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.
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.
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.
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.
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. :)
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.
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."