Yarrie’s new yards!
Host: Yarrie Station
Written by Sheryl Dorrington – Assistant Manager of Yarrie Station.
Sheryl has a long history with Yarrie, first coming to work for Annabelle’s parents when she was about 18 years old. Since that time she has been away, raised her daughter Brea and worked on other farming properties across the state. She also runs a building company with her partner. Yarrie is lucky enough to have her back this year taking up an assistant manager’s role. Sheryl is highly capable, easy going, modest, and is always having a good laugh through thick and thin.
We are making a new set of yards this year and it’s super exciting.
We are not altering, fixing, or adding to old yards – this is going to be a completely new complex to process the bulk amount of cattle mustered every year. So much thought has gone into designing a people and cattle friendly handling facility.
The new crush area – nice and shady!
Normally this beautiful spot (where the yards are being built) is lovely and quiet, not much to see bar a windmill, rusty tank, and small set of old yards! It is a scenic little spot alongside a quaint little river, that for the moment is a hive of activity. There are little camp sites everywhere, its dusty, there are materials neatly lined up, machinery in use, paddocks are being built, water points and troughs going in, painting everything shiny silver and the list goes on. We even have a huge sea container that we imported full of cattle panels, it has ‘China Shipping’ written across it, rather a site in the middle of the Australian bush, stating the obvious ‘that it’s not from here but a change is coming’.
The crew with the China Shipping container.
Building this new set of yards is awesome. I’m a part of a great team of people who are setting a cracking pace. I didn’t expect to be so excited with the progress, and super keen to try them out ASAP with real cows (the imaginary ones in my head are starting to get a little creepy).
The yards starting to take shape.
It is very easy to get completely wrapped up in our own little world and forget that anything else exists. Day in and day out, we all work hard from sun up till sun down. Blokes and sheilas alike are filthy, dirty and sweaty, no one cares if you brush your hair or wax your eyebrows out here, everyone is in the same boat.
Evenings we sit and reflect on the day with a few frothies, it ends up everyone laughing so hard they are crying or bent over with cramps. A healthy meal, and a shower will soon be followed by curling up in our swag before 9pm to get a decent sleep before we start again tomorrow.
Sheryl has been involved in setting up a lot of the water infrastructure for the new yards. Here is the buggy and poly trailer with Yarrie’s pipe rolling safari tours! There a many km of poly pipe to be trenched, rolled out and buried when building our new yards and paddocks.
A day off normally results in a town run for beer top ups and some treats. When you get to town, it’s a sudden rush of reality . . . oh dear! Where were all these well dressed, clean, tidy and civilised people hiding, and at what point did we forget they existed? Jeez! Time to be sociable and remember how to be town people again.
Seriously though, there isn’t much the Boss Lady hasn’t thought about in the design process, we have more drafting options, a flash new crush, a shed over the crush, shade everywhere, sprinklers that will cover the whole yards, (not moving them around one at a time or hand watering). Lots of considerations on how the cattle will flow freely, safety for bovine and human!
The yards will get built, the dust will settle, the spinifex will regrow and eventually the china shipping container will be painted, and in a few years time we will be sitting on top of that sea container having a beer and not be able to remember a time before they were built, it will look as if they were always meant to be there, and we can proudly put our hands up and say “we were a part of that!”
Sheryl and Summer in the buggy ready to let some cattle out.