A special breed

X4 and her calf at Mount Gnomon                       Photo: Eliza Wood

It’s been more than two years since our first Traditional Dairy Shorthorn cattle stepped off a truck onto Mount Gnomon Farm at Penguin, in Tasmania’s north-west.

When Warrick and Betty Holmes sold their girls, we were very fortunate to be given the opportunity to buy a portion of the herd.

Since then, the numbers have slowly grown, and we now have almost 20 females on the property.

We have sourced additional heifers from local dairy farmer Symon Jones, who lives just over the mountain from us.

The dairy shorthorns give us so much pleasure – they are stunning to look at, and they are friendly and easy to handle.

You also never know what you’re going to get at calving time. Often the roan cows produce white calves, and the white cows surprise us with roan calves.

Our goal has always been to direct-market their meat and engage consumers in the dairy shorthorn story.

As the first steer grew closer to size, we crossed our fingers that his meat would fulfill our expectations.

We remember that first piece of porterhouse so well. It was buttery, beautifully marbled and had a texture like none of the other breeds we had processed.

The feedback from the customers across the markets in Tasmania was incredibly positive, and that confirmed in our minds that this was the meat breed we wanted to keep.

Supply has been the biggest issue, and we have sourced young steers from Victoria to fatten on our farm to supplement our own production. It means we can provide customers with dairy shorthorn meat more frequently, and continue to promote the breed while our own numbers increase.

The dairy shorthorn in listed on the Ark of Taste – an international list of flavours at risk of extinction. Our meat was a feature of Slow Food Hobart’s Christmas dinner, which Guy attended (for quality control, of course!).

Our future plans include increasing our production of dairy shorthorn meat; milking a handful to supplement our weaned Wessex saddleback pigs; and promoting the dairy shorthorn as a perfect cow for the smallholder.

Next year we will open a rare breeds interpretation centre on the farm, at which we will hold courses on keeping house cows, making cheese and yoghurt, and numerous animal-related topics. The possibilities are endless!

Ten more (slightly restless) sleeps

In the same way a woman goes on maternity leave as her due date looms, Guy and Dane have been coaxing pigs with swollen bellies out of the herd paddock and into their personal farrowing paddocks.

They haven't got a hospital bag or a new nightie, but their pen has a muddy wallow and a shed filled with soft barley straw.

Through luck - and a tiny bit of planning - we've got a number of sows due in the week of our Rare Day Out.

Who wants to see a fresh, silky piggy, or ten?

The muscovy ducks that have been sitting in the barn have surprised us with their timing, and brought out their waddling clutches a little earlier than anticipated. At least the ducklings will be a bit more robust for enthusiastic handling at two weeks old.

The guinea fowl has also got babies. In the past we've had rotten luck with getting the chicks past a week old, but as we check these ones through the binoculars, they seem to have outlived the riskiest time.

Part of that's because the weather's a bit like dry Africa, where the fowls originated.

A year ago, as I looked out this kitchen window, the grass was a brilliant green and there was a paddock of smiling clover ready for the pigs to be moved into.

Today the grass that clutches the dirt is dead and waiting for the autumn break to bring it out of dormancy.

But as the wind blows, and the pigs rotate their bodies in the mud wallows, we are thankful for the  hardy shelter belts that divide the paddocks like green oasis strips.

It's dry - certainly the driest season we've had since we came to Mount Gnomon in 2009. But the old farmers across the north-west says it's been decades since we've had a year like this.

I'd love it to rain before our open day. I'll order a day where the cloud hangs low over the mountain and the water trickles slowly into the ground over hours. And then I'll order warm, overcast weather for the next day, and then the sun can come out and coax delicate shoots from the soil.

Dry weather or green grass, we're starting to get excited about the 2013 Rare Day.

Last year we fell off our hay bales when 650 people turned up to see our patch of piggies.

This year, we've got a few extra attractions, including music from the Doctors Rocksters, artisan wine from Blue Penguin Farm, Lost Pippin Cider, and cheesecakes, platters and smoothies from our friends at Red Cow Dairies.

They'll join Seven Sheds Brewery, enthusiastic coffee-making friends Theresa and Beau, and our team of Mount Gnomon taco and sausage cookers.

Head over to our registration page to let us know how many people you're bringing - you could win a voucher!

And we'll get back to running around like headless farmers as we prepare for your arrival...

Peachy keen

Five years ago Guy set the romantic bar rather high when he sent me a bunch of tropical flowers from the Northern Territory.

He was working at Humpty Doo for 12 months doing sustainable agriculture work, and I was living in my little house in Ulverstone getting up early to present the ABC's Rural Report.

As I relaxed in the bath on Valentine's Day 2009, I was annoyed by knocking on the back door. Very little will get me out of the bath once I'm in, so I ignored it.

The knocking continued. I assumed it was the children down the street, so I called out for them to "go away!". Eventually they gave up, and left me alone.

Later that night I opened the back door to go out to the veggie patch and there was a longish white box on the mat.

When I opened the box it was one of those wonderful moments where, even though you're alone, you grin rather stupidly and make happy exclamations.

There were heliconias, bee hive gingers, birds of paradise - all so bright and almost fake-looking. They were nothing like the salvias and daisies in my yard.

I know you're thinking about the flower miles and how a card would have been sufficient - but just let me enjoy this short moment of reminiscing.

My romantic contribution had been to make a batch of gingerbread biscuits, cut in hearts, and a card with a pumpkin on it. I was really worried the tropical heat would cause the biscuits to go mouldy, so when I asked Guy if he'd collected the office mail that day I had to encourage him rather strongly to make a special trip to town.

Five Valentine's days on, and surprises come in different forms.

"Get off the phone, Guy," I called inside this morning. "I've got a surprise, come and look!"

"Have we got guinea fowl babies?"

"No..."

"Have the Aylesbury ducklings come out?"

"No..."

We were heading for the orchard.

"Peaches!"

A tree that we thought the possums had destroyed is completely covered in beautiful downy, white-skinned peaches.

They're ripe and drippy and I can smell their fragrance as I stick my head between the branches to take photos.

So today we slurped and chewed in the orchard: dirty boots, farm clothes and messy hair, and ate the first fruit from the trees we planted together when we moved to Mount Gnomon.

That's what I call romance.

A slithering dilemma

Tasmanian tiger snake. Photo: Adam Holbrook

I saw a snake in my veggie patch yesterday. It was sunning itself next to the lettuces and sugarsnap peas.

I’d just finished watering the tomatoes in the greenhouse, and as I turned out the door, I saw a flash of black as the snake turned back on itself, and darted for the patch of weedy fat hen.

I made a noise of course; I don’t think I’ve ever responded to a snake encounter silently. It wasn’t a squeal or a scream, more of a “Waaaaah!” in various notes. Cyril had his nose in the grass near where the snake was headed, but looked more concerned about the sound from my mouth.

The first snake of the season makes your heart beat the fastest. Dane’s been tripping over them for weeks now, but Guy and I have had a slow start to the season.

There’s been one hanging around the tool shed, which is next to the washing line. One day he was stretched out straight across the doorway when Dane went looking for some pipe fittings. Another time he wriggled across the walkway and behind the compost. He scared Andrea the bookkeeper so much she believed he was in her car and had to stop part-way home and empty the contents with a hook-handled umbrella.

My mum can’t sleep with striped sheets. Back in the 1970s when Dad owned a wildlife park, he used to have a program on Tasmanian tv for kids. He’d take his snakes into the studio and let them slide around the polished floor, frightening the cameramen. Then he’d take them home to Granton in hessian sacks, get distracted and forget to unpack the car, and Mum would discover them under the seats when she left for the work the next day.

When I was growing up, long after the wildlife park, Dad would get stirred-up with people in our district who would go looking for snakes to kill. The general rule at our farm was that we’d leave the snakes alone unless we, or the dogs, were at risk. A toddler playing with a snake in the backyard was one of Mum’s big fears.

I can remember clearly the prolonged twitching of the first snake I saw killed. I can’t remember how Dad dispatched it – probably the mattock – but the image of it lying next to the rubbish bin flicking back and forth stuck.

Guy’s mum Denise ruined many wooden-handled garden tools protecting her family of five from snakes at the backdoor at Yolla. You’ll notice she now has steel handles.

The family dog Sasha was a great watchdog for snakes: she had a unique bark when she discovered one, but never touched them. Dane lost his beloved Jack Russell, Rusty, a few years ago. He came home to find a dead dog and two dead snakes on the lawn. And then Denise lost Jaffa, another Jack Russell, last season.

The fence at Guy’s Grandma’s place was speckled with holes, made with the shotgun as she blew the snakes off the lawn. She kept shooting them till she finally had to leave the farm in her 80s. There aren’t so many snakes in town, but I bet she shuts the screen door with the same care.

Since we’ve been at Mount Gnomon we’ve had two sows die from snakebite, both of them from rare genetic lines. When we found the first one frothing at the mouth and stumbling across the paddock we thought she’d contracted some sort of exotic disease. We shooed her out of the herd paddock to be quarantined and she collapsed in the laneway. She was struggling to breathe and her mouth and tongue was dark purple.

She died as the vet pulled into the driveway, and then we realised she’d been killed by a snake. The vet confirmed it.

The second one had piglets on her, and the symptoms appeared less severe. She was standing in the paddock puffing, her mouth a bit dry and bloody. The following day she was lying down, and her breathing had worsened. Because she hadn’t died quickly, I was hoping the poison was working its way through her system and she was going to fight it out. But she died, and it took hours, and it was horrible.

Occasionally cattle and horses will die from snakebite, but I think the problem with pigs is their curiosity. They’ve always got their noses to the ground, turning things over and investigating.

So we have a dilemma. We choose to live next to the bush, so we have to accept that sometimes snakes will visit our territory, just as we go exploring in theirs.

It would be impossible to call the snake remover after an encounter. We wouldn’t be able to keep track of the snake, and they’d be searching all over the yard.

It’s illegal to kill them; they’re a threatened species. But it’s a horrific death for an animal that gets bitten. And we worry about Cyril, and friends’ children, and the people who work for us.

So yesterday I put the sprinkler on the veggie patch and hoped the snake wasn’t into cold showers.

But I reckon as soon as he saw me he was gone: through the chicken wire, across the lane, and into the silage stack. Or perhaps he went across the driveway, through the orchard, over the road, and back to the bush. Let’s hope so.

Two pig farmers, their brave helpers, and some pulled pork

It’s taken almost a month, but I think we’re close to recovering from The Taste Festival.

Without drawing breath after Christmas, and barely having time for a shower, we packed up our pulled pork and sausages and headed for Hobart early on December 27th.

We drove in convoy, sort of. Guy sped off in the van and I lumbered along behind with the ute and trailer. We met at Ut Si Café at Perth and fueled up on ham, egg, and spinach sandwiches (funnily enough the ham wasn’t ours, Colette had run out, but it was Matthew Evans’). At this point I started to feel a bit excited about the week ahead of us.

When Guy and his brother Mark (Lost Pippin Cidery and Nursery) put in an application to have a cider and pork stall at The Taste I thought they were very optimistic.

I was sure we wouldn’t get in, both being young businesses, and having very little experience at food events. There was a nice link though, with us growing rare breeds of livestock, and Mark working to keep old fruit varieties alive. So the application went in, and I promptly forgot about it.

“Bloody hell”

I think that’s what I said when Guy told me we’d got in, but it might have been worse.

“What are two pig farmers doing going to The Taste?”

Aware that we needed some practice at dishing up tacos and sausages en masse, we attended some smaller events in the couple of months leading up to The Taste. We went to the Spring Festival at the Botanical Gardens in Hobart, the Deloraine Craft Fair, and Hobart’s Sustainable Living Festival.

And I’m so glad we had the chance to practice. We shifted around benches, lengthened bbq legs, graduated from spoons to squeezy bottles for sauces and sourcream, learnt that chopped coriander loses its aroma and plucking is worth the effort, and that Guy and Eliza work best at opposite ends of the stall.

It was a huge challenge preparing for The Taste while we were running around distributing a few hundred Christmas orders. The logistics were a nightmare, and I think we worked the hardest we have so far. But we had the most amazing staff and helpers though, like our butcher Neville who worked 12-hour days with only a 10-minute sandwich and newspaper break. Dane ran around sorting out everything we’d forgotten, and Elisha brought food, humour, and organisation as we worked from morning to midnight putting Christmas orders together.

Our new bookkeeper Andrea got the biggest Mount Gnomon baptism of fire. She thought she was coming to help us catch up with our records, but got thrown into sorting the orders, packaging, cleaning, rostering, and counseling! Guy’s sister Lauren cryovacked every single ham without a complaint, but may never eat ham again. Mark looked after everything at the Hobart end: bumping in, worrying about stall layout, signage, refrigeration, cash registers etc.

So, you can see that by the time we actually got to The Taste we were hardly running on fresh legs.

As we drove in on the first day, I felt like I was 14 again, standing in the wings at the eisteddfod ready to play my first cornet solo. I wanted to vomit and I wanted to back out and scratch from the event.

To my complete surprise, the day went really well. Our staff sorted out their jobs among themselves, and we survived the first lunchtime rush. Ian Parmenter and his team of judges came around and tasted the pulled pork taco, and while it was lovely for him to come around the back of the stall to talk pigs and have his photo taken with me, I thought that would be the height of the excitement.

But we WON the “taste plate”! It’s the top prize for a small dish priced at $8 or under. Suddenly the line grew from a few people interested in our story and free range pork, to an endless line of punters wanting ‘one of those pork things I heard about’.

We’re not fancy chefs at all, and we’ve got an awful lot to learn about food, but I think the taco went well because it was fresh and real. The pulled pork was literally just pork – no seasoning – it had just been cooked all day in fat. The salsa was fresh: chopped in time to the shuffling of the customers in line. (Knife-wielding Carol chopped tomatoes - from the Brandsemas who have been growing them for more than 50 years, chillies, onions, cabbages, and apples for a total of 70 hours accompanied by Neil Diamond and others). The sourcream was organic and came from Elgaar Farm and we managed to source almost all the coriander from our friend Graeme (Thirlstane Gardens) in the north-west.

We wanted to show that you don’t have to work in a restaurant to be able to produce yummy food – you just need really good quality ingredients. But we’ve learnt so much from talking to chefs who use our products, and from our enthusiastic, experimental customers. We really hope more producers will be inspired to have a go at food events, and bring the consumer closer to the grower.

We’d like to thank our wonderful staff and volunteers who may have not been fully aware of what they were getting themselves into. At one stage we had six Robertsons working on the stall: Mark with his cider, builder-cum-bbq-er Dane, twins Allie and Lauren, and mum Denise, and Guy.

Guy and I started The Taste race as though it was a sprint, and on day three when we hit the wall and realised it was actually a marathon, our wonderful workers let us rest and filled the gaps.

We’ve been trying to have a little break during January – in between catching up on farm jobs and attending the usual markets.

But soon we’ll be back on the taco production line… Festivale is on in Launceston from February 8 – 10, Devonport’s Taste the Harvest is on March 10, and before we know it we’ll be at Agfest from May 2 – 4.

See you there!

We survived Christmas!

Thank you to our friends, families, and all the local businesses that have helped us get through this crazy time of year.

And thank YOU for your support and encouragement!

Best wishes for a wonderful season of fine food, wine, and friendships,
Eliza and Guy

P.S. See you at The Taste in Hobart from the 28th!

Pig farmers' Christmas

It’s September and the pigs are snuffling and nosing the soft spring dirt.

“Are you taking Christmas orders yet? We were too late last year.”

“Almost… we're not quite organised yet.”

It’s October (pigs are still snuffling) and the enquiries are increasing.

“Can you put us down for a ham? Are you taking orders yet?”

Alright. I give in: let’s open the floodgates.

It’s November and the orders are flowing like grain from the silos.

“Guy, when are we going to stop taking orders? How many pigs have we got?

“Guy, I want to have some spare. We missed out on a ham for ourselves last year.”

Guy stares at the paddock and stares at the spreadsheet.

And stares again at the paddock and again at the spreadsheet.

I think he grunted.

It’s December. Already.

What if we don’t have enough pigs? What if we lose an order? What if we lose two orders?

How many hams? How many hams? How many hams?

Bone-in, bone-out, half, whole, she’s having a charcuterie pack – with ham, no, without – three gourmet barbeque packs please, with an extra kilo of scotch, did you write that order down from the man who rang last night? What man?

I’m tired.

I’m more tired than you.

I’m wearing odd socks. I’m eating sausages for tea. Not sausages and mashed potato with gravy, just sausages.

I’m shocked when I see my arm muscles in the mirror. You don’t need a gym membership when you’ve got hams to hang.

Five days till Christmas.

           

So early this morning I sat outside on Cyril’s bed facing east and listened.

Cockatoos, roosters, crows, bush birds that I will learn the names of, one day.

And sleepy, snuffling pigs.