After moving out to our property it wasn’t till 2019 that we moved on the agisted cattle and waited for the Spring rains to come before we bought our own. Unfortunately, before the rains came, we survived the worst fires to hit this area for 100 years (see more info here) and then after months of living in a black, seemingly dead landscape, the rain came, and with it flooding that removed a lot of the topsoil off our mountains.
But after the rain stopped the grass started growing and by the time we had hooves on the land in March 2020 the blue grass was over my head. We started with a small group of 33 heifers (female animals that haven’t calved yet) and strip grazed them down one of our front paddocks. It took 3 months to work through approx. 11 acres with those 33 cattle. This allowed both them and us to become used to working together and get into the swing of things. (Things didn’t always work out right – here’s a story of the escape I like to call the midnight muster). Since then we have fenced about 650 acres of our 2,400 acre property so we can rotationally graze the cattle, expanded the water infrastructure and have had a huge learning curve ‘in all things cattle’.
