sprocket

I dairy farmed for 14 years, and my wife and I got out in the winter of 2023. We've seen ever increasing scarcity of water in our region, because the surrounding mountains don't get enough snow pack whose melt feeds the streams through spring and summer, and we don't see the spring rains nearly as much anymore either. We used to be able to irrigate our hay fields all summer long with no issues, until fall rains returned. Now the rains stop in April, we irrigate until the water runs out (which last year was in June), and then hope for the best. When we need to buy hay for our animals, prices have nearly tripled in the last 10 years.

sprocket

há 3 anosdiscuss

I used this software when my mom was battling ALS:

   https://www.optikey.org/

which ran on a < $1k computer

At the time, the other options were much more expensive (> $10-15k) which were sadly out of out budget.

sprocket

há 3 anosdiscuss

I imagine that a lot of the Australian farms are going to be in the outback, where the quality of the land and feed for the cattle is marginal, and you have to farm extensively (ie. range cows on large tracts of land). They are not going to be irrigating and fertilizing millions of acres, so the feed is going to be relatively poor as compared to lush, green farmland you might be familiar with.

sprocket

há 4 anosdiscuss

It's a very rewarding lifestyle and I have a lot of good memories of it. It's meaningful work and it gave me a good sense of purpose. I'm in my mid-40's now though and my body just doesn't have the ability to recover like I could in my 20's or 30's.

sprocket

há 4 anosdiscuss

The -13C wasn't the straw that broke the camel's back. Sometimes it's not a matter of throwing money at the problem until it goes away.

Farming is hard, and dairy farming is even harder. The sheer responsibility of being responsible for 150 other beings day in, and day out, and having to show up every single day is very challenging. I haven't had regularly scheduled weekends in a very long time.

We've had a lot of very good staff over the years, but in the end, at 5am or 10pm at night, it's me who is ultimately responsible. I've missed out on a lot of gatherings with friends and time with family, because I had to ensure for the needs of my animals first.

sprocket

há 4 anosdiscuss

After I've sorted out the what-to-do-next issue, perhaps I'll consider putting it down in my cheese making memoirs.

In the interim, here're some gratuitous photos from the farm:

   https://imgur.com/a/84zAcbu

As a final aside...anyone looking to hire a tech guy with 13 years farming experience? ;)

sprocket

há 4 anosdiscuss

I did this myself thirteen years ago - I quit my well paying software job, bought a bunch of goats, and built a cheese business. I'm just now in the process of winding our dairy and cheese business down - it was an amazing period of personal and professional growth, money wasn't an issue, but the complete lack of flexibility (exacerbated by having to milk animals twice daily, every day, for 300 days in a row) eventually got to me.

I was out trying to bottle train 40+ hungry goat kids this winter in -13C temperatures when I decided that I didn't want to do this anymore. My wife and I decided to shutter everything a couple days later.

We don't have any regrets - I learned FAR more in running my own business in an area that wasn't previously my expertise, than had I stuck around doing things in software development. However, here I am again looking to find another tech job.

I'm fortunate in that I've kept a lot of tech skills current, in that I've had multiple personal projects or freelance contracts during slower winter periods. I can safely say thought that I have farming and cheese making out of my mind, for the foreseeable future. Should I ever want to do it again, I'll book myself 3 weeks in France, go milk and make cheese with a small cheesemaker there, and enjoy that all the day-to-day problems are someone else's. :)

sprocket

há 4 anosdiscuss

I started a goat dairy about 12 years ago, while software consulting on the side while we built up the farm. We built a cheese processing plant 8 years ago to start adding value to the milk we were producing. Over the years we started processing cow's milk and milking and making sheeps milk cheeses too. We currently have about 125 dairy goats and a much smaller flock of sheep.

As the farm grew it became more and more time consuming, and managing the software consultancy became more difficult as I wasn't near the computer for most of the day. I enjoy the seasonality of farming, though it is very physically demanding, and I can feel the difference that 12 years has made.

In early 2020, I lost my last software client in the early pandemic, and put most of my energies into building the farm up. I currently don't do any external consulting, but have been working on my own tech and development projects. It's fun for me to be able to apply my development skills to on-farm problems. I've been doing minor automation projects using Arduinos and Raspberry Pis over the last four years.

sprocket

há 4 anosdiscuss

I would interpret that remark to mean more than "Yes, I'm the president of the ECB, and my son is free to make his own choices, even if I regard them as stupid ones."

sprocket

há 4 anosdiscuss

In the grand scale of things, we're pretty small. We milk just under 100 dairy goats, and have about 150 goats total on the farm (the other goats being a couple of breeding bucks, and some kids of various ages that will be milked in future years.)

I'm somewhat smaller than I was two years ago - we scaled back a bit in 2020, as the pandemic seriously killed cash flow for a couple months.

We produce our own sheeps milk too, but on a much smaller scale. We also pick up cows milk from a neighbouring farm. I'm expecting this year to process around 100,000 liters of milk, producing around 10-12 tons of cheese.

sprocket

há 4 anosdiscuss

I usually shear just before lambing, which is right now for us. Whether or not you need to shear will depend on the breed of sheep - some can lose their coats on their own, some will not.

For us it's necessary as our sheep get a 2"+ thick coat, which during our summers (last summer we hit 42C/108F, normally we peak at around 35C/95F), and having a thick coat can be deadly.

I put the fleece in the burn pile. I don't have the time nor inclination to clean and card the wool to prep it for sale. I imagine some people would take it to do it themselves, but at this point, I need one less thing to do, not one more. :)

sprocket

há 4 anosdiscuss

I worked full time as a software dev from about 1999 until 2010. It was never really all that fulfilling for me, although I was pretty good at what I did. I was laid off in 2010, and spent the rest of the year milking goats and sheep, and making cheese in France and the UK. When I returned home in late 2010, my wife and I moved to a more rural location, bought a small herd of goats, and started building a cheese plant.

We've been making cheese going on 8 years now, and have expanded into sheep and cow's milk production, in addition to our goat's milk varieties. Unlike most of the cheese producers around us, we focus on raw milk cheeses with natural rinds. Many of our varieties are inspired by cheese I encountered while working in Europe.

  Here's a small gallery of some of our cheeses: https://imgur.com/a/zg0eaTz

We're just emerging from our kidding season and heading into lambing. It's the most challenging period of the year, as we'll have 150+ kids and lambs arrive over a couple of weeks.

  https://imgur.com/a/USmPghf

The shift has been fulfilling overall, and I still do work on some tech related projects which has been great. I have to some degree begrudgingly watched my peers' income shoot up dramatically over the last 12 years, while I have to work twice as hard to bring home the same amount.

Overall though, it's been net positive for my family, and while I've tried to quit farming at least half a dozen times, I was never able to bring myself to make the break.

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