The Sheep Farm

I woke up early in an attic room in a big white bed in Roy and Annabelle's house, with a view of mountains from the window.


After a big breakfast, they took me out to meet the crew, made up of Kiwis, Canadians, and Italians. It was a really nice group, some girls in vet school training and some people just learning how to farm. We'd take lunch and tea breaks camped in circles on the grass, laying in the sun and eating our sandwiches and tea.

The first 2 days I came along for the "mustering", which is rounding up sheep from a large area. We'd hike over hills in a long, spread out line and yell and wave our arms at the sheep, trying to budge them and their lambs out of the gate. Sometimes it worked, or sometimes there would be "lamb breaks", when a lamb would get scared and run behind us and we'd spend an hour or more trying to persuade it to leave, and finally catching it with the dogs.


Those dogs were amazing. They'd follow different whistles to go left, right, stop, round up sheep, or catch a lamb around the neck without killing it. They had endless amounts of energy too, and seemed to be really excited about their job. Although, sometimes they'd get too excited, and Roy would scream expletives at them.




While some of us were mustering, the other half of the group was "tailing" (the process of removing the lambs tails), which I got to help out with later in the week. It is hard work. There's a rotation of jobs from catching the lambs, putting them on the chute on their backs (they look so funny, like a little lamb-conveyor belt), or cutting a chunk off of the ear to indicate boy or girl (this was a bloody job) or vaccinating them or squirting penicillin into their mouths or castrating them or putting a rubber band around the tail, so it loses circulation and falls off in about 3 weeks. This process was not for the light of heart.

The time in between I helped out around the house, because that was what they most needed, and I wasn't exactly a pro at the farm-work (I tried my hardest, though!). So I would bake bread for lunch, muffins for tea, walk their puppy, and baby sit their 2 adorable kids, Joe and Georgie.



Farm-life is a non-stop lifestyle. Everything was big, the house, the land, the dinner-plates...I admire the people working there, and how much they handle every day. I don't think I could do it, I love the occasional lazy-day, and in this place you couldn't take a day off- the animals wouldn't get fed, the sick ones would die, things would fall out of order. I'm glad to have had the experience, but I was also relieved to leave...