Farm Experience: Wednesday, 1st December, 2004
Today was the start of Len's shearing stinct at Tony Taylor's farm. Tony Taylor can be considered Len's nearest neighbour, which was lucky for me, since we don't have to travel far everyday just to go to work. Tony has got to be the slowest farmer around here, in terms of the speed he walks and does things around the shed. It's painful to watch him move around, and I wonder about the patience his family must have with him. In the first place, it struck me as really odd that farmers can do things at such a speed. I always thought they needed to be really quick and nimble in order to handle their livestock well. After all, animals are always escaping and you need fast reflexes to prevent that from happening. Apparently, Tony has such a big farm and a large number of sheep that I don't think this problem exists for him... he actually runs the farm all by himself.
We were to work in the new shearing shed that was recently built. I was told by Andrew, the youngest of the Craigs and who was helping out as a shed-hand as well, that this was the best shed he had worked in so far. It was far more spacious and well-ventilated than most of the other shearing sheds. I suppose I'm really lucky then. Andrew is a year-9 student and helps out at the shed on certain days that help is needed. He gets paid, but he needs to skip school in order to help out. Apparently, the teachers at the Brookton school which he goes to don't really care much about the attendances of students. I guess they must be used to having children of farmers taking time off school to work on farms. Which leads me to wonder about the importance they place on education around here. Is that why most children who grow up on farms in rural towns naturally choose farming as their career? It must be real difficult to make a transition from country life to city life if one has grown up working on farms even on the days that they ought to be in school to create more career opportunities for themselves. Anyway, Andrew mentioned that he actually prefered to go to school than work in the shed. He said that school was easier, and more fun, cuz he can play pranks on the teacher. Ahem.
Dale is the official wool classer employed by Tony for shearing this time round. He needs a professional classing license in order to do that, and gets paid differently from the shed-hands, also known as rouseabouts. He's more or less the person in charge in the shed, and tells rouseabouts like us what to do. Anyway it turns out that Andrew was the one who showed me what to do instead of Dale. My job in the shed is mainly to remove dags (shit-covered wool pieces) and locks(small pieces of wool slightly cleaner than dags) from the shearing platform before, during and after each sheep is shorn. Because the shearers have it so tough concentrating on shearing the sheep, you have to intercept the area around the sheep at the correct times so that the shearer will not be disturbed. The trick is to move quickly, subtly, and efficiently so that the sheep will not be startled into kicking the shearer or his shearing equipment in self-defence. There's also plenty of wool to sweep on the ground so as to keep the place neat and prevent people from wading in wool if it piles up. Oh those stupid sheep. They kick all the time anyway, some more than others, and injure themselves and the shearer in the process. I asked Len if anyone had ever gotten injured from shearing sheep. Seems that shearers mainly only get cuts in the hand for injuries. Other accidents would include damaged equipement if the sheep kicks the shearing handpiece out of the shearer's hand and breaks upon falling from a certain height. I guess that must be more heartbreaking, because the shearing equipment aint cheap!
As promised, Len allowed me to take the afternoon off to stop by Romilly's for a couple of hours to watch their embryo transfers. I had heard from Scott that there were students living in the house I stayed in 6 months ago, so I had thought I was probably going to meet more Murdoch students on their respective farm attachments. These 'students' turned out to be the "staff" working on the embryo transfers. They were working for the company AllStock, and the working group comprise of 2 students, Emily and Nicole, and a working vet. Emily was going to start school at Murdoch next year, while Nicole has already done half a year of vet. science at Melbourne, and was planning to transfer to Murdoch due to its U.S. accreditation. The working vet (I couldn't quite catch her name) had graduated from Murdoch 5 years ago and have been working for the same company ever since. She was really helpful in explaining what she was doing for my benefit, considering she had no obligations to. The whole point of embryo transfer in sheep is to produce multiple embryos in the female ewe that has been artificially inseminated with good semen, either from a good breeding stud ram of same or different species to produce cross-breds, and then flush these embryos out and transfer each embryo into a normal merino ewe, which will act as the surrogate mother. One ewe can produce up to 15+ embryos! so incredible... From the way the vet handles the flushing of embryos and then stitching up of the sheep superbly, I wonder how many times she must have done the same process over and over again. I never really thought that this could be a field that I might go into, because I have never seen this sort of processes before. It's a reminder to me to find out more about career options that I may not yet have discovered, before I decide on a path to take. "
We were to work in the new shearing shed that was recently built. I was told by Andrew, the youngest of the Craigs and who was helping out as a shed-hand as well, that this was the best shed he had worked in so far. It was far more spacious and well-ventilated than most of the other shearing sheds. I suppose I'm really lucky then. Andrew is a year-9 student and helps out at the shed on certain days that help is needed. He gets paid, but he needs to skip school in order to help out. Apparently, the teachers at the Brookton school which he goes to don't really care much about the attendances of students. I guess they must be used to having children of farmers taking time off school to work on farms. Which leads me to wonder about the importance they place on education around here. Is that why most children who grow up on farms in rural towns naturally choose farming as their career? It must be real difficult to make a transition from country life to city life if one has grown up working on farms even on the days that they ought to be in school to create more career opportunities for themselves. Anyway, Andrew mentioned that he actually prefered to go to school than work in the shed. He said that school was easier, and more fun, cuz he can play pranks on the teacher. Ahem.
Dale is the official wool classer employed by Tony for shearing this time round. He needs a professional classing license in order to do that, and gets paid differently from the shed-hands, also known as rouseabouts. He's more or less the person in charge in the shed, and tells rouseabouts like us what to do. Anyway it turns out that Andrew was the one who showed me what to do instead of Dale. My job in the shed is mainly to remove dags (shit-covered wool pieces) and locks(small pieces of wool slightly cleaner than dags) from the shearing platform before, during and after each sheep is shorn. Because the shearers have it so tough concentrating on shearing the sheep, you have to intercept the area around the sheep at the correct times so that the shearer will not be disturbed. The trick is to move quickly, subtly, and efficiently so that the sheep will not be startled into kicking the shearer or his shearing equipment in self-defence. There's also plenty of wool to sweep on the ground so as to keep the place neat and prevent people from wading in wool if it piles up. Oh those stupid sheep. They kick all the time anyway, some more than others, and injure themselves and the shearer in the process. I asked Len if anyone had ever gotten injured from shearing sheep. Seems that shearers mainly only get cuts in the hand for injuries. Other accidents would include damaged equipement if the sheep kicks the shearing handpiece out of the shearer's hand and breaks upon falling from a certain height. I guess that must be more heartbreaking, because the shearing equipment aint cheap!
As promised, Len allowed me to take the afternoon off to stop by Romilly's for a couple of hours to watch their embryo transfers. I had heard from Scott that there were students living in the house I stayed in 6 months ago, so I had thought I was probably going to meet more Murdoch students on their respective farm attachments. These 'students' turned out to be the "staff" working on the embryo transfers. They were working for the company AllStock, and the working group comprise of 2 students, Emily and Nicole, and a working vet. Emily was going to start school at Murdoch next year, while Nicole has already done half a year of vet. science at Melbourne, and was planning to transfer to Murdoch due to its U.S. accreditation. The working vet (I couldn't quite catch her name) had graduated from Murdoch 5 years ago and have been working for the same company ever since. She was really helpful in explaining what she was doing for my benefit, considering she had no obligations to. The whole point of embryo transfer in sheep is to produce multiple embryos in the female ewe that has been artificially inseminated with good semen, either from a good breeding stud ram of same or different species to produce cross-breds, and then flush these embryos out and transfer each embryo into a normal merino ewe, which will act as the surrogate mother. One ewe can produce up to 15+ embryos! so incredible... From the way the vet handles the flushing of embryos and then stitching up of the sheep superbly, I wonder how many times she must have done the same process over and over again. I never really thought that this could be a field that I might go into, because I have never seen this sort of processes before. It's a reminder to me to find out more about career options that I may not yet have discovered, before I decide on a path to take. "
posted by Min @ 9:19 PM
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