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.
So you live in a region that has significantly less snowfall than what can be expected based on the normal variation that occurred 25, 50, or 100 years ago?
I don’t know where parent commenter lives, but in Central Europe, this definitely happened in a radical way. There is basically no snow. A day, or if you’re lucky three days a year maximum. This is going on for the past 20-25 years continuously. This didn’t happen in the past millennia at all. In the mountain village where I lived is totally unimaginable the winter for kids nowadays, how was in the 90s for me. And that was normal for centuries.
Also 40 Celsius is the new 30 in the past 15 years. This didn’t happen since we measure temperature. And 10 degrees are a lot, and the change happened in a decade.
Also summer wind patterns completely changed in the past 5 years, due to the weakening currents in Atlantic Ocean. This is something which is also highly unusual the past millennia. We know this for sure, because all of our towns were built wind from West in mind. We have wind from that direction less and less.
This is way over normal variation.
But looking at other examples, for example Norway. Thawing permafrost bogs are not something which can be explained by normal variation.
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.
AUSTRALIA REMAINS THE ONLY DEVELOPED NATION ON THE LIST OF GLOBAL DEFORESTATION FRONTS
In the 13 years from 2004 to 2017, an area of forest six times the size of Tasmania, more than 43 million hectares, was lost in the 24 deforestation fronts.
The report says “cattle ranching” (the destruction of trees to create pasture for cattle) was “by far the most significant driver” of forest loss or degradation in eastern Australia.
Contemporary Australia certainly may not have improved things, but most of those lands are and have been arid desert for millennia (in many of them, the only evidence of forestation has been pre Ice Age. It's generally just scrub).
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. :)
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.
Sometimes i wonder how we were able live on the back of people like you for such a long time. I remember my elders used to grow up on a farm too, getting up early, cold or warm, no excuses. And me just doing IT things, leaving the "day-to-day" duties to others. I feel bad.
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.
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.
It sounds like you were slowly making the shift to farming over the years and the pandemic sped that along. Do you see yourself shifting back the other direction?
Also, what areas are you developing automation for?
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."
I worked full time as a software dev from about 1999 until 2010. It was never really all that fulfilling for me, although I was pretty good at what I did. I was laid off in 2010, and spent the rest of the year milking goats and sheep, and making cheese in France and the UK. When I returned home in late 2010, my wife and I moved to a more rural location, bought a small herd of goats, and started building a cheese plant.
We've been making cheese going on 8 years now, and have expanded into sheep and cow's milk production, in addition to our goat's milk varieties. Unlike most of the cheese producers around us, we focus on raw milk cheeses with natural rinds. Many of our varieties are inspired by cheese I encountered while working in Europe.
Here's a small gallery of some of our cheeses: https://imgur.com/a/zg0eaTz
We're just emerging from our kidding season and heading into lambing. It's the most challenging period of the year, as we'll have 150+ kids and lambs arrive over a couple of weeks.
https://imgur.com/a/USmPghf
The shift has been fulfilling overall, and I still do work on some tech related projects which has been great. I have to some degree begrudgingly watched my peers' income shoot up dramatically over the last 12 years, while I have to work twice as hard to bring home the same amount.
Overall though, it's been net positive for my family, and while I've tried to quit farming at least half a dozen times, I was never able to bring myself to make the break.
I haven’t left the industry but do live rurally and have considered getting some sheep for personal cheesemaking. Do you also shear them on any regular interval? Is that even necessary for any reason? If you do, do you sell the wool? I’ve seen it going in farmers markets for quite high prices, although I’m not familiar with the processing requirements.
I usually shear just before lambing, which is right now for us. Whether or not you need to shear will depend on the breed of sheep - some can lose their coats on their own, some will not.
For us it's necessary as our sheep get a 2"+ thick coat, which during our summers (last summer we hit 42C/108F, normally we peak at around 35C/95F), and having a thick coat can be deadly.
I put the fleece in the burn pile. I don't have the time nor inclination to clean and card the wool to prep it for sale. I imagine some people would take it to do it themselves, but at this point, I need one less thing to do, not one more. :)
In the grand scale of things, we're pretty small. We milk just under 100 dairy goats, and have about 150 goats total on the farm (the other goats being a couple of breeding bucks, and some kids of various ages that will be milked in future years.)
I'm somewhat smaller than I was two years ago - we scaled back a bit in 2020, as the pandemic seriously killed cash flow for a couple months.
We produce our own sheeps milk too, but on a much smaller scale. We also pick up cows milk from a neighbouring farm. I'm expecting this year to process around 100,000 liters of milk, producing around 10-12 tons of cheese.
I would guess it goes the other way, as all the forests in England seem tragically small compared to those in Canada. British Columbia alone has about thirty times the amount of old-growth that all of England does.
Wiki>"Only 3,090 square kilometres (760,000 acres) of ancient semi-natural woodland survive in Britain – less than 20% of the total wooded area. More than eight out of ten ancient woodland sites in England and Wales are less than 200,000 square metres (49 acres) in area, only 617 exceed 1 square kilometre (250 acres) and only 46 are larger than 3 square kilometres (740 acres)."
My son's daycare closed permanently almost a year ago, and my wife and I had to adjust to have a 3 going on 4 year old at home with us 24/7. While it hasn't been easy, it's been a joy watching him grow over this past year, having time to bond with him (generally he favours his mom), and to have greater insight into who he is becoming as a person.
It has been a difficult time for everyone, but I honestly believe that this will be formative time not just for him, but for my wife and I, and one that we will look back upon fondly.
I think this is one of the curses of modern life, more so in the rat race, that one misses on just living with kids (who, most likely, will be living with parents for probably two or three decades of their lives and then move out). The current times generally have more fathers being participative in parenting compared to the past. It seems such a waste of time, if it’s feasible without breaking the bank, to not enjoy more of this phase.
This early stage is also the time when the kids are more dependent and more close in some senses. Can’t roll back the clock later.
BTW, a grammar nitpick. It should be “but for my wife and me”, not “ but for my wife and I”.
