What an adventure it has been since arriving here in Western Australia! Upon arriving in Perth after nearly 40 hours of travel from Ontario, I was treated to a fresh catch of blue crab. I stayed first with the past president of Western Australia Federation of Rural Youth where we did some touring of Perth with a day out on the boat crab fishing with nets. The fishing was a great opportunity for me to see Perth from a different view and take in a part of local culture.

After a few short days of R&R in Perth it was off to the country. With a short 2 ½ hour drive on 350 km of road due east from Perth, I arrived in the small rural town of Bruce Rock.

Bruce Rock is a farming-based community with about 600 people living in town and a total of about 1500 people in the shire (our municipality or township). I started my stay with a young couple that live and work right in town. Damian runs a metal engineering business that makes road trains for hauling grain and mine materials here in Australia, while Brooke works as a clerk for the shire. During my time with Brooke and Damian I was able to go to work for a few days in the local seed cleaners as well as go down south about four hours to help move the WAFRY office back to Bruce Rock after the loss of their executive officer. My weekend was filled with a local Bruce Rock rural youth meeting and a very late but still very fun Christmas BBQ and pool party.

My second week allowed me to go out on the farm for two days and help a local farmer out with some fabrication work on machinery, as well as shipping two truck loads of grain and the cleaning out of one of his silos. I was also involved in crouching sheep for two days, which is where they sheer the wool from around the tail and back end of the sheep so that the manure doesn’t stick to them and the flies can’t lay eggs and cause the sheep any harm.

I then moved to a farm about 70 km from Bruce Rock where I spent a week with former WA exchange winner, Bret Caporn, and his wife Sarah. Together we did some fencing and spent the rest of the week working on a new steel garage at their farm. The weekend was a road trip to the town of Wagin where we took in Wagin Wool-O-Rama. This is an outdoor event that promotes sheep and agricultural products in a two day event. Farms bring and show sheep for high honours as well as people come to see what genetics are available for them to bring back to their farm as well as check out some new machinery that might complement their current cropping program.

My next stop on my continuing rotation through the Bruce Rock area was a 36,000 acre farm that also has about 5000 head of sheep. My week was spent working on seeding equipment, getting ready for the upcoming seeding season as well as checking out the local machinery dealerships to see what new gear would cost for them to bring back to the farm. This family of four boys was looking at about 1 million change over cost after trade in to move their farm from two 56 ft Flexi Coil air seeders and carts to two 75 ft Bourgault air seeders and three compartment air carts to follow. It has been very nice to see many Canadian-made products here in use in WA.

I have had an opportunity now to visit many different farms ranging in size from around 5,000 to 36,000 acres and have seen many different approaches to farming just as we often see at home in Canada. Some people are running new gear that is less than five years old while others are running older gear upwards of 30 years old -- and everyone is still seemingly profitable. I will say that although the farms are very different in terms of size and equipment, one thing seems to be the same. Everyone has sheep in the thousands and they all grow the same things: wheat, barley and canola.

Everyone has been very friendly and has treated me just like one of their own-- lots of home cooked meals and plenty of food even for me.

Home-grown lamb is the top meat but many farms have a few beef cattle or pigs that they raise and have butchered to fill their freezers. I did get to see a couple of sheep butchered on-farm and then hung in the on-farm cooler. This also seems to be a trend here. People have a cooler on the farm large enough to hang a couple of small cows or 3 to 4 sheep for a week or so before they cut it up into smaller cuts that they can put in the freezer.

Now I am off down to the south-west corner of the state to Katanning for five weeks and then further south again to Donneybrook for two weeks. Then I have three weeks of free time before I head to New Zealand and meet up with the other exchangees from around the world to start my next adventure.

WAFRY is down in numbers over the past few years and is sitting at sixty-some paid members, but they are working hard to improve their numbers and reinstate their organization to its past glory. Their website is www.ruralyouthwa.org.au