The peculiar pressure on farmers
I'm on my way back to London after ten days in Australia, most of which was spent on the farm where I grew up in central NSW. The focus of the business is mostly cattle and I spent the week lending a hand as it's weaning season. I'd like to think that I haven't forgotten everything I knew about working in cattle yards and I don't think I totally embarrassed myself.
Farming, or more specifically what is called 'grazing' in Australia (ie producing food from livestock not crops) is a strange business because the only thing that you can definitely count on is that something will go wrong. The scale of the setback can range from minor inconvenience of, say, a cow barrelling through a fence and away from the herd, to existential crises such as bushfire or an outbreak of foot and mouth. Last week it was the cumulative effect of the minor things that struck me most.
You make your livelihood working with massive animals which, if they could be said to have any sort of agenda, have no earthly reason to make life easy for you. Why should they? At some stage they or their offspring will be sold as meat. Of course whatever sentience a cow has stops along way short of this but they instinct tells them that humans are to be feared. Luckily this means that mostly they run away from you. Mostly but not always.
On a good day the things that go wrong are minor irritants. Locating the newborn calf that was separated from its mother during the move is a annoying but rewarding part of the job. It's sort of the rural parallel of the document that didn't get backed up. Time and energy will be needed to rectify the situation. The difference is in the timeliness. The longer the document us left the more times and energy will be required to rectify the problem. Still, not much truly suffers if it isn't until Monday that the document is rewritten and resent. If the newborn calf is left that long it will die cruelly.
On a good day the entire herd runs through the gates and into yards in a smooth and orderly way. Nothing jumps a fence or barrels past you as you're drafting. The drenching or marking or whatever you're doing goes well and you get home yourself at a reasonable time. There aren't that many good days. Something always cocks up and yet again you're finishing work in the dark. This is why no one working with livestock is ever consistently on time. It isn't because they haven't organised their worklives as well as office workers but rather because the environment is that much more haphazard.
The management consultant who declares that human beings to be 'the most unpredictable of all animals' has never had to anticipate exactly how a distraught cow will act when she hears her calf bellowing from two paddocks over.