As blackberries creep over landscapes, smothering areas with their prickly canes, a non-chemical way of dealing with them is coming back to the fore. Laurie Reed is best known as a mountain cattleman from the Delegate River region on the New South Wales/Victorian border, and also known as the captain of the Bonang Fire Brigade. A lesser-known fact is that Laurie has run goats on his farm for...

Throw away your beef hat and put on your grass hat, you’re a grass farmer more than a beef farmer. The advice was from veterinarian, consultant and beef farmer, Rod Manning, who visited East Gippsland recently, running a low-stress stockhandling workshop at Marlo and speaking in Buchan.  Decision making strategies for productive farms was the topic of discussion at the Buchan meeting, where...

A date has been set and a glorious backdrop secured for the next Mountain Cattlemen's Get Together, where the cattlemen's heritage will be the focus. 'Livingstone Waters', Omeo, owned by the Ferguson family, and set along the Livingstone Creek, will host the event on October 18-20. Local MCAV liaison officers, Amanda Pendergast and Amber Connley, are looking forward to hosting about 3500 people...

Carbon specialist, Dr Richard Eckard, will this month help local farmers to crunch their figures to come up with their farm's carbon emissions number. The workshop, organised by Gippsland Agricultural Group (GAgG), aims to get farmers their baseline number, in line with Meat and Livestock Australia's (MLA) target for the red meat industry being carbon neutral by 2030. GAgG general manager, Jen...

Standing feed but dry conditions for the previous six weeks met the buyers at the annual Mountain Calf Sales last week, where hundreds of people converged for the flurry of activity that is five sales over two days. The history and stories to do with the people, the cattle and the sales over the years is varied and fortunately a lot of it is detailed in the book Selling the Mountain Calves, A...