For more than 70 years Colin Sharpe has lived on his family’s dairy farm in Toolijooa. Over the years he has seen the changes in dairying – the good and the bad – and does not regret a single thing about his life on the land. “I’ve been here all my life, this is the only home I’ve lived in,” Mr Sharpe said. “My mother’s family owned it, we bought it off them.” All the while his wife Margaret was by his side.
Having grown up on a dairy farm in Jamberoo, owned by her father, Margaret was not a virgin to Toolijooa Dairies, moving to them after she married Mr Sharpe. Even though she did not know how to milk cows, and never learned, she helped out the cattle. “My father had several properties and we used to move the cattle, on horseback, to different sheds,” Mr Sharpe said.
For decades the couple worked their 158-hectare farm, milking about 120 head of cattle twice a day for more than 40 years. “When I started in 1943 we had milking machines, but we had horses that did the work not tractors,” Mr Sharpe said. “We grew our own feed corn, sorghum and oats.” Making hay while the shone was a task. The farmers used pitchforks, not hay balers, to make bales of hay.
In 1948 that changed when the Sharpes bought a hay baler. The only problem was it was hay was tied with wire that could be ingested by the cows. “Sometimes the wire would stay in the hay and if eaten by the cows would give them perforated stomachs, later we used baler twine ” Mrs Sharpe said.
There was a lot of manual handling making the bales and then taking them to the shed. It was the same with feed until the Sharpes converted to bulk handling where feed would be put in bins, which were push-button operated.
“With bulk feed handling the cows could be milked and fed at the same time,” Mrs Sharpe said.
They saw the changes in the way milk was transported, from the farmer taking the milk to the factory in cans to being store in refrigerated milk vats and being picked up daily in insulated milk tankers. The Sharpes also saw the advent of artificial insemination, which is now the most common way of reproducing.
They said the saddest thing of all was the introduction of deregulation, which Mrs Sharpe said was detrimental to the industry. “I think we got out of dairying at the right time,” she said. After retiring in 1991 the pair sold off 63.5 hectares and now live on half a hectare.
“I enjoyed farming, but when we gave it up we had more time to ourselves,” Mrs Sharpe said.
In order to help preserve the history of dairy farming for future generations Mr and Mrs Sharpe took part in a project organised by dairy farmer Lynne Strong and University of Technology Professor Jenny Hammond. For The Living History of Dairy Farming project, the Sharpes volunteered to tell their story – a story of dairy farmers who have lived in the Gerringong/Toolijooa area for the majority of their lives.
This blog post is a copy of story written by Amanda Garrard in The Advertiser on July 4th 2007
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