For all those who are wondering what the huge brahman bullock weighed, in the 2012 Beef Week weight guessing competition – the bullock’s exact weight was 1280kg.  Apparently 17 people guessed the brahman bullock’s weight correctly and Cindy Offord was declared the prize winner.  Donated by Nick Dudarko for the RACQ Capricorn Helicopter Rescue service, ‘Kangarin-Tiny’ was purchased by Australian Country Choice (ACC) and Coles, then donated to Monto State High School for the ag students to work with for a year.  ’Kangarin-Tiny’ will then return to Nick Dudarko’s property.

I highly recommend that anyone interested in any kind of horses, attends Equitana.  It’s the equine equivalent of Rocky’s Beef Week Expo – being the largest horse show in the southern hemisphere.  Every type of horse and horse event is included in Equitana and many Australians from rural and remote areas attend.  In fact last time I went to Equitana, residents of towns such as Port Hedland and Darwin were complaining that they were sick of running into neighbours!  I even heard the same comments from Tasmanians and New Zealanders.

I’ll be there again this year, in the Walter Pearce Pavilion at tradefair stand number 45.  This year, not far from the restaurant – so I’ll be able to smell food, even though I won’t have time to eat it, between 7.30am and 6pm!  More than 75,000 people attend, many from distant parts of Australia and other countries (particularly North and South America), making Rocky’s beef week the largest beef event in Australasia and perhaps the southern hemisphere.

Looking forward to a great week meeting people, and the daytime eating curfew won’t do me any harm! If you will be there, call in for a chinwag.

It’s a two way street – many Australians head to other countries to work in agricultural jobs also.  Rural Exchange New Zealand (RENZ)  has plenty of information on working on New Zealand dairy farms, sheep and cattle stations, etc.

Henbury is a cattle station located in the Alice Springs region of the Northern Territory, and was purchased last year by RMWAH with the help of $9m from taxpayers.

Many rural residents have discussed RMWAH’s purchase and the financial and ecological aims of the project however there has been almost no public discussion, to date, and no detailed figures explaining projected estimates.

Filmed during midsummer in the beautiful rolling hills of Suffolk, ’A Farmers Life for Me’  features 9 varied couples (siblings and married/partnered couples, gay/straight; of all ages & from all walks of life) competing for the ultimate prize – the right to run their own 25 acre Suffolk farm rent-free for a year.  The eight episodes were screened in Britain late last year.

The competition is screened over eight episodes, and the judge is farmer Jimmy Doherty (childhood friend of chef Jamie Oliver), accompanied by his long-term business mentor.  Jimmy Doherty has appeared in more than a dozen farming and food related television series, dating back to 2004.  He’s also a book author, with two titles to his name; ‘A Farmer’s Life for Me’ (a guide to sustainable agriculture, as a hobby or business) and ‘A Taste of the country’ (a book of traditional country recipes).

Blunt and practical, Jimmy does a good job of explaining the reasons why things should be done in a particular fashion – and the attributes he’s looking for in the winners:  thoughtful people with a plan and capable of carrying it out; who display passion and ability to work hard and as a team.  And above all, couples who have business plans that have a realistic chance of success.

In the first episode, the 9 couples front up to the farm and choose which half-acre plot they’d like, out of the 9 spaces marked out.   One couple dithers so long, they simply get their plot because it’s the only one left.  Other couples rush in – and they ALL leave constructing their livestock-proof boundary fence until more than halfway through the 3 day initial trial (I’d have been in panic mode, especially if I’d never had anything to do with fencing before – like these couples.)   Some finished just as the very clean & shiny Range Rover rolled up towing the fanciest horse float (horsebox) I’ve ever seen, containing the first delivery of sheep.  Unsurprisingly, most contestants spent much of their 1200 pound budget on buying relatively easy to erect, electric fencing – plastic electric fencing poles, tape and a power unit.  One couple purchased second hand posts and another bought ‘proper’ ’livestock’ fencing – constructed with netting and treated pine posts.  It was interesting seeing the poor devils banging each post (about 12cm across – not skinny little stakes)  into the ground by hand (with a post hole driver).  Particularly as every contestant seemed to spend the whole time in gumboots (‘wellington boots’), despite it being the middle of summer.  The sweat just poured off them.  Not a tractor-driven posthole digger in sight.  Admittedly these timber posts came with a pointy end, and the soil was relatively loose and sandy…but as anyone knows who has tried to ram a skinny little beach umbrella stake into a sandy beach – you’ve still got to dig a hole, to get it to a secure depth.  Curious to not see any star pickets, which would have been so much easier to handle and drive in by hand.  Maybe they’re not commonly used in England, where fences are either temporary (and electric) or made to last hundreds of years (stone, hedges, solid timber).  The self-described very competitive, sporty couple who built the ‘proper’ livestock fence unfortunately forgot about insulation – and had to improvise by tearing up plastic bags to reduce the power leaking out of the fence via the bare screws into the timber posts.

Along with the 1200 pound budget, each couple has 3 hours worth of use of the toy-sized tractor and plough.  Some obsess over straight lines, others plough deep enough to lay pipes.  Over the 3 days, each couple has to decide what sort of profit-making farming they’d like to do on their plot, as an example of how they’d run a larger farm.   All come up with interesting ideas.  Perhaps the most foreign concept to Australians, is one couple’s idea of ‘serviced allotments’.  Serviced allotments are apparently planted out to veges and herbs, and customers pay for the right to come along and treat it as their own – picking whatever they want – without having to do any digging, planting, pruning, watering or weeding.   In other words, they pay to get the fun end of the stick not the work end.  Other contestants have plans for hog roasts (Wessex Saddleback pigs), mutton sausages (Texcel sheep), millinery wool hand died with natural vegetable dyes, such as beetroot (dreadlocked Wensleydale sheep), hay production and specialist salad greens.

There are also Gloucestershire old spot pigs, pedigree goats (organic, low fat goat meat), and wheat grown especially to make the pastry for goat meat pies.  (Goat is the world’s most widely consumed meat.)

Curiously, no-one chooses cattle.  It could have been because they need higher & more substantial fencing – however it wasn’t mentioned if this was a factor in anyone’s decision when choosing livestock.  Perhaps the avoidance of cattle is because one of the very first tasks, done as a whole group, was piling up an estimate of the annual supply of grass (in bags) in front of pens of different animals.  When told sheep and goats only eat around 15 bags of grass per year (in England, anyway) whereas one cow eats 100 bags, and of the perils of underestimating feed requirements, there was a group sigh of surprise.  The 69 or so bags they piled up for the cow, wasn’t nearly enough.  Lucky Jimmy Doherty didn’t add an estimate of what a single horse eats in one year, the contestants would have keeled over in shock.

The nine couples became eight, already.  The first couple to go were siblings, dismissed because of their disagreements.  Fairly stock-standard argy-bargy for siblings, but potentially problematic when running a business efficiently together.  The couples are housed in very new and neat caravans, parked in a row across the paddock.

The classic quote from Jimmy Doherty is:  ‘one of them said why do we keep doing all this business stuff?  When are we going to do some actual farming?’, in a UK Telegraph newspaper interview.  Jimmy keeps steering the contestants away from romantic fantasy land and back to reality.

Next week, ‘A Farmer’s Life for Me’ contestants have to demonstrate that they’re capable of producing saleable products from pork.  Such as pork sausages.  As anyone knows who has tackled sausage making – it’s one of those things that looks pretty easy but in fact has hilariously messy results in store for learners without the ‘knack’.

‘A farmers life for me’ should be screened on prime-time, not hidden away at 6pm when much of the population is either at work or travelling home, or dealing with family demands.  It has all the hallmarks of the very best quality ‘reality’ television shows – by having an excellent judge in Jimmy Doherty, and sensible commentary (rather than overly dramatised, or romantic/idealistic).  I look forward to seeing the whole series and encourage everyone who is interested in food, agriculture, the urban/rural divide, etc –  to watch it also.  The differences between farming in the UK and Australia are very interesting, but equally interesting are the similarities in public attitudes and farmer problems.

There’s some especially interesting forum comments in relation to a Guardian Newspaper article on ‘A Farmer Life for Me’, written by Brian Schofield.  What strikes me is that many people in the U.K., just like in Australia, confuse ‘moving to the country’ with ‘moving onto a farm’ (as in a full-time self-supporting business).   I’m puzzled about how someone can think they understand agriculture and farms, when in fact they’ve just moved from a large city to a small town.  But they do – both here in Australia and in the U.K.  And no doubt elsewhere.  There are comments on the Guardian newspaper story from people who talk about ‘moving to the country’ then go on to mention that they’ve actually moved into a village – they’re not involved with agriculture in any way.  And the classic comment on this forum?  ‘Papers and milk are not delivered…Many rural spots are low on amenities and services, including one post box pickup and one bus a day!’  It is truly funny, at least for an Australian, because the writer of this comment clearly wasn’t joking.  So many towns I could name, that would be delighted to have one bus a day, instead of only one every few days…

Very thought provoking – as to the reasons why this happens, how often it happens, and how the image of rural Australia might alter, if it was to change.

• There are those that are entertaining and informative accounts of daily domestic issues, written by women, which highlight the lifestyle and financial management differences between living in towns and living in the bush.  These blogs are interesting and very useful in regard to helping non-rural residents understand what it’s like to live in the bush – particularly from the point of view of being a mother and a wife.  In the bush  women still mainly run the household, which includes the business’s office (statistically, most rural women have spent more years in formal education).  While blokes spend most of their time outside in a hands-on role.  It’s not politically correct to point this out, but it remains an immutable fact that blokes are physically stronger when it comes to rural work, which remains physically demanding despite labour saving devices - and as age advances, this difference between men and women becomes more apparent.   And women generally do a better job of organising and running a household, family etc.  This is not to suggest that women should be chained to the kitchen!  In fact there are many blokes who deal with finances and many women who work outside, particularly in jobs requiring patience, such as training weaners.  (To clarify further - ’running a household’ is of course just as essential as working to earn an income – successful farming families usually have a husband and wife partnership, in which each person does what they’re best at, enabling the other to do the best job they can, sometimes swapping roles, and supporting one another.)  It is mostly blokes who are writing blogs discussing more technical, factual, hands-on aspects of farming, because they’re usually the ones driving the tractor all night or branding or crutching all day - and these are the farming blogs that are the scarcest (for obvious reasons).
• There are also many blogs written by people running food production enterprises that are not of a sufficient scale to produce an income large enough to live on.  I.E., they’re ‘hobby farm’ type enterprises, for want of a better description.  These are often run by people who have made a living in an urban career, and bought rural land to escape to on the weekend or in retirement.  Those written by people who do not have a rural background are interesting in regard to growing your own food in your spare time, often with very innovative ideas, and often with very clear descriptions of farming practices because they’ve been written by people new to the business.  However as farming blogs they can be misleading, because often the way of doing things is not economically feasible on a farming operation that is required to generate sufficient income to support a family, long-term.  How it is possible to manage a small number of livestock or grow food on small acreage often isn’t transferrable to a full-time going concern that grows enough food to sell to others and make a full-time, long term living for a family.  It’s easy to be idealistic and use practices that would be inefficient on a large scale,  if  there’s another source of capital or income.  There are quite a few blogs that purport to be ‘farm blogs’ that fall into this category.  Without naming any names, some of these ‘farm’ blogs are written in a clearly superior/smug tone, either criticising the previous owners (the farm we bought from an elderly couple was very run down and degraded…) and/or neighbours.  How not to win friends & influence people, and how to set yourself up for future criticism by successors.  It must be pointed out, however, that anyone who has purchased rural land and set about improving the natural environment and producing good quality food, is a very valuable asset to the local community.  Often people who have built up capital outside primary production have the financial resources to spend money on renovating and/or embarking on capital works that would otherwise have been difficult.  This includes work on buildings (homes, machinery & shearing sheds) to yards, fencing, waters, pastures and livestock breeding programmes; and weed and pest management.  This capital expenditure doesn’t just improve the property they own, it can help introduce innovative ideas to others, improve local moral, provide local employment and help local businesses.
• The exception to the above ‘hobby farm’ group of blogs, is blogs written by people who grew up on farms, moved to the city or mines for a career, then returned to the bush with enough money to buy their own land (which may or may not be enough to make a living off).  The old saying ‘you can take the boy out of the bush but not the bush out of the boy’ is true.  People who grew up on the land and return to it, do so with enthusiasm tempered by a healthy dose of realism.  They understand the good aspects of rural life and primary production but they also know the downsides so they’re not filled with romantic dreams or out-of-control idealism.  They retain a life-long understanding of the web of life and that making a living from primary production is complicated, completely weather and market dependent, and not a two-dimensional career in which hard work and talent is predictably rewarded.  If you grow up in the bush you have a fundamental understanding that what’s great in theory won’t necessarily be feasible in practice, but most people are creative, prepared to give new things a go, and hard working.  Blogs written by this group of people tend to be especially well written, because they’ve got very broad life experience.
• It’s much harder to locate well-explained rural blogs written by people who are hands-on running fulltime agribusinesses, long-term - with nitty-gritty factual information and debatable issues relating to large scale farming and livestock raising.  (Full time) farmers work long hours most or all days of the week and are generally exhausted when they knock off.  So naturally it’s hard to find any hands-on fulltime farmers dedicated enough to voluntarily spend some of their scant spare time, writing about what they do, for no other reason than to help people unfamiliar with the industry, understand how their food and fibre is grown and encourage thought on topical issues.

However there are a few.  Here’s a few excellent rural blogs that I’ve found via some concerted digging around the internet:

• Dairyfarming – Milk Maid Marian (Marian Macdonald, Gippsland, Victoria) Excellent info on dairyfarming and explanations of issues.
• Free Range Pig farming & heritage poultry and other rare livestock breeds – Mt Gnomon Farm (Guy Robertson & Eliza Wood, NW Tasmania) Loving descriptions of their livestock combined with the practical realities of raising livestock to be eaten – different to the average ‘organic, free range’ type farmers who are specialising in odd breeds because they’re ‘cute’ - this couple are the real deal.
• Cotton growing – Tales of a Cotton Wife (Bess, Mungindi, northern NSW) Excellent info on cotton growing.
• Chook farming – Our Free Range Farm  (Andy Peverill, Cookamidgera NSW) Good explanations of the trials of chook farming.  And no it’s not like having half a dozen chooks in the backyard, only bigger.
• Grain Cropping – Nerd Farmer (Jonathan Dyer, Wimmera district, Victoria)  Wondering what your supermarket pasta is made from?  Jonathan grows it, and he explains it.
• Sheep – wool production, plus sustainable land & wildlife management - Ochre Archives (Phillip Diprose, Grenfell, Central NSW).  Practical, no-nonsense, factual examples of sustainable farm management.  Images explain the writing in an exceptionally organised and clear manner.  For example, before and after images of sheep mowing the house yard, wool selling, soil sampling and tree planting. 
• Merino wool production, crossbred fat lambs & Hereford cattle, written especially for young children – especially those unfamiliar with life on a farm - KT’s Farm Life.  Over the years I’ve been contacted by many primary and secondary school teachers seeking agriculture-related teaching resources for their students.  Older kids would find adult blogs interesting and informative, but younger kids need something specifically written for their age.  This blog has been written by Alison Rutledge but from her five year old daughter’s perspective.  Now I have somewhere to direct the enquiries from teachers!

It’s surprising that well written, informative blogs similar to the style of the above farming blogs, but written by people making a living out of Merino sheep (as distinct from non-fine wool breeds), are scarce.  Given the historical significance of Australia’s production of fine wool, the continuing uniqueness of our fine wool industry and increasing popularity of wool as the ultimate environmentally friendly fibre (with prices rising again in recent years) and the relatively high level of education amongst this sector of primary industry –  the lack of blogs written by people living on Merino sheep properties is surprising. 

Writing good quality blog posts, regularly and long-term, with no prospect of financial or other tangible gain, is truly an act of dedication.  The rural blogging landscape is constantly changing as new farm bloggers begin, full of enthusiasm, and longer term farm bloggers find their supply of time and/or energy has depleted past the point where continued blogging is possible.

I look forward to seeing additional farming blogs written by people involved in all aspects of Australian agriculture, from horticulture and fruit growing, to fishing and forestry, crop growing and livestock raising, in different parts of the continent.   The more variety there is, the faster two-dimensional farming stereotypes will be broken down.

The patient travel schemes run by state governments to provide financial rebates for travel to essential medical appointments by remote area residents, are a bad joke.  Last time I looked, the patient transit scheme reimbursement rate for an overnight stay was $35!  Remote area residents are out of pocket thousands of dollars on travel & accommodation-related expenses by the time their baby attends the standard 6 week checkup with a paediatrician, unless they’re lucky enough to be able to travel by road to a town where there’s relatives they can stay with.  Because these children and mothers are in a remote area the standard pregnancy and follow up appointments after the birth, are far more vital than is the case for mothers and children who live within an hour or less drive of a hospital (i.e. within a fairly short ambulance ride in the event of an emergency).  In fact it is usual for anyone living a long distance from a hospital to go and live in the town where it is intended for the baby to be born, at least 2 weeks beforehand, if not 4 (the latter being a common choice for first time mothers [who've never had a test run to make sure the landing gear more or less works as it should], if there are any potential issues that surface (eg low placenta, high blood pressure or blood sugar etc) or if the mother lives in an area where roads are likely to be impassable at the time of year that the baby is due.

In total there were 15 x 30 minute episodes in the Keeping up with the Joneses tv series, plus the one hour introductory episode.  Tonight’s episode 16 was the final episode.  It revolved around Christmas, the arrival of the wet season and the birth of the latest member of the Jones clan, Jack.

Judging by the amount of comments I’ve received regarding how much people are enjoying watching Keeping up with the Joneses, it would be nice to see more episodes or a follow up programme in future years (will the tribe of Cristina’s boys expand beyond two, to four?).   The last segment in the final episode was especially well done and will inspire many people of all ages to head bush to work on a cattle station, or aspire to raising their children in the bush.  Throughout series 1 and 2 of  ’Keeping up with the Joneses’ we’ve seen little Milton and Coolibah employees riding steers and  poddies (calves), campdrafting and mustering on horseback, catching crocodiles and raiding nests for croc eggs, helicopter mustering, motorbike riding, fishing for barra, jetski riding, toad racing, bullcatching and driving roadtrains and graders.   The stuff of dreams for active boys and girls, trapped in classrooms.

In the meantime, everyone who has enjoyed watching ‘Keeping up with the Joneses’ can do some armchair travel to many of Australia’s largest and most remote cattle stations, via the best-selling coffee table style books ‘A Million Acre Masterpiece’ and ‘Life as an Australian Horseman’.  These unique books contain more than 500 colour photos taken on cattle stations in the Northern Territory (including the Victoria River District, the region where Coolibah Station is located), Western Australia’s beautiful Kimberley Region and Queensland’s remote Cape York Peninsula and Gulf, and arid Channel Country.   These cattle stations are businesses and are not open to the general public – the only way to see what they are like is to work on them, or via photographs or film.  The books are ideal Christmas gifts for anyone who is interested in Australian outback life.  Orders for 2 or more books come with a free calico carrybag and a good discount, and books can be personally signed and mailed direct to anywhere in the world.  The books also come with a money-back guarantee of satisfaction.  For more information on these outback books, visit the Book Contents page, or visit the Testimonials page to read comments from other book purchasers.  Many book purchasers have taken the plunge and started living and working on one of the cattle stations included in the books, after being inspired by the photos.

But there’s also been a few glaring gaffes.  One is the commentary remark made when one of the cleanskin bulls objected to being loaded on the truck: ‘he should be happy since he’s going off to breed with the females’.  Feral, unbranded bulls are caught and sold, not kept.  In fact later in the programme Milton mentioned that they aimed to catch 30 bulls a day late in the year, because it was ‘handy fuel money’.  Once cleanskin bulls are caught, they don’t come within a coo-ee of any cows, instead it’s straight to good yards with a fence higher than 6ft (if possible), then onto a ‘town’ truck and to the meatworks to be turned into hamburger mince.  Cattle station owners/managers don’t want the undesirable temperament and physical attributes of feral cattle passed on to any offspring.  Also, cleanskin bulls will tend to lurk in difficult-to-muster scrub and come out at night to compete with the good quality and expensive herd bulls, hunting them away from the breeders with the aim of passing on their genes instead.  Suggesting that Milton was catching the cleanskin bulls to drop them off in a 3-barb paddock with the domesticated cows, has drawn attention to the fact that whoever wrote the script has absolutely no genuine understanding of cattle management on northern cattle stations.  Because the cleanskins would vanish from open country overnight.   It’d be like dropping off a bus load of crims at a tea party.  Yeah they might scoff a few cakes down as they passed by but they wouldn’t hang around where they could be seen and easily re-caught, sipping cups of tea with the ladies.

Early in the 14th episode the commentary remark was also made: ‘the wet season starts in a few weeks’.  We all wish it was that cut & dried!  Unlike southern regions of Australia which have four relatively predictable seasons and an official calendar start and finish to summer, autumn, winter and spring; northern Australia has two commonly recognised seasons ‘the wet season’ and ‘the dry season’.  However there’s no official start day marked on any calendar and no-one agrees on precise times.  Every wet season and every dry season is different and every season starts at a different time and in a different way.  And it varies between locations.  Most commonly, October heat will start to bring thunderstorms to the north, and everyone hopes for some falls of at least several inches each time, in November.  But frequently northern Australian residents are disappointed, and bake in unrelenting heat and rising humidity instead.    Annual rainfall averages show that the highest rainfall month in the northern end of Australia is February; followed by January then March.  December and April average rainfall figures, follow on.  Usually wet season rain has gone by some time in April, and months of cloudless, completely rainfall free days, usually follow.  In some years these predictable days may be interrupted for just a day or two by cloudbands dropping light rain over the cooler months, and hour-long intense thunderstorms in October & November, but solid rain (from low pressure systems or monsoon troughs) doesn’t usually commence until December at the earliest.  So ‘the wet season starts in 3 weeks’ – if only it was that predictable!

From memory there were only going to be 15 episodes of ‘Keeping up with the Joneses’, and next week shows the start of heavy wet season rain, so presumably it is the last episode.

People who have enjoyed watching ‘Keeping up with the Joneses’ love the best-selling coffee table style books ‘A Million Acre Masterpiece’ and ‘Life as an Australian Horseman’.  So these unique books, with more than 500 photos taken on Australia’s largest cattle stations, are ideal Christmas gifts.  Orders for 2 or more books come with a free calico carrybag and a good discount, books can be personally signed and mailed direct to anywhere in the world.  The books also come with a money-back guarantee of satisfaction.  For more information on these outback books, visit the Book Contents page, or visit the Testimonials page to read comments from other book purchasers.

Attendance at these social media workshops is is highly recommended for any livestock producers who are interested in learning more about how to get first-hand stories of everyday rural life and issues, direct to anyone who is unfamiliar with Australian agriculture, via the internet or mobile phones.  I’m not sure that there would have been much rural interest in attending social media workshops prior to the live export ban fiasco.  But the outpouring of live export misinformation actually did the bush a favour in one way, because it highlighted the increasingly urgent necessity for as many rural Australians as possible to take maximum advantage of the huge range of direct storytelling and networking avenues now available, to counterbalance the mass of opinion very efficiently broadcast by animal rights extremists and uninformed conservationists (eg the ones who keep telling us that ‘Meat Free Mondays’ will stop the sea engulfing coral atolls in the Pacific). 

MLA workshop information includes websites (static or rarely changing background information – but it can take days or even weeks to be found by search engines, especially if the website is new and/or small), Blogs and online forums (up-to-the minute opinion pieces, found by search engines within minutes), Twitter (instant 140 character messages, around the world in seconds), Facebook (more personal and casual family stories, but also how to set up a Facebook ‘Page’ for business networking/storytelling), LinkedIn (more formal business networking – direct with decision makers running companies and organisations to grassroots primary producers; all around the world), YouTube (videos) and Flickr (online galleries of still images).

Workshop participants bring their own laptop if possible.  And if you need help with anything, it’s there in spades.  Our group had a huge age range, from Hillgrove’s venerable can-do Tom Mann at 76 (embarrassingly capable with a fancy mobile phone activities) to people many decades younger.  The range of experience was very varied also, however most had personal experience with one area (eg Facebook) but knowledge gaps in other areas. 

Participants end the one and a half days with a Tumblr blog page set up and a Facebook ‘Page’ (for non-family/close friends) set up, with images and links attached.  Plus a new network and a specific ‘to do’ list.

Any livestock producers who are interested in attending the MLA ’Social Media Conversations’ workshops should contact Deborah Leake at Meat & Livestock Australia as soon as possible, because only the dates and locations for the first 3 ‘test run’ workshops (Charters Towers, Qld; Katherine, NT & Katanning, WA) have been set.  More workshops will be held in other areas in 2012.   Speaking up now will help ensure an MLA workshop is held within travelling distance of where the largest number or most interested participants live.  Information Technology-related workshops tailored for rural residents are as scarce as hen’s teeth – so best to sieze the opportunity.

Over the last six months it has been great to see so many rural residents realise they have first-hand stories of what it’s like to live in the bush that are of interest to other people, and that you don’t need to have some sort of special qualification to be able to write something of interest to others.  The more primary producers who invest a bit of online time in explaining to the public what their life is like, all over Australia and in all aspects of food and fibre production, the better off we’ll all be now, and future generations.