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 a bit thrown when they meet our animals — spotty little cows in eighty colours, sheep that shed their own wool, chickens that roost up trees like pheasants. “Where on earth did you get these?” Africa, mostly. And there's a very good reason for that.
Here's the thing most people miss: if you lay continental Africa over continental Australia, we've got an awful lot in common. Hot. Dry. Drought-prone. Marginal country. Ticks and parasites that never take a day off.
On our patch we swing from about −3°C on a frosty morning to a recorded 48°C in summer — halfway to blood boiling — on around 800mm of rain a year, with a solid five months where the whole place has dried off to low-quality brown feed. That's a hard country to farm.
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 half your problems solve themselves before they even start.
Because here's the uncomfortable truth: a lot of the animals our industry has bred over the last fifty years can no longer handle the environments they once came from. We've selected so hard for marbling and weaning weights that we've bred the toughness — and sometimes the basic ability to give birth — clean out of them. I've heard of a stud running a 40% pull rate on its maiden heifers. Four in ten couldn't calve on their own. That's not an animal, that's a patient.
The African breeds are the opposite story. They 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'll admit it: I'm besotted with these cattle.
I didn't start there. Like a lot of blokes I ran British and European steers as a socker — buy them as yearlings, fatten them, sell them on. Then yearling prices blew out from around $800 to over $2,000 and that whole game fell apart, so I decided to breed my own. I ran some Shorthorn cows and wasn't impressed — doughy calves, pink eye, the usual. Then a fella at a farmers market told me about Nguni. 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. Fewer than 250 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-resistant, disease-resistant, they're fantastic mums, they thrive on rubbish feed, and they eat superbly.
The industry can't stand 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. Damara are one of the most rejected sheep in the industry, and I'm very happy for the industry to keep ignoring them, because I'm going to buy them all. I picked up fifty ewes for $35 a head with twenty lambs thrown in at foot. Try finding value like that on a fashionable breed.
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 the internet 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 are laying by sixteen weeks, 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 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, the lot of them.
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.
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
