years ago someone said we had some planes from N America .. would be good if we could trade degrees around different times of year .. and yeah, precipitation too ..
"I think the bigger problem over here will be the massive ice storm now getting under way in large parts of west/northwest Texas, the Texas panhandle, and west/northwest Oklahoma -- gonna be a lot of folks without power, many for more than just a day or two"
The herd is on the move. Welcome to Tasmanian cattle country, dubbed the coastal outback.
They are scenes that could be from a blockbuster movie, but it's real life.
The pictures of a cattle muster on a unique and spectacular Tasmanian property tell the story of a proud tradition of moving cattle between island paddocks.
"We probably do a dozen of these rides — maybe not the same amount of cattle, sometimes we might take some bulls over or we might take some cold cows off — but we do it quite regularly and we've got a good core of locals that like to do this," farmer John Hammond said.
"It's good fun, we've developed some great friendships and it's probably the aspect of the job that I really enjoy the most."
Photo: The journey sees the cattle winding their way between pooling seawater and a rushing incoming tide. (Landline)
CHAPTER ONE
The cleanest air in the world
John and Keith Hammond are an institution in north-west Tasmania.
Their American drawl stands out, a leftover of a childhood spent on the Hammond's broad-acre wheat farm, in an area known as the Oklahoma pan handle.
Photo: Farming has never been so much fun for John Hammond, who has been in the Wagyu industry for more than 20 years. (Landline: David Fraser)
But they are fourth generation Tasmanian farmers; in their early 20s they swapped the windswept plains of Oklahoma for the windswept islands of their mother's land.
It couldn't be more different — Robbins and Walker islands are perfect beef country, with a system of natural sandbars and tidal channels that allows the Hammonds to work cattle between them.
"Fifty kilometres north, at Cape Grim, they've got one of the five baseline air monitoring stations that are positioned around the world and when the air is blowing from the west it's the cleanest air in the world," John said.
"It's cleaner than what they measure in Antarctica, that's what they say and they've got the best instruments in the world to measure it."
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