ABroad

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Friday 24 March 2017

#fbf WA7 Akureyri - Iceland

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January 12th til the 1st of February 2017.
Grema the Icelandic sheepdog and I mid-arvo on  a snowy day.
Time truly went the fastest while we were at this workaway, before we knew it an amazing three weeks had flown by... This was our first kid-specific workaway so we weren't really sure what we could be in for, but it turned out to be one of the most rewarding few weeks of the trip! Odinn and Elisa were our Icelandic hosts and they headed the family of 5. 
The kids: Alexander was a 10yo boy with mass energy and super athletic. Astro 7, was wise beyond her years, super smart and considered the most responsible of the clan. Asdis 5, had a smile that melted hearts and knew how to use it! On weekends Elisa and Odinn would host some other local kids (sort of foster kids), which increased the energy levels in their modest house and made for plenty of laughing, and just hectic scenes.

 Our three weeks were spent milking at a dairy farm with Odinn in the morning, followed by coffee, snacks and a couple of hours on the couch before a couple of outdoor activities feeding bulls, spreading cow shit on the fields or odd jobs outside. If the weather was pretty cold and rough we would have a clean up around the house, run errands or pick up the kids from school or gymnastics training in Akureyri. If there was time we'd help Odinn with the afternoon milking. We truly tried hard to help out as much as we could with kids or around the house because this family was so busy, that even sorting out the odd socks was a help! Overall you could say we didn't have any real routine, as the household was truly ran on a day to day basis which kept things interesting to say the least.

 We had a ripper mix of weather, -15degC, rain, snow, sun and wind. Sometimes it was just too cold to go outside, other times if you rugged up and kept dry you would be fine. We have definatly met a new 'cold' on this trip. Although once you go below -6, the cold feels the same unless its windy! 
Looking south outside our workaway house! After a day of rain all the snow had melted revealing the road and some grass! this was unusual for winter but we were pretty thankful because it revealed some beautiful landscapes!

Our location was half an hour directly south of Akureyri in this valley of farms - mainly dairy but a couple of sheep. Up the road the neighbours also had workaway guests so we got the chance a few times to catch up with them over coffee, and even travel around a bit since one couple had ferried their car over from Denmark. Despite been relatively remote, we had quite a social time.

 This workaway was the most flexible, most trusting and most 'freetime' of any of our experiences yet. We became close and comfortable with the hosts, which eventually turned into a night out at the Akureyri pubs and clubs on our last Saturday night with Odinn and Elisa. 

Our best memories:
Alexander asking us to call into the Airport on our way home from gymnastics training to pick up a "lost book" when really he was pulling the wool over our eyes and convinced the cafe at the airport to give him a free lollypop.
Late night Icelandic Scrabble with a few beers! (they have loads of weird letters in their alphabet!)
Baking hedgehog and chocolate cake with the girls.
Parenting 101 with Odinn and Elisa.
Having a night out in Akureyri with Odinn and Elisa.
Playing "Eye Spy" in cartrips with the kids.
Playing hide-and-seek with the kids.
Trips to the local pool and water slide in below zero conditions.
Learning how to milk and work in an Icelandic dairy.
On an overnight excursion with some new Czech friends Zuzanna and Simon, we went to the grocery store to buy a couple of frothies - which turned out to be a disgusting orange soft drink! Luckily I had kept the reciept and the shop replaced them!
Multiple "icelandic beer" tasting nights over movies, and just plenty of beers in general!
Seeing the northern lights dance over the house!

Worst Memories:
The hangover after our night out.
Eating a salty, salty liquorice lolly thing supplied by Odinn (thought it was going to be deliciously sweet but we were so wrong).

 What we learnt:
Icelandic cows produce on average 5000 liters of milk a year. The top producers are around 8000 litres. The cows are stabled all year round and we experienced a mix of different diary systems from a fully automated robot, to the more laborious mechanical milkers which were taken to each cow in each stall and attached, milked and then removed.
Icelandic lambs average around 17.5kg, and their average lambing percentages are around 200%.
How to walk on Ice - fair dinkum this is a skill and requires a significant amount of concentration when walking from AtoB. We both fully lost our footing and ended up on our arse multiple times on walks, trying to get out of the car in icy conditions and even just trying to walk up the street could be a task.
Traveling in a car for an extended period of time (say an hour), and sitting in the back seat your feet get bloody cold, which is something little and annoying I had never experienced.

Plenty of fresh snow at the Christmas house.
Myvatn Trip
Simon and Zuana were stationed up the road, doing a workaway on another dairy farm. They were from the Czech Republic (Czechland as the Icelandic's referred to it LOL), and had brought their car over via the ferry so we teamed up with them to head up to Myvatn which is one of the highlights of the north of Iceland. It was a brisk -12degrees early in the day but this provided some reasonably clear conditions and meant basically all the sights were tourist-less.

 First stop was to Krafia Volcano Crater which was unfortunately all frozen... and turned out to be literally the coldest experience we've ever had. We drove up to an icey top carpark hiked to its peak. We couldn't see much because everything was white. It was so, so icy and we both ate shit hard a couple of times. The phones stopped working and died mid Snapchat and our hands, feet and faces felt like they were going to freeze off.
Hveraround geothermal field.
Amy, Zuana and Simon enjoying the sulphur and mud ponds.
Looking over the Myvatn's Krafla Power station from Krafla Volcano Crater 
Grjotagja - lava cave and thermal spring. A popular swimming hole until the 1970's when local eruptions caused the water to increase to an undesirable 50deg. This location was used in the Game of Thrones where Jon Snow had intimate relations with a Wildling while bathing!!!

Earlier in the day it had been -12, at this point it was -4.2 and a toasty 41 in the thermal pools. A good way to finish off a cold day of exploring!
Enjoying the warmth with Simon and Zuana
Day two we were welcomed by another amazing sunrise! Myvatn as a town is super small and is a good example of how remote Iceland really is. I can imagine in summer it would be bustling with tourists, but in winter it felt almost like an abandoned town. It was hard to get an understanding of what sort of industry, or work might be available out here other then farming and tourism.

Enroute to Hverfjall Crater - easily accessible even in winter in a 2WD, we just missed seeing the sunrise from the top of the crater but were lucky enough to get some ripper photos on the way in. 
One of the last stops on our two day journey north was to Godafoss Waterfall. Stunning!
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A neighbours robotic milker - since its installation the farmer has been able to produce x4 the milk. Cows wander into the robot at their leisure (when they feel pressure in the utter), get a feed of corn or pellets from the robot and milked at the same time. Each cow is electronically tagged which the robot can recognise. This process allows the farmer to keep an eye on individual milk production and allocate specific feed depending on the cow's condition. On average these cows would self milk 3 times a day compared to the milking system where we worked just twice a day. Despite the increase in milk production, unfortunately milk quality was down since the robot wasn't able to clean the utter as well as the human, but the farmer was working on different pen systems etc. to try and present a cleaner cow to the robot. The technology in the robot was very impressive with lasers in place to recognise teet location etc. Very, very interesting!!!
Elisa had a handful of Icelandic Horses - tough buggers stay outside all year round. Other then feeding them a couple of times and some hoof maintenance (if they have shoes snow builds up under the hoof). If you want to ride horses throughout winter, by law you need to have under cover stables so that after a ride and the horse is all sweaty it's protected from the elements.
Amy on the scraper at the dairy.
Loading up the shit-spreader (basically a big water tank with a pretty simple PTO pump, pumping cow shit onto a plate which sort of directed the crap into a fanlike pattern) before spreading it on the fields! 
Some weird ram (left) and an Icelandic ram on the right.
The pregnant ewe in a shed situation.
The neighbours Icelandic sheepdog in full flight!
Typical dress ups with Asdis.
Via the GoPro - which really did a pretty good job at getting plenty of colour of the norther lights. They are pretty amazing and when conditions are perfect you really see them dance about the sky.
Via the olympus - trying to get a little artistic... to get the olympus to focus it needed something lit up. Really our lense wasn't good enough to capture a truly great image over long shutter speeds but we managed to get a couple.
GoPro did a great job!!
A day trip to Husavik - north east of the workaway
The sun setting over Akureyri.
Akureyri on our way back from Husavik just after the sunset.
Day trip to Siglufjordur. This tiny village actually had a pretty handy ski field.
The closest church to our stay was a cheeky wooden/turf arrangement built in the 1800's.
Enroute to Akureyri one night to pick up the kids.
Akureyri church. Saw a local end up on his lid walking down these icy stairs.

The squad! Thanks to these legends for putting us up! We wished we could have stayed longer!
So much could be said about our couple of weeks at this workaway. The experience was amazing and how these people have managed to live in one of the most vast and remote places in the world is truly amazing. The scenery is unrivalled by our experiences so far and we felt so lucky that we had the opportunity to stay so long in such an amazing place with true Icelandic people! 

Icelandic tucker we enjoyed:
- Sour rams testicals
- Sheeps head
- Rye bread
- Dried fish
- Hung and smoked meat
- Skyr
- Liquorice

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Saturday 18 March 2017

WA8 Lambing in Lanark - Scotland

13:40:00 No comments


5 weeks ago we walked onto an old estate farm, in Lanark Scotland to experience lambing in the UK. Over our time there we learnt a lot, a lot more then we could have imagined and we left having gained some valuable knowledge about lambing sheep, farming styles and systems for this area of Europe. We drove tractors, an excavator, mostly completed 500m of fencing, had a hand in lambing 120 ewes, fed out silage, checked sheep daily, rode horses, a day trip to Glasgow, a few walks along the River Clyde and helped drain a paddock.
After initially being out of our comfort zone with the amount of hands on work required specifically with the ewes, compared to having them roam around a paddock and only intervening when really necessary, we gradually found ourselves coming around to this micro management system and really quite enjoyed it, and saw the benefits of one-on-one sheep care where we only lost maybe 10 lambs in total.

 We had arrived a few days earlier then lambing was supposed to begin which allowed us to get used to the environment and our tasks - feeding rams (tups) twice a day, feeding a hand full of chickens in quantiene due to the state wide bird flu kicking around. Feeding a 32yo horse mushy food 3 times a day (she was short a few teeth), feeding a couple of pet Zwartbles, running a couple of tractor loads of silage up to some Blue Faced Lester x Texel ewes (mules) and checking a mob of hoggets (hoggs) as well. Other random tasks included keeping the horse stables full of straw and hay and feeding the cat - then lambing in-between.
Lambing 101 with Juan - A family friend large anaimal Vet. He came down one Sunday night with a sheep's pelvis mounted in a wooden box. For an hour we practice 'lambing' the box with two dead lambs in different positions. We learnt how to use a head snare and leg ropes which provided extremely useful in the following weeks. 
The actual lambing situation was... 150 pregnant ewes, a mix of pedigree Texels, Cheviot x Texel, a couple of old Cheviots and 4 Zwartbles. All these sheep were inside a shed, split into a large pen of singles, and another large pen of twins/triplets where feed was slightly better. To the side of the large pens there were 16 smaller pens which we would put the ewes into when actually lambing, and they'd stay with their lamb(s) for 24-48hours before being ear tagged, marked/rubber ring on their tail. From the small pen we would move them into another pen where ewes and lambs were kept for a few days, turned out each day into the field and brought in each night until everyone was fit and healthy then the ewe and lamb(s) would be turned out into the field for good. 
Early days - lambing pens empty and plenty of twin ewes hanging around.

Inside the shed there were 4 surveillance cameras, 2 of which you could zoom and scan. These would prove priceless when checking the lambing status from the kitchen table over coffee, or in our bed at 2am via a phone app!
Amy and Faye lambing one of John's zwartble sheep. Scanned with triplets, unfortunately she was hiding a cheeky 4th lamb which we found and pulled that afternoon, dead.
Boof - what a sheep.!
Photo curtsey of Debs! 
The adopters. Affectionally called 'the gheto' by Ludi. These were interesting, the ewes head gets jammed into this board much like a gallows, with food and water. Her lamb and another orphan lamb would be put in the pen behind her and allowed to drink. The ewe would be locked in here for a week or until she accepted the lambs. It was very successful and such a good alternate to bottle feeding lambs who's mum didn't have milk etc.
Stompy's was one of the first sheep to go and unfortunately her actual lamb died at birth, so we skun it and put its coat onto a triplet Zwartbel lamb.  Stompy mothered it like a legend, a provided plenty of entertainment for us over the next few weeks! The skin is a few days old here and quite on the nose!


It was around Friday the 3rd of March and we were full swing into lambing after a bit of a lul.. We've see a couple of triples and quads give birth (I've never seen triples), a few complications and a caesarian but we've managed to get nearly every lamb born alive up and running! A few issues with Texel ewes mainly because lambs seem to be too big!
We are injecting ewes with penicillin after a complicated birth, lambs are getting a squirt of orjet and iodine on their navel straight after they've hit the ground. We are involved in getting the lambs onto the tit shortly after they are born to ensure they get a good amount of colostrum. This gave us a good understanding on the ewe's milk situation also as some ewes are getting some mastitis, or don't have any milk at all.
We had a couple of heat lamps for really cold lamb/sick lambs. 

Two nights later and its full HAM 2.0. everything is full, more temporary pens made and lambing until 3am. The most significant of this day was a call to a vet after a ewe Amy was lambing showed intestines coming out with feet... after a couple of hours and a cesarean, a mutant lamb was discovered with its rear legs as front legs, intestines outside the body and a horizontal S shaped spine.


Almighty - a 7.2kg lamb born via cesarian because he was just too damn big!

The result of almighty being too big.
 Ludi (another Workawayer from France and her dog Meg) left right in the thick of the action unfortunately, but a new workawayer from Germany arrived the same day as Ludi had left so she could carry some of the work.

 For the last few days of our stay we had been searching high and low for blue 11's lamb. She's been put out to the paddock and back in the shed each night without a lamb for a couple of days. We decided that a fox had got it, or it had gotten out to the shed through a hole in the gate, and possibly fell/washed down the river during a rain event. All in all we had written it off. Toward the tail end of lambing with only 16 pregnant ewes in the shed, and after all our jobs are done we've been draining up the paddock with Brian or pottering around cleaning up. A mob of the older ewes and lambs have been pushed back into a larger grassier field next to The Clyde river and are now staying out of the shed for good. We are checking them a couple of times a day just to keep an eye on things. On an  evening check Debs, Abby and Hillana came across a fresh healthy lamb trotting alongside blue 11!!! Mystery solved, the only place we hadn't checked was inside the ewe!!! She must have snuck from the expecting pen into the new born pen for some greener pastures.
Mysterious legs 11.
Despite all the good things, we did experience some bad - Listeria in sheep, a ewe was ran over by the silage cart/tractor and affectionally called Squishie, she made a great recovery despite an aborted lamb. A healthy born lamb a couple of days later must have been kicked or squashed and almost seemed paralysed, with a bloody nose and swollen eye, I'd written him off.  Some TLC over a week and Wonkie the lamb was back on his feet, successfully mothered onto a Texel ewe and healthy. By the time we'd left there were three caesarians - one lamb was completely deformed. One lambs stomach was torn above the navel and its intestines came out. Two attempts to sew it up was successful but it died a few days later, possibly with a twisted bowel... All in all only one ewe was lost to listeria.

A freshie only minutes old.
Additional to lambing...... 
After a couple of days non-stop rain, the Clyde falls were raging! These falls were directly behind the farm.
World heritage listed New Lanark (also featured on the scottish 20 pound note!). The site of old mills ran off the Clyde. A couple of mile walk from the farm.
Looking over one of the old mills still working back up stream of the Clyde.
Ludi's 30th - enjoying the elements while checking the pregnant mules on a snowy morning!
Meg in action one morning when checking the Hoggets - photo courtesy of Ludi.
Amy and meg - some cheeky night time cuddles. Meg loved a little cuddle!
The daily silage route.
Abby's pet Mr. Nibbles.
Me 'n Meg!
Me 'n Harvey!
Amy on the post chapper - one of a few afternoons spent up the paddock fencing while lambing was quite.
During a cold afternoon fencing we were graced with a small window of sunshine and a double rainbow.
Draining with Faye and Brian.
We were lucky enough to go on a couple of rides around the area on Faye's horses. Very well trained, followed voice commands. 
A day at a the Lanark Scottish Black Face Ewe sales: Top ewe sold for 7000pound = 11000AUD+
Grand champ and runner up - as judged by the short happy looking bloke in the middle. Sheep fleeces are dyed for the occasion.
Bidding was relentless in the ring. 120 Ewes sold averaging between 600 and 2000 pound I reckon.
What a top Scottish Black Face sheep looks like. The one on the right won the day. 
Most nights I'd read to Lucy if I could find the time.
Stompy happy with her adopted lamb.
Hanging out with Lucy and Conny (border terriers) on a sunny Scottish day, draining the swamp/paddock.
A flat chat 5 weeks! No doubt we've forgotten to mention something about this amazing experience, but hopefully we've gotten the bulk of it. We worked bloody hard and only had a couple of days off throughout our time here. But we thourghly enjoyed every minute. Helping Faye, Debs and Brian out with what ever we could was very rewarding and we could see the difference each time we swung a hammer, mucked out a lambing pen or turned the horses out. 

 Scottish Words:
Burn - Stream (creek)
Brae - Hill
Stappit - Full (like full after a meal)
Tup - Ram (sheep)
Gimmer - Maiden ewe
Guddle - to fumble around in a mess

 "I" - yes
"wee" - small

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