GET IT I FEATURE
FOR THE LOVE OF
Australia
With fire and drought ravaging Australia, Get it hit the road to visit one of our incredible farming families and investigated how we can all lend a hand. Writes Kathleen Loxton
ARMING IS IN THE BLOOD Allora feels like a world away from the Gold Coast, yet it’s only about two and a half hours from us. Gone is the lush, tropical environment, instead there is a landscape that is equally vital and intrinsic to the identity of Australia: our farmland. Out here there is cracked, baked earth as far as the eye can see, and there’s no green pastures. We met with Norco farmers and tight-knit family, the Mullins, and spoke with Naomi (accompanied by her beautiful son, Ned), who shared with us the history of the land and taught us about the realities of farming in Australia today. Farming is in the blood of the Mullins family. They are salt of the earth folk who, like all our farmers, are at the mercy of nature to provide for their livelihoods. It takes a certain type of resilience and faith to work the land. Naomi explained her husband’s farming legacy, saying,“Andrew’s heritage is Irish on his dad’s side and English/Scottish on his mum’s side. On his mum’s side they are the fifth generation of dairy farmers in the Goomburra Valley [Queensland]. The brothers, Andrew and Chris, bought and continued to grow the family farm in 2010.” Exploring the area, you can feel the February 2020
connection the family has to the farm. It feels like a home. The tractors and sheds are part of the furniture, and the cows beloved members of the family — plenty even have names that have been passed down through generations. THE REALITIES OF THE LAND One of the biggest effects of the drought for the Mullins family is the impact it has on sourcing feed for their animals. Because of the drought the Mullins are having to purchase feed (trucked from interstate) that they would usually be able to grow themselves, and costs are double to triple what they would normally be.“We have nearly used up all our stored feed that we had aside for this sort of situation,” Naomi said. Another challenge for the Mullins’ farm is having enough water for crops and animals. Naomi described,“Water allocation is back to 60 per cent for irrigation, but we aren’t using it as we are saving that for stock water. The stock goes through about 100 to 120 litres of water per day, per cow (the milking herd).” To put this in perspective, when we receive rain on the Gold Coast, it’s easy to imagine our farmers get plenty. However, this is not the case, even if they aren’t far away. As Naomi put it,“Rainfall was 240mm for last year, with 160mm in the first three months and only 24
80mm for the rest of the year [2019]. Our normal annual rainfall is 650mm! That’s a huge difference.” Sadly, as a consequence the family had to sell a few truckloads of their cows due to the critical need to preserve feed, now they are left with a few hundred. Even amongst the struggle, though, the family’s connection to the land and their animals is paramount, and it’s clear the animals and quality produce are still their top priority. The hard work doesn’t stop there, even a normal day on the farm is made up of long, tough hours. Naomi ran through an everyday routine with us:“An average day on the farm is Andrew getting up at 3:15 each morning to head down the track to the dairy where he sets the dairy up and gets the cows in to be milking by 4:00 a.m. Milking takes about three hours with the clean-up process afterwards. This is repeated at 3:00 in the afternoon as well. The time in-between milkings isn’t for rest, that’s for the continual maintenance and general farming that has to happen as well. (Feeding, cattle work, tractor work, irrigating our small crop of 30 acres of corn, etc.) A day normally finishes after the sun has gone down. Summer is a little different as we have more light.”
