Ross Walker is descended from one of the original selectors of farm land in the Cann River Valley, today he has the last dairy farm standing in the region.
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At one stage there were about 25 dairy farms in the area. Today the landscape has changed, with most of the old-timers moving out and beef ruling the roost.
At 76 and facing a big health challenge, Ross isn’t sure what the future holds but the farm is standing strong amongst its beef neighbours. It’s still performing well enough to sustain five families, including Ross’s son Ross Junior who has taken over management and part-ownership, and their share farmers.
Despite the challenges associated with farming in an isolated part of far-east Victoria, or possibly because of those challenges, Ross has always loved farming.
He’s never let the tyranny of distance hold him back.
“What I enjoyed most was the challenge,” Ross said.
“It was very tough. My wife and I did it tough for a number of years but I said I was going to make it into a good farm if it’s the last thing I do.
“Some people just want to cruise along, but I need a challenge.
“I’m here and I’m sticking it out.”
The farm is in the Noorinbee area, about 11km out of Cann River, and Ross says that despite the isolation, it’s a great region for dairy farming.
Most of the original farms were 320 acres and Ross’s grandfather selected on the west side of the valley to avoid crossing the Cann River when it flooded.
It’s mostly hill ground but a lot has been cleared.
With leased land, 160 acres owned by Ross Junior and other expansions over the years, they now have about 900 acres, though about 200 acres remain as native bushland.
Ross found it too hard to keep the original Jersey stud going at such a distance and today they have a mixture of Jersey, Holstein and Holstein cross, usually milking about 350, though numbers are down this year at 320-330.
Because of their remoteness, the Walkers have been forced to become self-sufficient.
“The bulk of the fertiliser is contract and we contract in if we’re doing a silage bunker, but we do pretty much everything else ourselves,” Ross says.
“We’re mostly self-sufficient. We even have our own gravel pit.
“We have a lot of laneways and we couldn’t keep operating if we had to purchase gravel, so we do that ourselves.
“There’s no one here to contract so it’s me, though that means I’ve got a lot more money tied up in machinery than I’d like.
“I have a disc direct drill and instead of cultivating we tend to mulch. We have a lot of Kikuyu and run a mulcher over it and then direct drill.
“I’d love to be able to have contractor to do 20 acres for me, but there’s no one. The drill sits there most of the year.”
Ross and his wife Laura bought out his mother in 1980. As he got older and wanted to step back from milking, he put on sharefarmers, now Kym and Barney Gregson, and about five years ago Ross Jr, an electrical engineer, returned to the farm after marrying and having children.
After taking over in the 80s, Ross and Laura faced one of their biggest challenges.
“At the time Murray Goulburn was in strife and they cut off four dairies at Buchan. We were getting paid 16 cents a litre and they put a 4 cents a litre freight levy on us. You can imagine how that affected everybody.
“I had just bought the farm so I was committed but others dropped out. About half a dozen kept going but they stopped investing because we were on the end of the line and that gradually caught up with them. With age, they whittled away.”
The Walker farm has been the last dairy in the region for more than five years. His closest neighbours are about 50km away at Cabbage Tree Creek.
The freight levy was eventually ditched and Ross had ridden the first of many waves.
“My farm wasn’t big enough to go into beef. I could put a sharefarmer on and still be better off than being in beef, so I’ve stuck with it.”
There have been times when he’s worried about having access to a processor, but at the moment he has a choice.
Saputo currently collects Ross’s milk but Bega also passes through the valley.
“We’ve never had a time when we haven’t had a processor to collect our milk, but it has been a worry as the farms dropped away and increasingly, I was left by myself. Having a choice is a big relief.”
Despite the isolation, Ross has always aimed to stay up with trends. The farm was one of the first in the area to use artificial insemination, the first in the Orbost district to put in a bulk milk vat, and the first to bring a round baler to the area.
Ross went to dairy discussion groups in Cann River and to field days whenever he could, always on the lookout for an edge.
The farm has traditionally followed a low-input system, though that has been upended a bit in recent years.
“We were only feeding about a tonne of grain per cow per year but the share farmers have talked me into doubling that,” Ross said.
“We only started half way through last year but we’re hoping it will have an impact on production. We did about 550kg/Ms last year but it would be good to get to 600.
“We try to keep ourselves in the lowest cost denominator; we don’t irrigate, use very little or no nitrogen, make our own silage and hay, just use average fertiliser.
“It’s been a low input system and we don’t do a lot of cultivation. We put in some brassica and millet this year but it’s only 10 acres.”
Ross is also ahead of the game in another field.
“The big push now is multispecies pastures but in my mind we’ve always been multispecies. Here in the valley, you get a mix of everything. That’s how most here have operated.
“I over-sow with ryegrass but we have paddocks in the summer that are totally Kikuyu and we try to maintain a level of ryegrass and clover and mulch the Kikuyu into it.”
They calve in July-August, with a brief sojourn to autumn calving not working in their system.
“We’re seasonal,” Ross said.
“Generally we get a good spring, sometimes a good summer. Traditionally that’s how we manage it as a low-input farm.
“We found that when we calved in autumn, you had to feed extra silage in the winter. If the cow walks and eats grass, it’s a lot cheaper than giving her silage which normally doubles the cost”
The farm is well served by about 1000mm annual rainfall, which Ross describing it as one of the best climatic areas in Victoria for dairying.
Ross was diagnosed with aggressive Merkel-cell cancer three years ago. It’s a rare and usually terminal but Ross has had a lot of radiation treatment and at the moment is in remission.
Like his attitude to farming, Ross is tackling the cancer head-on.
“I was told I’d be dead by now, but I’m not,” he says.
Ross says the future will be up to his son and the share farmers, especially with their 17-a-side rapid release herringbone dairy reaching its limits.
“We’ll have to look at a new dairy or robots and you’re looking at millions of dollars,” Ross said.
“My son will have to get to the point whether he stays in dairy or goes to beef. It’s a big decision.”
Ross can’t see any new dairy farms being established in the region, so the Walkers will remain the lone rangers.
“These days you need to go big if you want to start a dairy and it would be very difficult to milk 1000 cows here. I have a good balance of flat and hill land but some farms closer to Cann River are flat and get really wet.
“Trouble is now all the dairies are gone; you’d have to build new.”
Ross continues to enjoy working when he can, following through on projects such as clearing rocky areas and removing scrub on the hilly land that was burnt in the black summer fires.
“I’ve spent my life since I was 18 back on the farm and I’ve enjoyed it,” he says.
“It’s hard work but I’m a bit ornery – I’m better off as my own boss.
“We have five households depending on the farm and we go along all right. I’ve got no dairy farmers near me to compare with, but I assume we’re going okay. We’re all earning a living off it.”
He’s also a bit ornery about the state of the dairy industry and Australian’s attitudes to food production.
“It annoys me that the dairy industry has been in decline and it worries me that we’re an importer of dairy products,” he says.
“That’s really sad and it will come back to bite the country.
“Most people live in cities, and they’re not aware of the farming system. I think that’s a tragedy.”
Listen to Ross's podcast The Last Man Milking: Ross Walker on Spotify