael my hero – ooooooooooh palpitations
The Green Corps arrived early to get stuck into the planting. They were very excited when they found out that they were going to be getting a lift to the site in the back of Erin’s Ute (albeit very slowly) – but just as excited when they found out they were going to be revegetating some important sub-tropical rainforest.
The trees that were used in the planting were nothing short of amazing- there was a huge variety of local species supplied by Richard Scarborough from Landcare Illawarra. Richard tells us that these trees were grown from around 7 different local nurseries and this makes sure that there is a wide genetic diversity in the plantings, which is very important for biodiversity.
Richard Scarborough – local legend
The trees we planted included some of Erin’s favourites – Native Tamarinds (Diploglottis australis), Black Apple’s ( Planchonella australis)
and even a couple of Giant Stinging Trees (Dendrocnide excelsa)- which are a very important local rainforest trees apparently ie if you can forgive the almighty sting you receive if you brush against one of the leaves! and I dont find myself very forgiving in this instance particularly after the day I thought a young one was a Tobacco Bush which I decided to pull out withy my bare hands. Oh how I regretted that little “do good” effort
Stinging Nettle Trees love the soil at Clover Hill – I don’t love them – baby ones popping up everywhere – that “thing” with the big round leaves next to the Red Cedar ( love them)
So the Green Corps did an amazing job of planting nearly 200 trees and we were very grateful for the use of a Petrol Auger that was supplied by Landcare Illawarra!
Erin and Mick returned on Friday to put on the tree guards (thanks to Couriers Please for your as always delayed service… LESSON TO ALL NEVER EVER USE “COURIERS PLEASE”).
We are trialing the use of Milk Carton Guards as they are biodegradable and very appropriate for a planting on a dairy farm!
And seeing some of our milk goes into PURA cartons I think we should be able to get a better deal on our next purchase and I can assure you it wont be “Couriers Please” who bring them to the farm
Our maintenance regime will be just as important and our plan is to mow and snip to keep the Kikuyu down and use a light Glyposate mix to keep the grass away from the plantings. This is where the guards will be very useful- they highlight where the trees are to the mowing contractors, and they protect the plants from any spray drift while they are only little. Once they grow to a metre- they will need very little maintenance and they will grow into beautiful trees before we know it.
So all in all a great day and another example of how effective partnerships can make a huge difference and lead to great successes in Natural Resource Management on Australian dairy farms and help keep our cows happy and healthy.
Erin is a great advocate for the Nationals Green Jobs Corps Initiative. “This is a program that works. I have been lucky enough to be involved with a number of these groups and I have found that their team leaders are consistently brilliant- patient and very enthusiastic about training these young people- and learn a lot themselves from working with such a diversity of people.” says Erin
Well Done Green Corps and Erin!
My family has been farming for 180 years. 180 of great farming stories waiting to be told. But how, but where and to whom. My family aren’t alone farmers across Australia have great stories to tell. So I decided to fill this gap and what better audience than our future, our school students, the next generation of consumers, decision makers and our workforce.
So Art4Agriculture was born. Our signature program is the Archibull Prize and now we have paired the Archibull Prize with the Young Farming Champions program which I hope will be my ongoing legacy.
The Archibull Prize Awards and Exhibition Day is the highlight of the Art4Agriculture year
It was yesterday and it was huge. Woolworths rolled out the red carpet and hosted the event. The Hon Katrina Hodgkinson not only presented the winners she spent considerable time viewing the artworks and talking to the students
I love the Archibull Prize. Every entry gives me one of those ‘feel good’ moments.
It reminds me that young Australians are interested and positive about the future and they are filled with hope.
Don’t believe what you read in the papers – our school students are engaged, they are talented and they are truly inspiring!
And this competition proves it!
This year was second time we have rolled out the program in Western Sydney with 5 primary schools and 15 secondary schools participating.
20 bulls have made their way to the judging ring and today we found out which schools have triumphed in each of the categories and who is the Grand Champion Bull
Once again it has been an outstanding success
I thought the entries last year were impressive – but the schools who participated this year have taken things to a whole new level.
World class is the only way to describe the efforts of the teachers and the student participants in the 2011 Archibull Prize
and the winners are ?
Announced by the Hon Katrina Hodgkinson Minister for Primary Industries and Small Business
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Primary Winner |
Secondary Winner |
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Artwork |
Macarthur Anglican School ($250.00) |
Caroline Chisholm College ($250.00) |
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Blog |
Macarthur Anglican School ($250.00) |
Model Farms High School ($250.00) |
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PowerPoint |
St Michaels Catholic Primary School ($250.00) |
Colo High School ($250.00) Model Farms High School ($250.00) |
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Video |
Schofield Primary School ($250.00) |
Caroline Chisholm College ($250.00) |
Overall 2012 Archibull Prize Winner
Caroline Chisholm College ($1,000.00)
“Moobiks Cube”
Artwork Award of Excellence
Hurlstone Agricultural High School
Quakers Hill High School
Richmond High School
Innovation in Technology Award of Excellence
Windsor Public School
See all the picture from the Awards and Exhibition Day on Flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/art4agriculture/
This week the milking cows are taking their morning feed (4am to 12 noon) in the paddocks in front of my house. I so look forward to this part of the grazing rotation which at this time of the year comes around every 14 to 18 days.
Now the cows seem to know I have a new camera and are doing their best to provide the rural idyll but this morning things were a little too perfect.
Firstly there was this
that was fine. Then there was long lingering looks like this
Then there was thousands (never let the facts get in the way of a good story) of looks like this
Quick turn on of the tap at the kitchen sink confirms my suspicions lots of thirsty looking cows means broken water trough. Michael to the rescue once again
You are our hero Michael – shame about the shorts
