Reading the landscape & keeping boundaries

This may just be a Dorper proof fence. With a few hundred metres of barbed wire and a day up our sleeves we rolled out, tensioned and tightened the barb in a bid to keep the Dorpers in the three paddocks we have allocated for them. These paddocks happen to be the more depleted acreage that we have on the farm and not surprisingly the sheep have not looked back since discovering what lies outside their boundary line. So the steps to rehabilitation continue, such as the dozens upon dozens of stacks of Bathurst burr spoken about here.

A huge amount of tussock on the far side of the dam has also been an issue and on taking the advice of an old cocky we slashed the tussock very early in the break of spring. The wet spring and boggy ground limited the tractors path and It’s easy to pick where the tractor couldn’t get to in this photo. We will repeat this process at the break of this spring and probably the next. With a pipe now put in under our adjoining farm track and feeding into the lagoon we should now alleviate the problem of the waterlogged ground as well. This was a two step process as some years ago Jono removed excess fill from the dam bank and transferred it to the low lying areas below the dam, as it was prior to then even more swimming pool like.

Time then to turn our attention to the top paddock with its old growth grey box trees for shelter and our plans to direct sow in the near future. The size of this paddock fits nicely with our ethos of starting small and with additional trees and shelter in the smaller triangle paddock behind the farm stay (pictured forefront) these sheep and farm stay family animals shouldn’t have any reason to wander far.