Yesterday Di and I spent the day with the Dairyland Beef Producers Association, on a tour through the local counties, checking out the agricultural scene.

Catching up with more Americans that have visited Waaia, we are now staying with Chuck and Carol Schwartau, and since Chuck was involved in the organising of yesterday, we were able to join in the tour and go check it out.

Really quite interesting, and Di was very impressed with the fact that she was able to compare what she knew from back home with what she was seeing. It seems she has taken quite a bit of knowledge in from the ag scene, more than either of us realised.

It was especially interesting to see a 800-cow dairy milking with only a 22-side parallel dairy. Seemed incredibly inefficient to us, but then, everything is different when the cows have to be protected from snow each winter.

Given the nature of the industry here, even the beef side of things was interesting since the disposal of effluent is a major issue here. A lot of town people moving to the country to enjoy the rural life find that when they move in, the rural life smells and is not quite the odourless picture postcard they imagined. As a result, the farmers around this area have to take new steps to minimise pollution issues of the past.

I also managed to get myself more famous, interviewed at length by two radio stations here, since they don’t get too many Australians going to that event each year. Kind of intimidating to be eating lunch, then have to do an interview on the radio, followed by another reporter from a rival station coming up and wanting an interview also.

Having a couple of problems with the van at the moment, because it seems to be losing charge. The local garage just confirmed it was the alternator that was the problem, coming to a total of about US$300 - ouch! Especially since we just went to a Ford service centre last week who diagnosed the problem as the starter and they charged US$191 to fix that. Really ouch! Almost AUD$1000 in a few days is a lot more than we wanted to spend in the last few weeks of owning the van…

We are thinking of going to check out Dodge County Fair this evening, which will allow us to cross another “must do” activity off the list of things we wanted to achieve in the US/Canada.

Perhaps there might be pie there too…

Categories: Travel, Odyssey 2001