July2011_MT MEE NEWS
By Ian Wells
La Nina has gone, but everything is still damp. As Ian Chapman remarked wryly the other day, the earthmover’s nightmare continues – the list of uncompleted tasks grows.
Meanwhile, he just watches the rain fall and the bank manager becomes ever more fretful.
The winter feed situation is wonderful though and Mountain cattle have never looked better. Let’s hope that our dairy and beef industries can survive the shenanigans of our revered and well paid industry and political marketing experts.
To indulge for once in a little personal opinion, I for one have had concerns for some time that MLA is so focused on meeting esoteric and imaginary future industry threats that it is oblivious to present and real ones.
“Fututech” saw millions of industry dollars lost on the construction of an automated meatworks that wouldn’t work and was scrapped. From the outset, “Cattlecare” had no chance of being adopted across the industry and it was eventually abandoned as another financial disaster.
Although MSA has some degree of acceptance, a proper cost/benefit study would be interesting, and while NLIS is a marketing novelty, many doubt it can really deliver if/when we do have a real exotic disease event in the cattle industry.
But MLA has achieved little in solving the continuing welfare issues for livestock reaching export destinations, even though those issues have been standing out for years as explosive.
Nobody wanted to rock that boat because of political sensitivities. The cruelty to our cattle in Indonesia that was portrayed so publicly by the RSPCA is totally unacceptable to Australians, and action has been long overdue. But criticism of the traditional beliefs and practices of other cultures is easily seen by other cultures to be arrogant, sanctimonious, and it so can be equally unacceptable. So that little conundrum was ignored.
But the bottom line is that the Indonesian trade is critically important to the entire Australian beef industry and the matter must be resolved! And at the same time we need to look harder at our Middle East live export destinations.
But enough of that!
The May “Symphony on the Mountain” concert really was brilliant! The newly discovered young tenor Iain Henderson is a tremendous talent – both as a singer and as a performer, and he played the part of Pavarotti to perfection. Most tellingly, several husbands “dragged along” by insistent wives actually said how much they enjoyed it, and our phone and email ran hot with messages of congratulation over the next few days. That performance sets a very high bar for next time!
Residents have been wondering what has been hidden under the tarps in front of ‘Farmer Brian” Winkel’s house in Robinson Road and those who went to Woodford’s Centennial Show in June should now know the answer.
Some 12 years ago Brian had Steve Bleisner and his big excavator to a dead red cedar tree deep in a gully the ‘Bastard Scrub’ at the back of his property on Mt Mee Road.
Brian carefully topped it and removed the limbs before Steve excavated the root ball, removed the tree and with some difficulty dragged it up the hill to home – as it was then.
As the soil in the root structure dried, Brian removed it, and when the family moved to Robinson Road the tree came too. This autumn, Brian had Tony Hewitt lift it out of its shed with his crane and he set to work on it.
It is now a bar – more than four meters long and over three meters wide across the root ball and fit for a gathering of very big drinkers. The trunk was sectioned, all the bark has been stripped and the timber has been sanded, polished and lacquered. The effect is magnificent – not just for the polished bar top, but for the polished intricacies of the root system. It takes little imagination to see all sorts of items in that root structure – dogs, ducks and a riding boot hit my eye.
It is a wonderful, magnificently enhanced natural sculpture. It was displayed at the Woodford Show and it should be displayed in the Queensland Art Gallery.
Well done indeed Farmer Brian!
Finally, some more wild dog information. The two autumn baiting rounds were successful and Rod and Lenny have brought their tally for the year up to 26, with four more successes in the Campbells Pocket/Dawes Road area. These two do a great job for us, and continued support for the community Dog Fund is needed to help meet their costs. Baiting must be supported with shooting! However there has been much loose talk in some local newspapers about introducing a Council funded bounty system for dog scalps.
Council quite properly has balked at this and the facts support that.
On the national scene, both the National Vertebrate Pest Committee and the National Wild Dog Committee no longer support dog bounties. Of the 74 local government authorities in Queensland post amalgamation, only 10 still have a dog bounty. These cover some of the western sheep areas that have always had bounties to support doggers, plus Gladstone and Bundaberg.
Many of those councils are looking for alternatives. They’ve come to recognise that in terms of investment, bounties do not represent the best value. Formal analysis of bounty payments in some of those local government areas has led to the conclusion that the bounties are providing employment rather than mitigating the impact of wild dogs.
We MBRC ratepayers look for better value than that – and anyway, we don’t wish to swap our own reliable shooter team for a bunch of unknown hopefuls chasing a buck!
The winter feed situation is wonderful though and Mountain cattle have never looked better. Let’s hope that our dairy and beef industries can survive the shenanigans of our revered and well paid industry and political marketing experts.
To indulge for once in a little personal opinion, I for one have had concerns for some time that MLA is so focused on meeting esoteric and imaginary future industry threats that it is oblivious to present and real ones.
“Fututech” saw millions of industry dollars lost on the construction of an automated meatworks that wouldn’t work and was scrapped. From the outset, “Cattlecare” had no chance of being adopted across the industry and it was eventually abandoned as another financial disaster.
Although MSA has some degree of acceptance, a proper cost/benefit study would be interesting, and while NLIS is a marketing novelty, many doubt it can really deliver if/when we do have a real exotic disease event in the cattle industry.
But MLA has achieved little in solving the continuing welfare issues for livestock reaching export destinations, even though those issues have been standing out for years as explosive.
Nobody wanted to rock that boat because of political sensitivities. The cruelty to our cattle in Indonesia that was portrayed so publicly by the RSPCA is totally unacceptable to Australians, and action has been long overdue. But criticism of the traditional beliefs and practices of other cultures is easily seen by other cultures to be arrogant, sanctimonious, and it so can be equally unacceptable. So that little conundrum was ignored.
But the bottom line is that the Indonesian trade is critically important to the entire Australian beef industry and the matter must be resolved! And at the same time we need to look harder at our Middle East live export destinations.
But enough of that!
The May “Symphony on the Mountain” concert really was brilliant! The newly discovered young tenor Iain Henderson is a tremendous talent – both as a singer and as a performer, and he played the part of Pavarotti to perfection. Most tellingly, several husbands “dragged along” by insistent wives actually said how much they enjoyed it, and our phone and email ran hot with messages of congratulation over the next few days. That performance sets a very high bar for next time!
Residents have been wondering what has been hidden under the tarps in front of ‘Farmer Brian” Winkel’s house in Robinson Road and those who went to Woodford’s Centennial Show in June should now know the answer.
Some 12 years ago Brian had Steve Bleisner and his big excavator to a dead red cedar tree deep in a gully the ‘Bastard Scrub’ at the back of his property on Mt Mee Road.
Brian carefully topped it and removed the limbs before Steve excavated the root ball, removed the tree and with some difficulty dragged it up the hill to home – as it was then.
As the soil in the root structure dried, Brian removed it, and when the family moved to Robinson Road the tree came too. This autumn, Brian had Tony Hewitt lift it out of its shed with his crane and he set to work on it.
It is now a bar – more than four meters long and over three meters wide across the root ball and fit for a gathering of very big drinkers. The trunk was sectioned, all the bark has been stripped and the timber has been sanded, polished and lacquered. The effect is magnificent – not just for the polished bar top, but for the polished intricacies of the root system. It takes little imagination to see all sorts of items in that root structure – dogs, ducks and a riding boot hit my eye.
It is a wonderful, magnificently enhanced natural sculpture. It was displayed at the Woodford Show and it should be displayed in the Queensland Art Gallery.
Well done indeed Farmer Brian!
Finally, some more wild dog information. The two autumn baiting rounds were successful and Rod and Lenny have brought their tally for the year up to 26, with four more successes in the Campbells Pocket/Dawes Road area. These two do a great job for us, and continued support for the community Dog Fund is needed to help meet their costs. Baiting must be supported with shooting! However there has been much loose talk in some local newspapers about introducing a Council funded bounty system for dog scalps.
Council quite properly has balked at this and the facts support that.
On the national scene, both the National Vertebrate Pest Committee and the National Wild Dog Committee no longer support dog bounties. Of the 74 local government authorities in Queensland post amalgamation, only 10 still have a dog bounty. These cover some of the western sheep areas that have always had bounties to support doggers, plus Gladstone and Bundaberg.
Many of those councils are looking for alternatives. They’ve come to recognise that in terms of investment, bounties do not represent the best value. Formal analysis of bounty payments in some of those local government areas has led to the conclusion that the bounties are providing employment rather than mitigating the impact of wild dogs.
We MBRC ratepayers look for better value than that – and anyway, we don’t wish to swap our own reliable shooter team for a bunch of unknown hopefuls chasing a buck!
