Matraville Archibull 2015: HEROES OF FARMING

As a part of Archibull experience we got to meet Glen Green

He runs a sheep property...

INTERVIEW

Reporter Stevie-RayWatch it here live:

https://youtu.be/RMEPEUnDknk

ONE on ONE with a FARMER – Stevie-Ray Rugg

What made you want to become part of the agricultural industry in Australia and what was your biggest motivation?

The greatest motivation was getting away from the city, as I said before my uncle was a country cop and every time I went there- I just love the country. I love the people; I liked the fact that you could till the soil and get some production out of it and to look after animals, as opposed to in Sydney all I was doing was just building things and it’s not even mine at the end of the day- I sell it to someone, I move away. So that was the main motivation.

What is your favourite part of being of being part of the agricultural industry in Australia and why?

I’ve gotta say, as hard as I might want to be, It’s got to be lambs’ meet morning- it’s the greatest thrill; I’ve got four children of my own, but there’s something special about lambs being born.

What is your favourite type of wool or breed of sheep and why?

Okay, I get from Merino on my property, the property I set up for Merino; so the fences have gotta be a five strand fence with the barb on top and that keeps Merinos in. If you go for other types of sheep- like Warpers for example that come from South Africa and don’t really produce any wool- they’re mainly meat sheep- they get underneath those fences so to change from one type of sheep to another, there’s a lot of money involved. Merinos also got the softest wool and Australia is renowned for our good Merino wool.

What do you find most challenging about working in the wool industry and why?

Dealing with drought and prices that rise and fall and basically the biggest challenge- is the weather. The weather can be helpful.

Earlier you spoke about why hot tar has been replaced when a sheep gets cut. What other sort of technological advances have you seen in the Industry in your farming time or the last 60 years?

Okay, cutting a sheep is inevitable – it’s always going to happen- out of a mob of maybe one hundred sheep, you’d probably get two that need to be stitched. The CSIRO- another government- has laboratories, trying different things. One of them is a protein injection, where you actually inject the needle into the sheep and it sheds the wool all by its self. The problem is that you’ve then gotta go into the paddock and pick it all up. Now there’s another way of doing it, where you actually put a coat on the sheep, at crutching time, and the coat-or the vest- holds the wool in. Again the cost there is the cost of the vest and the cost of the labour to put it on and the cost of the labour to put it off. So generally everybody’s staying with shearing.

Have these advances enabled you to produce more reliable wool quantities and or access healthier foods for your sheep?

Not on our property because I don’t apply any of that technology.

There is a lot of talk these days about the impact of climate change challenges on our farmers and their practices. What sort of effects have you noted?

Look, I think that the main thing in the last probably twenty to thirty years is the farmers have accepted the fact that droughts do come, and droughts do go and floods come, and floods go and so what they’re doing now, is they’re being a little bit more counter-productive by getting better storage facilities on their dams so that they don’t lose the water out of their dams and we’re putting in crops that are more drought resistant than ever before. That’s about the best way that a famer can worry about climate change.

What sort of things are farmers doing to ensure that they have healthy landscapes and clean waterways?

Okay that’s another thing that in years gone by, farmers would’ve, if they saw a tree they’d knock it down because where a tree goes no grass grows. We’ve learnt that that’s not the way to go. We’ve learnt that if you run, if the prevailing winds come from the west, you run trees on the north-to-south corridors. As the wind hits those trees, it blows down and there is a better chance of rain on the eastern side of those. So that’s one thing that you do, apart from that there’s also different types of tilling, instead of doing very deep tilling of the soil, we now do short tilling of the soil, low tilling or no tilling at all. You leave the stubble of the previous crop there and you just plant or sow another crop directly into the tilling that’s already there.

In what ways do you work at reducing your carbon footprint?

We probably don’t have much of a carbon footprint, we don’t have electricity on our property- we’ve got solar panels and that’s the only power we have. So we get a lot of our power from the sun. I use a generator for shearing, that’s the only time.

Why do you think biosecurity in the farming industry is so important and what are these measures?

Okay biosecurity on a farm protects the land itself, the animals, the people that live on that farm-that work on that farm- and the people that eat the meat that comes from the sheep. So you have to be careful of what comes onto your property, by way of feed-so it doesn’t introduce species of weeds etc. that can kill sheep, you control your poisons and try to use poisons, or rather use chemicals that aren’t poison and so we’ve evolved in that manner as well.

What government bodies do you work with to ensure biosecurity threats are kept to a minimum?

Every farmer in NSW pays a fee to an organisation called Rural Land Services they come out to make sure you don’t have an noxious weeds on your property, advise you on control of pigs and any veterinary problems with your sheep they will also give you advice, we rely very heavily on them because we are paying them money and I want something in return.

Thank you so much for taking time today to speak with us so we can understand our topic better.