BLUE green algae is toxic to livestock.
We do get algae regularly through summer, but rarely this badly. My hope is the suction pipe on the stock and domestic pumps are pulling water from lower in the water profile with less algae than what we see on the top.
I have never seen as many frogs (my boys like to call them frouoogs) in my life as I am seeing on a daily basis.
And I’m talking seeing them in their hundreds (and hundreds). We also have a cricket fiesta going on. If you need some for fishing bait, I’m your man.
The crickets are a nuisance as they eat and kill the upcoming grass, and despite us having a gazillion ibis and snakes eating them (and the frogs) until they become the size of walruses, there is still a solid supply.
Maybe I need to come up with a cricket harvesting technique, insects are very high in protein, or maybe I just let them eat my grass.
The snakes are making a late surge before winter hibernation and I’d be in double figures for sightings for the week, including two where I have had to quickly lift my legs on the motorbike and one where Rohan, who is eight, said: “Dad, you just ran over a snake, you didn’t even see it did you”?
Well, I did see that tail after he told me.
Meanwhile, the inconceivable has happened – we did not win the gold medal at the Sydney show.We entered in three different categories – regular milk, yoghurt and flavoured milk.
And not even a slight glimmer of gold, not even a smudgy sort of silver.
Oh, well, I guess I should be grateful we even got a bronze medal in each category – but I am struggling to be that grateful, I must confess.
Clearly, I have no bias and am completely impartial about the outcomes of these shows – after all, what would a group of blindfolded judges know anyway?
I am sure I will get over it. Eventually.
But you can rest assured I intend to bear a serious grudge, for at least the next week or so.
No, it’s not the lack of gold about which I am truly the most bitter.
I am genuinely bitter and twisted because we got ripped off on the freight – and I won’t be getting over this anytime soon.
Every week we send a chilled pallet of Bethune Lane Dairy products to Sydney weekly, which costs a few hundred dollars each time.
So when we got all excited about our potential gold medal selections and ended up packing three relatively small boxes (net value about $50), we gave them a good luck pat and shipped them off to the Royal Sydney, through our regular freight provider.
And promptly got hit with a bill for nearly $900.
NINE HUNDRED DOLLARS!
NINE HUNDRED DOLLARS!
Surely someone was just having a laugh at my expense.
Well, as it turns out this wasn’t a mistake, I don’t know if they were laughing but I know I wasn’t.
So if you are looking to bring a little joy into your otherwise routine daily existence, block out some time on your calendar and contact your multinational transport company and inform them you wish to contest an excessive bill – and see how that works out.
A word to the wise, if you are blocking out some diary time, make it about a month and that should get you close to someone who might be able to point you to the right person to consider your query.
So my multinational turned my $50 into its $900 – do I put that one down to experience or stupidity?
Meanwhile, back in the factory, we are chasing problems at the moment as some batches of yoghurt have not set correctly – not the whole batch, just individual pots within the batch, which is really odd and proving hard to track down.
In our regular milk we nearly had 18 months with a clean slate of zeros for bacterial growth, but lately we are getting (some very) low levels that we can’t totally squash.
We are still a mile below official problem thresholds, but it’s been bugging me (that is a joke in case you missed it). Our new pasteuriser, which was ordered in November, should arrive in a week, which is almost cause for dancing a jig.
However, I do have pleasing news to report, such as I am very pleased we connected town water to the milk enhancement centre as the river is iridescent with blue green algae. I guess the floods provided a rich nutrient loading, then we have had low flow river conditions, creating the perfect environment for algae to thrive.
But getting back to my freight ramble, my suggestion to you is to be bigger than me and not let bitterness over a small trivial thing.
Sally’s grandma used to say “did you really have a bad day dear, or was it just a bad five minutes?”
Go well, my friends.
