Why we farm Nguni cattle, Damara sheep and Fayoumi chickens — Australia and Africa share the same harsh, dry, tick-ridden country, so we chose fit-for-purpose African animals bred to thrive on it, no props required.
People are always very intrigued when they meet our animals — spotty little horned cows in a variety of colours, coloured horned sheep that shed their own hair, chickens that roost high up trees like pheasants. “Where on earth did you get these?” Africa, mostly. And there's a very good reason for that.
If you lay continental Africa over continental Australia, we've got a lot in common. Hot. Dry. Drought-prone. Marginal country. Ticks and parasites that never take a day off.
On our patch in Woomargama NSW we swing from about −3°C on a frosty morning to a recorded 48°C in summer, on around 700mm of rain a year. We can have up to five months where the whole place has dried off to low-quality brown feed. That can be a challenging environment for improved breeds.
I started with more conventional breeds. Shorthorn, Merino, etc. They are fantastic animals and thrived in good seasons. When the pressure came in, it became apparent that our systems weren't optimised by them. These “improved breeds” are made for fast growth. This relies on more intensive management from the farmer. Improved pasture, periodic medical interventions, a keen eye over calving and lambing.
These things are fine, but I really wanted animals that could thrive like the animals I observe in the wild. No one is out there feeding, vaccinating and drenching wild deer or pigs and their numbers keep exploding.
So when I went looking for animals to farm it with, I didn't look to the green fields of Britain. I looked to the animals that had already been surviving country like ours for thousands of years — with no drench gun, no vet, and no bag of grain to fall back on. African genetics are a bit of a cheat code for Aussie farmers.
Everything on our farm hangs off one idea: fit for purpose. I need to start with an animal that's rugged, that can handle the natural environment, and that's as close to its wild counterpart as it can be. Get that right and you're on a solid foundation.
African breeds were never bred on a spreadsheet. They were stewarded for thousands of years by tribal peoples who had no pharmaceuticals to prop these animals up — so nature did the selecting, and the rule was brutally simple: stay alive and breed, and we'll keep you. Don't, and you're gone. What you're left with is an animal that carries all its survival tools built right in.
I adore these cattle.
I didn't start there. Like a lot of blokes I ran British and European steers as a stocker — buy them as yearlings, fatten them, sell them on. I ran some Shorthorn and Hereford cows and hit a hard season. We had prolonged flooding on river flats - it really impacted the cows and calves. Then I heard about a fella running “Nguni”, the “Apocalyptic Cow”. I went home, Googled them, and the first line I read was: small-framed, parasite-resistant, disease-resistant, drought-tolerant… and they come in eighty colours. I thought: that's me. Bought my first bull the next day.
So what makes them what I like to call a Transformer of a cow?
Then there's the sheer romance of them. Eighty colours and no two alike — they fall under their own genetic category, Bos Taurus Africanus, a Sanga animal, not your Brahman. Probably fewer than 300 purebred Nguni cows exist in all of Australia, and ours trace back to frozen genetics carried out of South Africa. Best of all, a newborn Nguni hits the ground like a little springbok — up and running almost before it's dry.
“This is a hardy, apocalyptic cow. It's easy going, you can breed them first ovulation — and they'll give you fourteen calves in fifteen years.”
Our sheep get the same double-takes. Damara are an African fat-tailed hair sheep — and that word hair is the good bit: they shed their own coat, so there's no shearing, no crutching, no mulesing, none of it. They're parasite-resilient, disease-resistant, they're fantastic mums, they thrive on low quality feed, and they eat really well.
The industry doesn't like them. They don't fit the wool system and they don't fit the neat white-sheep box, so they get rejected — which suits me just fine. They are thin frame, yield small carcasses and generally have single lambs. But the mums lamb unassisted easily and they stand over their lambs, keeping predator birds and foxes at bay - which can be a real struggle. I can't stand watching predators kill my lambs, so having a single lamb that mum fiercely defends is fine by me.
Once I had African cows and African sheep, well… I wanted an African chook to match. So I did what any reasonable farmer does and asked AI which chicken best suited a hardy, fertile, long-living, low-input, disease-resistant farm like ours. The answer came back: Fayoumi. An ancient Egyptian breed, near enough to bantam-sized, and tough as old boots.
I Googled them and fell in love on the spot. Put a call out on socials, a follower tracked some down, and I drove six hours each way to bring a handful home for my boy Otto to breed. They're everything the write-up promised: the hens can be laying by sixteen weeks (very early), the roosters are crowing at four or five, they're far too fast and too switched-on for a fox to bother with, they roost high up in the trees, and they are sensational foragers — the bloke I bought them off reckons that let out of the coop they'll barely touch grain and feed themselves like guinea fowl. Egyptian pocket rockets.
This isn't just me collecting exotic animals for the fun of it — though I won't pretend it isn't fun. It all ties back to how we farm. If you start with an animal that has all the tools to thrive built into itself, you simply don't need to medicate it — and that gives you the best possible shot at genuine animal welfare and at clean, healing food. The tough, fertile, self-sufficient animal and the drug-free paddock are the same idea from two ends.
Fit for purpose isn't a marketing line for us. It's the whole reason a spotty little African cow, a self-shedding sheep and an Egyptian chook feel right at home on a dried-off hill outside Woomargama.
I like to split welfare into 2 categories as a thought experiment. Micro & Macro Welfare.
Micro welfare is intervention and individual care. If an animal needs some intervention because of fly strike, a stuck calf or lamb during labour, pink eye, mastitis — etc. This is important in husbandry and animal care — it needs to be done.
Macro welfare is picking animals and facilitating their development and genetic direction so that these inputs become less and less needed — meaning the animals suffer less overall, and the farmer has less of the labour and costs associated with treatment.
Our beef and lamb come from these tough, fertile, fit-for-purpose animals — raised on pasture, moved daily, no props required.
Want to meet the eighty-colour cows for yourself? Come and say g'day on one of our farm tours.
— Jake
