The Farm

Later…

We’ve had a very interesting tour around the farm in Michael’s ute – they have 10,000 sheep and 380 cattle here on 1800 hectares and the cows have almost finished calving, while the sheep are right in the middle of lambing. This meant that there were lots of calves around only a few weeks old, and little woolly lambs everywhere (there will be 13,500 sheep once all the lambs have been born) – we even saw a pair of twin lambs that Michael reckoned had only been born about 10 – 15 minutes before we drove past. I was hoping that we would actually see a birth but I guess they wouldn’t have been particularly relaxed with us driving around and about J While we were in the paddock one of the twins wandered off, following a cow, and got far enough away that it couldn’t find its mum again (who hadn’t noticed as she had the other lamb to look after), so Michael ended up opening the car door, picking it up by its hind legs and driving along with it hanging out the door back to its mum. The kids thought this was very strange but it was because he didn’t want to get his scent on it which would mean its mum would abandon it. Apparently Merino sheep only have 4 hours within which to imprint with their babies (and after that they abandon them), whereas other sheep have 48 hours or something like that, so that first period is very important for Merinos.

We also had a look at the shearing shed and at all the different thickness fleeces in there as they sell superfine Merino wool between 12 – 18 microns – for all those people out there wearing Armani or Zegna suits, they might be made out of Michael’s wool! A lot of Australian wool producers were each asked to donate 100 grams of wool apparently to make into Australia’s present for the upcoming royal wedding, so we also saw the bale of wool that some of it came from which was interesting from a trivia point of view.