Hartwood Station, where my family farms, is located 80km south of Roma in west Queensland. We’ve got about 36,000ac and the property is a mix of cattle, sheep and cropping. The largest paddock is 4,000ac. The guideline stocking rate for the area is about one cow to 10ac but there’s more acres per cow needed this year.

Breeders

We generally run about 1,200 breeders with calves and have about 200 replacements coming through.

At the moment, we are running about half of our normal numbers. We’ve de-stocked pretty heavily to deal with drought. We have a controlled breeding programme and we breed for three months of the year so we were able to wean early and got rid of all the weaners early this year.

Wedgies get them when they are little lambs while dingos are a hassle with calves

We pregnancy-tested early and got rid of any empties so we’ve just got the nucleus of about 600 cows left. We still have our replacement heifers coming through but some of them could be the next to go if it doesn’t rain.

International Farmer Writes: Sarah Packer, Queensland.

We also run 900 Dorper breeding ewes. They are a breed that are conditioned to dry climates and shed their wool. Wild dogs, pigs and wedge tail eagles are our biggest challenge at lambing.

You get some big pigs out here and they just come straight up behind the lambs and grab them. Wedgies get them when they are little lambs while dingos are a hassle with calves. You’ll generally lose 1% or 2%. The first lot of sheep we ever brought out here were scanned in-lamb ewes and when it came to weaning time we only had about 35% lambs.

Since then we put up more fences and got 10 Marama guardian dogs. Since getting them we’ve jumped back to 80-85% weaning so they’ve had a massive influence on survival numbers.

Rainfall

Normal rainfall for here is about 24in a year. We’ve had 4in this year so far. Last year, we averaged about 16in. A large chunk of that fell in March. In the 2010 floods, we had 23in of rain in 12 hours overnight.

When those floods happened, we knew there was a lot of water coming our way because generally there’s a time frame and we talk to the neighbours 80 or 100km further up the creek. That generally gives you six hours to clear the livestock out of the paddocks and get them to higher ground.

Under water

That night, we swung gates open and didn’t chase them out. The next morning there was nothing but water to be seen. Even the mature trees were under water.

We lost about 20 head but the rest made it out.

You need to be tough when experiencing droughts. In 10 years, you could have six of drought here. There are parts of Queensland that are in their seventh and tenth year of drought.

You can’t plan too far ahead at the moment. We have Buffel grass and in our red soil type of country that would respond quick if we got an inch of rain. We also have mulga trees. They are a fodder tree that cattle can eat. Its leaves have a protein content of 12 to 14% and it’s useful to graziers in time of drought.

When things get really bad we were able to get dozers in and knock a few into cattle’s reach.

The Queensland government recently enacted controversial laws preventing farmers from knocking these trees over and farmers are very unhappy about this.