Farewell to Sarah

Time has flown since the arrival of Sarah in January for the appointment as a teacher at 'Bald Hills'. Even since arriving Sarah has been a blessing to all of the family, her dedication and loyalty will never be forgotten. Kurt and Kayla really enjoyed Sarah as a teacher this year resulting in their high achievements and efforts in their work. The last couple of days of school was filled with a surprise Christmas Concert, plenty of cuddles, (some tears shed by Leah) and a making of a Gingerbread house!!

Kayla and Leah organised a farewell dinner for Sarah giving it a Christmas theme.

Beau and Sarah have always had a special bond, he is still asking when is Sarah back?? Thankfully, she is returning for a couple of days in late January and also promised camping and weekend visits!!

Leah and I wish Sarah all the best.

Early Storms have been a blessing

Leah and I finished a fence-line to link up the Forrest side yards to the Home yards about a week ago which made moving the maiden heifers from one side of the property to the other trouble free. The kids also helped out in the afternoons after finishing their schoolwork.

We have been lucky enough to have received 72ml of rain at the start of November and another 15ml of rain this morning. It has provided a huge relief and has given our pastures and legumes a great kick start to the summer season. We are hoping that the storms will be reached by all over the next couple of days.

October Already ??????

Time has flown since I last updated my blog. Since then, Kerstin completed here six months work with us so Leah and Kayla organised a farewell dinner.


Kayla has now joined Kurt and Sarah in the schoolroom completing her EKindy year with Leah and Beau now helping me with more paddock duties.




Leah and I have been continuing the paddock rotations and started feeding the breeders with a molasses supplement.



I officially completed my Nuffield Scholarship with the approval of my report and also the delivery of the certificate. The experience, knowledge and people that I have met throughout my Nuffield studies will never be forgotten. I was lucky enough to head over to Perth for four days for the Annual Nuffield National Conference Tour where I watched 19 Nuffield Scholar present their findings of their individual studies. A total of 21 scholars were awarded for the 2014 year with such a diverse group of people studying topics ranging from raspberry genetic mapping right through to fishing gummy sharks!! I congratulate them all and encourage them to acknowledge how privileged they should be to be associated with Nuffield.





We are now seeing all the Brahman cross breeders calving with their Brangus, Simmental and Brahman bulls. This is one of the sires we purchased early on this year.


We have dried off here, but are fortunate enough to have bulk feed and water. We received 12mls on the softwood side of the property and 25mls the forest-side hopefully this is a good sign of what is around the corner!

Nuffield SpringTour 2012

Here is the link to my Nuffield findings I presented last year in Toowoomba. Click on the link below to view:-

http://vimeo.com/54518427

What a busy start to the year!!

After spending New Years in Townsville with some family and friends, we came home to a rather dry ‘Bald Hills’. Even though we were concerned about our wet season not arriving yet, we were all excited to pick up Kerstin, who we met at the Chico Basin Ranch in Colorado last year. With Kerstin from Germany, the hot and humid weather wasn’t too kind, not only did she feel it, but we all suffered from the heat, especially when the first job on the list was fencing!! Kerstin has been helping us out with all stationhand duties from seeding paddocks right through to mustering.


Upon completion of splitting more paddocks up, we got stuck into our annual branding of calves, to be happily stopped half way through the muster with 16 ½ inches of rain in the second last week of January. The following week, we completed the branding and muster, and moved onto maintenance of machinery and shed clean up.



On Australia Day, we also welcomed Sarah to ‘Bald Hills’ to take on the HomeTutor/Teacher duties for Kurt who is in Grade 2 through Capricornia School of Distance Education. Sarah had a marathon drive from New South Wales during the midst of all the rain, but finally arriving safely a few days later than expected!!


The weekend just gone, we were lucky enough to host a BBQ for MLA (Meat and Livestock Australia). We were hosts to 8 chefs from the US to experience an Aussie BBQ. With the showers around from Thursday, it was a very wet BBQ on Saturday with the booked bus replaced with three four wheel drives!! It was such a unique experience that we will never forget, having amazing chefs preparing different cuts of Australian beef in our humble little kitchen. The meat was cooked to perfection on our newly purchased BBQ (didn’t want too much of an authentic Aussie BBQ!!) We also invited some cattle producers from around the area, who were more than happy to introduce our guests to Bundaberg Rum and also a feed of our local mud crab and prawns. We have never had so many people in the kitchen not only cooking but observing (even our four year old daughter Kayla, didn’t blink, watching their every move!) By the means of Lickity Fingers catering providing us with delicious salads and scrumptious desserts, everyone was so full of food by the end of the night, especially our son Beau who has a love of all food, devoured several desserts. We would like to personally thank Elissa, John and Jaimie (MLA), Dirk Flanigan (Chicago), Mourad Lahlou (San Francisco), Bill & Yvonne Kim (Chicago), Chandra Ram, Plate Magazine (Chicago), Kevin and Susan Ryan (Winter Park), Stephen Bulgarelli (Dallas/Fort Worth), Rick Wolf (Bethesda) – our BBQ and kitchen are waiting for your return!!!