Cullen Bullen Visit

I have just spent nearly a week with my brother, Michael, and his wife, Beth, on the farm at Cullen Bullen (photo). This is my old home town and I still have 200 acres there which was part of the original family farm. As usual it was an insight into the busy and demanding life of farming. In four days: we shifted cattle from paddocks many kilometers apart including across a major highway and a railway line with all the frustrations and hazards that entailed; we vaccinated, drenched and weighed about 120 steers; several steers were dehorned; the vet came and treated two steers for pneumonia and gave no hope to a 650 Kg bullock that had an infected foot and leg and so had to be shot; my brother organized a likely lot of greyhound dog owners to come and butcher the beast and remove all bits of the carcass and they gave him $50 for a beast that was worth $1000 (and so it goes....); 25 tonne of fertilizer was spread by two huge trucks; Michael finished sowing a 60 acre paddock of oats with the necessary lifting of 40Kg bags of super onto the seed drill; I sprayed out about 700 litres of poison onto blackberries; we erected an electric fence to protect a 5 acre patch of oats from cattle in the same paddock; and we made several trips to nearby Portland for necessary supplies. In between there were a couple of appointments to be kept, Beth was making daily trips to Lithgow to visit her sick Mum and cakes had to be cooked for the cake stall on Saturday to coincide with polling day. WOW!! But it was beautiful to sit on the back verandah in the evening and have a beer and watch the setting sunlight bounce off the magnificent sandstone cliffs across the paddocks to the east.