When I was growing up, I wanted to do everything. I was told I was going to be a farmer.

Many of us have our lives maped out for us, and boy don’t we know it if we take a wrong turn. Delivering our lamb boxes the other day with a Tom Tom GPS, I had that distinct feeling of real life deja vu. You know where you are going and the GPS is telling you in a measured polite accent to ‘do a u-turn at the next round-about’, you don’t, and the more you go on, the more the measured polite accent seems to morph into a shrilling, almost unbearable order…

Well as much as I love farming, reality is coming into play, and like your TomTom, there comes a point when its GPS satellites realign your coordinates and you understand the detour you have made and start agreeing with your turns and directions…

I have spent the past year ensuring that my farm is secure, with a continuation of my farm plan of desilting and enlargening all my stock drinking water dams and electrifying all the fences to ensure minimum upset to the intoduction of drought resistent stock into my breeding programme. I have been fortunate to win a Government grant through my local Murray-Darling Subcatchment Group, which will ensure the best management of my pastures and will almost eliminate the massive wind errosion that has been such a feature of the past years on my property thanks to bare earth, which was fallowed for cropping but due to lack of rain stayed bare, as well as the remaining grassland over-pressured from the grazing of sheep, which were forced to consume usually unpalatable grasses that would protect the soil from erosion.

With the grant, which my neighbours and I will match dollar for dollar, we are able to regenerate tracts of vulnerable farmland with pasture planting, weed control and most importantly water piping and fencing, which allows greater control of grazing and prolonged groundcover through a drought event, resulting in greater drought proofing and much decreased erosion and river water turbidity, which affects all those downstream.

Also with the establishment of Farmer Dave Free Range Lamb, I have secured a stable price for the lambs I produce (as well as for other farmers with the same emphasis on environmental  sustainablility and the ethical treatment of animals), which has taken away my vulnerability to the highly volitile livestock market.

As winter comes and there are no decent rains in sight, we farmers again are looking at very lean times ahead, and what seemed like a end in the drought early on in the year now appears just to have been a reprieve.

My lamb business has now matured to the point that my fantastic team are running it without too much direct input from me, which means no more mustering one day, transporting at night, butchering and making sausages in the morning, and attending the markets over the weekend. This is now allowing me to refocus on the farm in these next weeks to ensure the developments can sustain the sheep through the winter and keep producing prime Dorper lambs.

However, I am a realist and the universe has thrown me too many lifelines for me not to be an adult and make the right decisions for the future. I was blessed with the stint on BB, which although the financial rewards were small they were enough to help (as well as giving me a super fuel efficient car to do the tens of thousands of kilometres to keep all afloat), but more importantly allowed the Australian public to help out and sponsor my pregnant merino ewes through an impossible period. Then I again got another reprieve, not from the rain clouds, but from the producers of ‘Dancing with the Stars’. This literally bought me sheep feed to get through to a point that I could strengthen the ewes and new lambs for sending away on adjistment and give the farm a break from grazing.

This time, heading into winter, I have decided to make the massive changes to my farm, setting it up for as close to drought proof as possible, piping stock drinking water to as much of the farm as possible, and cutting paddocks into smaller lots to maximise feed usage and groundcover control. Once these changes are made I will set off to develop the Farmer Dave brand in Melbourne and do whatever it takes to keep the ‘Farm’ in Farmer Dave.

It’s a decision that has taken a very, very long time. It’s been almost impossble to make, as my farm is my life and to think of moving in a new direction is gut wrenching. It’s been a crazy journey with my personal TomTom…and it seems just now neither of us now knows what’s around the corner…

…but to take a phrase out of Scarlett O’Hara’s monologue, ‘As God is my witness, I’ll never be hungry again’. In my case, my sheep will never go without grass and, like Scarlett, I’ll keep my head up and keep the promise.  Just hopefully with less dramatics…