Country Living – Green with envy

I am starting to feel as if our farm is full of discrimination and it’s about food and “love handles”. Our farm is what you would describe as a fattening and finishing operation, which basically means we grow a virtual smorgasbord of food for our stock. Plain grass just doesn’t suit the pallet of our stock around here – instead, we spoil them with a salad bowl of choices. Our bulls get to chow down on these huge turnip-looking things we grow called fodder beet, then we have our own home-grown crushed barley along with bales of silage and, yes, good old fashioned grass.

Our breeding ewes and lambs are just as spoilt with paddocks full of ‘hunter’, which looks like spinach and is great for piling on the kilos.

So the main purpose of our farm is to get everything big, fat and plump. Skinny on our farm is a dirty word (unless of course it pertains to oneself), which is where I am going with this discrimination card. Has anybody out there ever heard their partner mention the words ‘big, fat behind’ and ‘fantastic’ used in the same sentence with a big smile on their face? Or do any of you have a partner that urges you to stuff food in your mouth from daylight to dusk? Tell me, is there any fairness in the fact that a cow can seemingly eat 24 hours a day and take forever to gain wait when the rest of us just have to glance sideways at a cheesecake and it goes straight to the hips?

That old saying ‘the grass is greener on the other side of the fence’ couldn’t be more realistic around here. Our stock gets moved to new paddocks daily for fear of losing weight. Around here a well-eaten paddock is a form of celebration, and yet I never seem to hear my husband asking me to scoff down two main courses and desert! If they think an animal is looking a bit skinny, ‘bang’, out comes the drench, as they must have worms. However, I deeply suspect that in the case of most wives the drench would be shelved and they would be rushing out to buy us a string bikini!

So it seems to me that weight discrimination is rife on this farm and that most of these farming types spend their whole lives wanting everything to get extremely fat except perhaps their partners. So in fairness to all, and not just to cows, I propose a toast. Here’s to all our ‘luscious lady lumps’, ‘man boobs’ and forever days in the kitchen whipping up double cheese toasties and cream sponges. After all, if it’s good enough for the cows then it good enough for us!