“It rained!” they chorused, grins wide as a grand piano.
They were loading hay when we saw them from the road, the C222 from Halls Gap in the Grampians to Ararat, in central Victoria, and they were working with an urgency which indicated they knew what we knew – the weather was about to take a nosedive from hot, cloudless days to showers.
In the 15ha paddock, already liberally dotted with massive bales, a baler was punching away with the same urgency, scoffing up the heaped windrows in a cloud of straw fragments, noise and dust.
It was the sort of scene every Kiwi farmer would relate to instantly – hot, dry, dusty, busy, immediate work that must be done right now, and when complete and the hayshed is full, there’s that huge sense of relief and satisfaction, knowing you’ve got the winter feed in and safe, and your stock are properly provided for.
Jan was driving the big 4WD forklift tractor, stacking 450kg bales two high, then loading them onto the flatbed truck which Rosie, his wife, kept slowly moving to reduce tractor work and speed up the operation. A full load was 18 bales – about 8000kg of hay – and they were running it into one of their big sheds at the farm base a kilometre away.
We stopped to get photos, were acknowledged with a friendly wave, got chatting briefly when the load was completed, and were invited to “come up to the sheds and Rosie will tell you all about it while I unload it – we’re pushing for time because of the weather change”.
We followed the truck and its blizzard of loose straw, off the C222 into a side-road and then a large farmyard, with its sheds, implements, ducks and a modest house.
Above one of the sheds was the title “Shire of Ararat, Fine Wool Company”. They introduced themselves as Jan Ibs von Seht and his wife Rosie, he of German descent, she a true blue Aussie, both lean and brown and fit and full of life, in their early 50s.
Jan used a second, borrowed, forklift tractor to unload the truck while Rosie gave us the detail.
The hay was a coarse long stalk with bulky seedhead, from a plant they call ‘winteroo’, a specially developed hay oat. In a good year it can grow 1.5m high and very dense, making a wonderful winter fodder for both cattle and sheep.
“We make it for our own stock, but also to sell some for export to Japan,” Rosie said. “It’s been a very good year this year, and we’ve been lucky. The hay was cut two weeks ago, and it takes that long to dry it and get it in the right condition.”
The crops is planted in May and harvested in November, each bale measuring about 8ft x 4ft x 3ft and equal to 18 to 20 small bales. Sometimes the farmers also make even larger bales, 8ft x 4ft x 4ft, weighing about 750kg.
The couple farm 1000ha of rolling land, country that is liberally sprinkled with gums along the fencelines and out in the paddocks.
Much of the farm is sandy, known as light country, but with rain it grows good feed. The couple breed cross-bred fat lambs, wethers for live export, fine merino wool, and about 50 beef breeder cattle for veal. About 130ha of their land is bush “which doesn’t support much,” notes Jan.
The farm runs three sheep to the acre, and a ratio of one cattle beast to 10 sheep.
They harvest 500 to 600 big bales of winteroo a year, and from the 15ha they were baling they expected about 230 bales. That’s better than 15 bales, or neatly 7000kg of dry feed, per hectare.
The hay looked good and golden, and just the sort of stuff a herd of Waikato milkers would seriously tuck into on a cold, wet August morning.
The bales, held together with six rounds of heavy twine, are stacked in open-sided sheds, and those sold to Japan are reprocessed, chopped into a fine shred, mixed with other ingredients and tightly compacted.
Jan showed us a 30cm gap he’d left in the stacked bales, explaining that one of the farm ducks is nesting “way in the back”, so he’d left her and the expected brood safe passage to the outside world.
“We’ve had a real good year this year,” he said. “The last three years we’ve got maybe 1½ – 2 tonnes of hay to the acre. This year I reckon we’ll do four to 4½, possibly even five tonnes.”
“Why?” I asked. “What happened?”
“It rained!” And the smiles of happiness tell of the joys of farming when things go right.
“We used to get 22 to 24 inches a year, but the last few years it’s been about half that, with maybe two or three inches in a thunderstorm in January or February. Most of our growth is in September and October.
“This year we got real good rains in August – 56mm, then another 54mm in September, and another 23mm in the first two weeks of October.”
It was the best possible time to get rains, and crop growth was strong. So they started harvesting in early November, working till 1am the day we met them, and then getting back on the job shortly after day-break to get as much baled and into the shed as possible before the weather went crook on them.
“We always plan to have enough hay for the coming year, plus some spare – you never know …” said Jan, with that innate wisdom of a man who knows the value of having a little extra put away for tough times.
We headed back onto the C222 to Ararat, and they back to the paddock, and we wished them both the best of good luck in the future.
In Ararat, a surprisingly big, bright, busy town, the lady in the barber’s shop said a lot of hay was being made this year.
“We had good rains, real good rains,” she said. “Our farm dams are all full for the first time in 10 years. We even had enough water to fill the swimming pool.”
Rain really means life to these inland Aussies, in a way few Kiwis can comprehend. They love it when it comes – to them it literally is liquid gold.
Kingsley is a columnist with the Waikato Times in Hamilton. His Outdoor columns appear fortnightly. He has recently published his second illustrated volume of selected columns, and a third is due early next year. He can be contacted a kingsley(at)accuwrite.co.nz
Jayla - 10 years ago
I enjoyed the Liquid Gold article. Just one remark to make, there are a couple of ways to use the word ‘scoffing’ but am not sure on its meaning in this article, were they eating the hay without meaning to?
scoffing – to jeer, deride etc & to guzzle, eat quickly etc.