20160315 – Tuesday – About goats

I have realised that Barrie is an absolute font of information about goats. I wanted to know all about his goat farming venture and anything and everything he could tell me about goats. I got Pauline and Barrie to record some data for me and here it is.

Pauline: There was a stage when we had nobody to help us, just myself and Barrie. I don’t get in with the goats I just stay on the outside. I wasn’t much help, I couldn’t reach them and we were getting frustrated. I thought, “What I need is a ‘scare goat.’ Not a scarecrow, a ‘scare goats.” I got a long broom handle, with a coat hanger on it and a bright orange shirt handing off it, and I drew a face on thick cardboard and dangled some material from it and put a big face on it and I called it “Abdulla,” because the material looked like Arab material.

I would go up to the goats and suddenly wave Abdulla over the goats and they would all run up to where they were supposed to run. It was quite effective, and it saved myself and Barrie feeling so frustrated with each other.

When Paul came to help, he had issues with mobility too, so I made him one as well, and we called that one ‘Fatima.’  So we used to wave Abdulla and Fatima over the goats and it worked for both of us.  They were quite heavy things with the shirts hanging off them so eventually I cut them both down to just  the streamers and it didn’t any more have to have a face on it and it still worked quite well.

The goats would run away from us and up towards Barrie to be drafted off.

I would go up to the back of the goats and then wave Abdulla over the back of the goats and Paul would wave Fatima and the goats would run away from us ad up towards Barrie and he would draft them, that is choose which goats were ready for market and which goats could wait for another day.

Barrie: The number of goats we run here is governed by the goats. Goats won’t stay if there is no water or food.

Sheep on the other hand will just go to the corner of the paddock and die if there is no food or water.

A goat will push through fences. Goats can smell water as can cows and horses, but sheep are well… sheep! If they are brought to the water and shown the water they will then come back to it when they are thirsty, but if they are not shown the water they won’t know where to go to find it and then they will die.

If you buy a new mob of sheep and take them to the watering hole, and they can familiarise themselves with where they are, then you can let them go and then they will know where they are and will be able to find that water hole again.

They might track for 5 ks away from the water but they will be able to go back. If on the other hand you drop them in a paddock at the gateway and there is water in the middle of the paddock they won’t be able to find the water without being shown that it is there.

I think this is why God set the goats on his left hand because they are independent and don’t need God. They are a clean animal according to the law, so there is nothing “unlawful” about them, but they are an independent beast and do not “need” God.

The goats have a very varied diet and some of the food that they eat is toxic to other animals, such as hop? bush.  If they were to eat only hop bush it would not do them any good, but they have such a varied diet that they never eat a toxic plant in sufficient quantities to do them any harm.

We put out molasses and salt licks which is what they lack in their diet and in certain areas there are particular soils that must contain salt and minerals that they need and you will find that they dig up these areas and eat the dirt to get the minerals and salts that they need. Their bodies tell them what they are lacking and they look for ways to satisfy that need, salt licks with molasses if we provide it or mineral enriched soils that they seek out for themselves. This helps their digestion.

If food is scarce or not very nutritious for them, like in drought conditions, the salt and molasses helps them make up for the lack in the food they are eating. In town, the agents who buy our goats are always surprised that when we bring goats in they are always healthy and in good nick. They think we must be “looking after” our goats and doing something special for them but that is all we do, just make sure they always have nutritious licks for them to eat. When we are tracking, we put hay in  the track yards, big bales of hay 8ft x4ft x 3ft and not cheap hay. That brings them in.

We don’t sell our nannies, we keep them and sell the billies. The hay brings them in and they have as it were a farewell feast, and then we take them into town and our goats are always in good nick. We feel that we are blessed and what we are doing seems to be right and seems to be working.

Fay: Barrie how does your year work, when do you work and when don’t you work?

Barrie: When this country dries out and there is no more surface water on the land, then all your bores and your dams are all fenced and they are usually big areas.

Then around the actual bores and dams we build a fence and a draft in it so I can draft off the goats I want to take and draft the ones I don’t want to take and they can go back into the paddock.

We have built free-standing loads so that we don’t have to keep dropping the back of the truck down because that is hard work. Now I just have to back up to the ramp open the gate and then draft them off and the goats just walk in.

On the outside of the inner fence around the dams there are ramps set up that the goats can just run up and then jump into the fenced area to get to the water, but once in there is no way for them to get out again, so they are trapped and then we can draft them.

The gate is open in the early season as well, so they can just walk in to the fenced area, but in the drafting season, we shut that gate and the only way in is up the ramps with no way out. On the inside of that fenced area we have another lane way that goes up into that bottom corner down here.

We drive the goats here and the goats all rush to the back of the yard to try to escape us and they run over to this corner here and then they are in the lane. They walk there int the yards and I shut them up there. Then I back the truck up to the loading ramp and then Pauline and Paul will “scare” them and push them up to me on the draft and I cut off the ones that I want and they go up into the truck.

Then we bring them back to the main yards and we try to deliver on the same day that we trap to maximize the weights of our goats. If you have to sit them in the yards for two or three days, the fret and then they will lose weight. So the best method is at 3 or 4 in the afternoon when we have got enough, we stop doing what we are doing and get the big truck and load them up.

Fay: Will they take them in town when you do that?

Barrie: They will take them seven days a week and will take them up to dark. In summer time you can go in there and still unload at 8.00 pm at night.

Fay: Will they take anything that you have got?

Barrie: Yes, except they have to be 20k or above – live weight 20 k. We make our cut off about 25 k. If you take 20k goats they are really next years goats, even 25k are next years goats. I try to make mine above 25k if I have enough of them.

Fay: Are you ever told “We don’t need goats.” Do you have quotas?

Barrie: “No.” We tried taking a full truck load of goats which would be about 600 goats. We found that if we wanted to get 600 goats together to sell, it would take me five days of trucking.

Those goats would then be in the yards for five days and they would lose weight, so we have found that the best method is to take them in on the day we truck them and then they don’t lose condition, so we can’t fill a whole truck load at once. They weigh four or five k better than if they have been in the yard for five days, and that at $1.90 a kilo, well that would have paid my fuel bill.

Fay: Well, that’s right through summer, when does the season cut out?

Barrie:  It starts in September and then when the season changes, we stop. The abbatoirs close over Xmas, from the 15th 16th December to the 2nd January, and that’s when they do their abattoir service.

All the workers get a fortnight’s holiday and then they get going again usually about the 2nd 3rd of January. We stop drafting once you get the change of seasons.

Right now it is March, April May, we usually get rain in May. The weather will probably go from 28degrees and then finish up being 22 degrees and not get warm again.

Fay: So you get 5 months off vircually?

Barrie: We get at least 5 months off this year because we haven’t got any more goats that are available, we’ve had a good run on them, so Manda and Jacob are coming out after Easter, and we will probably do a load of nannies and that will be it.

I don’t want to sell any more nannies because I was very hard on them last year because it is the first time the prices had jumped. Now because the prices are so good, and one goat now is worth what three goats were last year. We think we are blessed and what we are doing seems to be right, seems to be working

Fay: Do you have any ideas about a way of earning income in winter at Kaleno? What could you do on this property for winter.

Barrie: Relax! At my age relaxation is enjoyable.

Fay: Relaxation is enjoyable at any age! Barrie you were telling me about timing, how the year works.

Barrie: When we bought this property we weren’t even thinking about goats. We came here initially when we were going to look at a property share farm. for grain, and that was Hampton, another property over the back over here.

When we got there the chap tried to sell us the farm. He knew that if we share farmed we would find that there wasn’t enough rain in this area to grow crops on a regular basis and that we would be wasting our money.

He had a good crop that year. He had one really good year and you get about one in ten, but usually you go broke in the meantime. You would have nine years of failures and then the one good year pays back all your losses of the previous years. So then you are back to square one.

That’s basically the way I viewed it. The cost he wanted for his farm was quite reasonable and so we thought if the country is worth that sort of money we’d see what else is available.

Dad and Mum were just for doing it and so we were able to buy this place for a ridiculously low price, and it was a better place than the other one anyway, and twice the size, just a lot better place.

We made this ridiculous offer and they accepted it. Mum died then and dad, to join with us in buying this place had to sell his home. Dad had been with us for 30 odd years and he wanted to stay with us.

Then someone came along and offered him more than he had expected for his house and so financially we were right to go so we did. Dad was with us for 12 months and then he died of heart failure.

When we bought the place we also bought equipment to do farming. We pulled a lot of country preparing it ready to plant. I was trucking as well, and it wasn’t raining, and we were going backward. I couldn’t see there was any way this place was going to make money and it was as dry as a chip and we would never grow a crop on it and I was burning fuel like it was going out of fashion.

I was running up and down over Australia trying to pay for it in the truck and I wasn’t making much money out of the truck. It was one step forward and two steps back .

This was when Pat and Peter Thomas walked in, so our conversation creased for the time being, but we took it up again shortly.

Barrie:  I was speaking to a neighbour who said that they caught a trailer load of goats and took them to town they got  $1,000 for them. So ee found out about the goats and what they did with them and so we had Dazzas old blue trailer out there and  Pauline and Stephen thought, “Let’s try this out and they went out and got some goats.

There were no facilities here then so they just went to a dam and Stephen chased goats and loaded them on the trailer and took them to town. They took 10-15 goats into town and they came home with about $900.

I was working the trucks and I knew that I wasn’t making $1000 a week profit when I was driving the truck, so I had this “light-bulb moment.” I thought, “Why don’t we find out how they do these goats and so we made inquiries and went and looked at a few bloke’s set ups.

The people who owned this property before us apparently used to work with goats, but when they left they took all their fencing and equipment with them and they were never going to tell us how they did it.

We then worked out what worked for us and we started building yards around the dams and we had eleven watering points on our property and now we have dams all set up

The goats all know these watering points. Nat Mansfield and Danielle were here originally with us. Nat is Stephen and Beth Mansfield’s son and our daughter Danielle. Stephen is Graeme Mansfield’s son. So Nat and Danny were there and then they wanted out so they sold their property and moved here for a while but eventually moved back to Adelaide.

Nat got involved with insulation with David our son and set up an Insulation business in Adelaide and since have gone from strength to strength. Like all Mansfield’s he has a good head for business and Danielle probably still has the first dollar she ever earned – she is good with money too, and she is tight as. If you owe her $2 she will remind you of it.

Fay: Well, old Jim Mansfield, the one who had those two indentations in his head from an operation, he owes me a shilling and so I will have to ask him for it in the kingdom!!

Barrie: So we just kept on doing goats and we gradually learned more over time and we are fortunate that this country here is good goat country.

It is 80,000 odd acres and 50,000 acres of that is called alluvial and the remainder is “ridge,” like highlands. You can’t see it from here but there is a higher area  out there which is a fair bit higher.

The higher country is big and bouldery, and goats love that sort of country. It is a playground for them. There is water up there and they haven’t got much competition up there either. Pat and Peter are learning with the goats.

Once it gets into the highland country it goes into melon hole or gill hide, or sink hole country, and that is three different names to describe the same thing. What they are is just natural divets in the country which are actually fractures in the rock underneath. It has all got  limestone and the limestone country is like a filter and when it rains the water that runs down the gullies and finishes up in these melon holes or sink holes feeds the underground water.

Fay: Is that artesian water?

Barrie: No we are not artesian here, you have to go further north for that. We’ve got what is called sink holes or cavity waters that you get in this limestone area.

There are big caves which fill up with water.and that is where our bores are tapping into. That country is very soft country. We have four working bores.We use this water for our stock.

When our dams go dry we put tanks in. I have 25,000 gal plastic water tanks on the dam banks which we keep full. I’ve got a water truck out there. When we are running short of water in the dams I fill that truck there up and I go back and I fill my tanks so I’ve always got permanent water there and even if the dam goes dry my goats will stay in the area because there is water for them.

In the high-rise country you get a lot of rosewood trees there . Or over the scrub you get a little bit of Mulga. You get Mulga on the break between the alluvial and  the high country. You get a rim of Mulga that follows that country around and when you get on top of the melon hole country you get Rosewood, Bimblebox and Leatherwood and a speckling of woody weed. Woody weed predominantly grows on our alluvial country.

Fay: Is woody with its proper name?

Barrie: Well, it’s Turpentine and it’s, well it’s just a weed, but it always stays green because the alluvial soil here is fortysomething feet deep, And there is no Clay in it so water goes down through the topsoil and it comes to rock. We do have a few clay pans and that clay is really close to the surface.

Fay: So you don’t actually have to travel out to the extent of your land.

Barrie: No, in the 12 years we’ve been here I haven’t seen over the whole of our land.

Fay: What I think is so amazing is that you have that great big area of 88,000 acres as a resource and you just have to sit here in your Homestead with a few dams and bores around you and wait for the goats to come in.

You don’t have to drive them or herd them like you do with cattle or sheep. You just have to design structures around those dams and bores so that the animals are able to get in but once in a not able to get out. Then at your leisure you herd them up a chute and onto your trucks. You don’t have to muster.

Barrie: it would be a little difficult to muster goats. If you drove say 100 goats through the Woody weed when you got to the other side you would find you had 10 goats left.

You can have good fencing on your property and the goats will get through it every time. The nannies of the best ones to get through fences. They will push their heads through a small opening and then they’ll just continue to push and wriggle and push until their whole body goes through and once one is through then all the rest go through after it. We’ve got well mesh all around our working areas. We learnt that long ago so we don’t have that problem now. We have only just worked out how to catch the hard to catch Billies.

Fay: How do you do that?

Barrie: Our secret weapon is hay! Hayis the secret. They just love hay. They boss the hay and won’t let any other goats come near it. Next minute they are in the yard and on the tuck.

Fay: So that means I’m never going to see Susie or Pauline chasing goats then?

Barrie: Susie and Pauline are a long way from chasing goats these days. They are just struggling to walk actually. When we went to New Zealand, there were signs up saying “15 minute walk to such a such place.” They need to change these signs to read “1 1/2 hours to such and such a place” for Pauline.

So so when you get to the highlands country then it goes into the Rocky Ridge country, and that would be a great place for kids to play cowboys and Indians, it’s all boulders and ridges.

Out behind that it falls off to more woody weed country and more semi alluvial and highlands country.

After that I simply haven’t been down there. Our best dam is out there. We figure that we don’t have to disturb what’s going well so we stay at home here and do what we do.

In fact when we bought the property we didn’t even know we had that dam and when we saw it there were thousands of goats around it.

Pauline: when we first saw that dam, we drove over a rise and first of all saw a dam we didn’t know was there and then thousands and thousands of goats all around it.

Fay: so instead of the Indian wars you could have the goat wars.

Barrie: The way that we found the dam, was that we had come in the back way. The way that we normally came in was so dry and boggy, That is sand bogged.

We had the truck loaded with goats and we had the grader parked there, and we knew there was another way in and we thought we would try it. So that’s what we did and that was when we found the dam.

it was tough on the tires because it’s a very stony region and we did do a few tires but at least we didn’t get bogged.

In the meantime the boys GPSed  another track and so we put the dam on the GPS. So the boys went down on the motorbikes later on and GPSed a better track that was not so stony and that’s the way we used after that.

Brad and Steve did that for us. They’re both intrepid explorers. Dave’s the same,  they’ve got to do it because it’s there. They took the grader up there and they did some work and made a good road and now we use it all the time.

We don’t  see goats up there in such numbers now because we’ve taken the big ones out.

Fay: Well pauline and Barry and Peter and Pat that was so interesting thank you all for your input. How long have you been here now?

Barrie: we’ve been here 12 years.