It’s not just crickets
Blue-green algae has hit our waterways, thank goodness for town water!
Farm life is rarely smooth sailing and the past few months we have been battling rough waters. At first it was the rain, followed by the floods. The excess water proved to be the perfect condition for mosquito reproduction. Now that the river levels have dropped significantly we are now faced with our next few obstacles, enter the algae, crickets and frogs.
The river is iridescent with blue-green algae. I guess the floods provided a rich, nutrient loading environment and with the low-flow river conditions, have created the perfect habitat for algae to thrive. Blue-green algae is toxic to livestock. We do get algae regularly through the summer months, but rarely this badly. My hope is that the suction pipe on the stock and domestic pumps are pulling water from lower in the water profile with less algae than we see on the top.
I have never seen as many frogs in my life as I am seeing on a daily basis and I’m seeing them in their hundreds (and hundreds). We also have a cricket fiesta going on so if you are chasing some fishing bait, I’m your man! The crickets are a nuisance as they eat and kill the upcoming grass and despite us having a gazillion ibis, snakes and of course the frogs eating them until they become the size of a walrus, there is still a solid supply. Maybe I need to come up with a cricket harvesting technique…insects are very high in protein so there is potential, or perhaps I should just let them eat my grass.
The snakes are making a late surge before winter hibernation and I’d be in double figures for the sightings I have had this week, including two where I have had to quickly lift my legs on the motorbike and one where Rohan, who is eight, said: “Dad, you just ran over a snake! You didn’t even see it, did you?” Well I did see that tail after he told me.
Meanwhile, the inconceivable has happened-we did not win the gold medal at the Sydney show. We entered in three different categories-regular milk, yoghurt and flavoured milk. And not even a slight glimmer of gold, not even a smudgey sort of silver. Oh well, I guess I should be grateful we got a bronze medal in each category- but I am struggling to be that grateful I must confess. Clearly I have no bias and am completely impartial about the outcomes of these shows-after all, what would a group of blind-folded judges know anyway? I am sure I will get over it. Eventually. But you can rest assured I intend to bear a serious grudge for at least the next week or so. No, it’s not the lack of gold about which I am truly the most bitter. I am genuinely bitter and twisted because we got ripped off on the freight-and I won’t be getting over this anytime soon.
Every week we send a chilled pallet of Bethune Lane Dairy products to Sydney, which costs a few hundred dollars each time. So when we got all excited about our potential gold medal selections and ended up packing three relatively small boxes (net value of $50), we gave them a good-luck pat and shipped them off to the Royal Sydney Show through our regular freight provider and promptly got hit with a bill for nearly $900. Nine Hundred Dollars! Surely someone was having a laugh at my expense. Well, as it turns out, this wasn’t a mistake. I don’t know if they were laughing, but I know I wasn’t! So if you are looking to bring a little joy into your otherwise routine daily existence, block out some time on your calendar and contact your multinational transport company and inform the team you wish to contest an excessive bill and see how that works out. A word to the wise, if you are blocking out some diary time, make it about a month and that should get you close to someone who might be able to point you to the right person to consider your query. So my multinational turned my $50 into it’s $900- do I put that one down to experience or stupidity?
Meanwhile, back in the factory, we are chasing some problems at the moment as some of the batches of yoghurt have not set correctly-not the whole batch, just some pots within the batch which is really odd and proving to be hard to track down. In our regular milk we nearly had 18 months with a clean slate of zeros for bacterial growth, but lately we are getting some (very low) levels that we can’t squash. We are still a mile below official problem thresholds, but it’s been bugging me (pun intended). Our new pasteuriser, which was ordered in November, should arrive in a week which is almost cause for dancing a jig.
However, I do have some positive news to report, as I am very please we connected town water to the Milk Enhancement Centre given the state of the surrounding water.
Sally’s grandma used to say “did you really have a bad day dear, or was it just a bad five minutes?”
Go well, my friends.