The organised chaos of lamb marking time

Lamb marking time at the Pedley farm, Lochhaven at Selbourne, is typical of many small farm operations - it’s a case of everyone chips in.

Andrew “Peddles” Pedley and wife Jude tackled the job of marking, tagging and vaccinating 700 composite lambs last week while the weather was fine.

His son Tom, a builder, helped out as he does every year and three of his building apprentices received some practical training off the tools, grabbing lambs from the pens for a production line that worked relatively smoothly.

There may have been some sharp kicks to the stomach of the handlers, sprinting after slippery lambs from time to time, and a few ended up in pens where they shouldn’t have, but it was organised chaos.

Family friend and part-time farmhand James Medike, from Cressy, took care of the vaccinations, managing to keep his hands-free while puffing on his pipe. 

Andrew, who also runs a weed spraying business, said the lambs will be fattened for market and sold around February through the Australian Lamb Company.

“It’s been a great lambing season with the dry weather conditions - you just don’t lose the lambs you would when it’s wet and windy like it has been this week,” he said.

“Most of the lambs in Tassie are born between May and September, with feed supply playing a big part in whether they lamb early.”

It’s the second year that the Pedleys have used eID tags, but said it had all been pretty straightforward and they look forward to the traceability, but not the paperwork, in the future.

The 175ha farm has increased its carrying capacity dramatically over the years, and currently has about 600 ewes and 150 cattle.

Like most livestock producers he’s been thrilled with the prices being paid for fat lambs, saying he was used to getting $20 and now it’s $120.

“I’ve been farming here for 40 years and never had anything like that before,” he said.

Andrew and Jude left for a 10-week holiday on Thursday, with Andrew planning one of his regular motorbike rides, this time through Europe and Asia.

He sent his old Yamaha Tenere 660 motorbike to Africa 10 years ago to tour with mate John Wells from Launceston, and the pair, sometimes accompanied by Jude, have been traversing the world ever since. 

Last year they rode from Norway to Kazakhstan, with the bike shipped to a different country as needed.

When the motor blew up in Sweden last year, he managed to find another one to install and over the next three years he’ll basically ride it back to Tasmania via a host of countries - timing his run around busy times on the farm of course.