Agriculture & Farming

Tim Saunders is a farmer and a writer. He describes the seasons: Summer, with shearing, slaughter, crop harvest and conservation; Autumn and its floods, trading stock, drenching and dogging; Winter, the maize harvest and lambing; and Spring, with docking, pet sheep and weaning. H...e explores how a farm that has been in the same family for five generations functions, and describes the everyday lives of farmers and their enduring love of the land and the animals they work with. This is powerful and poignant writing that outlines a lifestyle often taken for granted, and it goes some way to explaining why farmers love what they do and are also conflicted by what they do.
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In this joyful novel, our narrator is Charles Dickens's tenth child, Edward Bulwer Lytton Dickens, known as Plorn. Sent, as his brother Alfred had been before him, at sixteen years of age, to Australia to learn to 'apply himself', we follow his early Australian adventures in outb...ack NSW learning to become a man from the most diverse and toughest of men. Part of Dickens' motivation was to separate these younger of his children from the Dickens family schism, where Charles had expelled his wife from the family home, keeping her sister Georgie there to run the household and taking up with the actress Ellen Tiernan. Plorn arrived in Melbourne in late 1868 carrying a terrible secret. He has never read a word of his father's work. After a very brief stopover he is sent out to become a gentleman stockman on a 2000 square mile station in remotest, semi-arid parts of NSW. Here he inevitably gets enmeshed in a tribe named the Paakintji and various other folk, colonists, colonial-born, ex-convicts, ex-soldiers, and very few women - though he is struck by each one he does encounter. Plorn did not expect he would encounter the same veneration of his father and familiarity with his work in Australia that was rampant in England. Against this backdrop, and featuring cricket tournaments, horse-racing, bushranging, sheep droving, shifty stock and station agents, frontier wars and first encounters with Australian women we follow Plorn, and sometimes his brother Alfred, through wonderful adventures as he works to apply himself. This is Tom Keneally in his most familiar terrain. Taking historical figures and events and reimagining them with verve, compassion and humour. It is a romp.
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Want to eat well, reduce food and packaging waste and save some money? Home Bird is here to help, going back to basics with seasonal, bold and wholesome recipes that are not only better for the environment but also your well-being and budget.

Tom Bolton's account of how Harry Ferguson and his inventions changed the world of farming forever.

My Family and Other Animals meets The Secret Life of Cows: this rediscovered gem tells the charming tale of how a baby llama transformed a Welsh farming family forever. Things llamas like: Snaffling cherry brandy, Easter eggs, and the Radio Times. Fluttering movie star eyelashes ...at surprised visitors. Curling up in 'tea-cosy' position by the fire. Orbiting, helicoptering, and oompahing. Humming along to classical music. Locking victims in the lavatory. Spitting nuts like a pea-shooter. Chasing snowy toboggans. Things llamas dislike: Having toenails trimmed by a visiting circus. Being adopted mother to an orphaned lamb. Invitations to star on Blue Peter. The indignity of being sheared. Accidentally swimming. Snowdonia's rainfall. The dark. Ruth Ruck's family live on a Welsh mountain farm, no strangers to cow pats on the carpet and nesting hens in the larder. When dark days strike, they embark on a farming experiment to cheer them all up - but raising a baby llama proves more of an adventure than expected .
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