I have a stupid question. What do you do on a sheep station when there aren't any sheep? How do you earn an income and generate enough expendable income to live?
(I'm not a sheep farm girlie so humour me...)
Depends on a whole lot of factors. Excuse the incoming essay, but I’ll try answer your question the best I can.
If the property has been owned by the same family for several generations and the business hasn’t bought out neighbours or other paddocks to expand, there shouldn’t be a debt burden to service which is a big assist in running a “small” family business.
Anyone trying to run a sustainable operation will have drought plans and ideally will be able to absorb the hit from a dry year or so, particularly if they’ve been profitable in the past and money has be put away in farm management deposits to draw on in leaner years (like now).
Cashflow is
very seasonal even in a regular year, most sheep operations will basically generate an income once or twice a year and that has to stretch across the rest of the year to cover everything else (including living expenses for whoever is running it). One, the wool clip if you’re a woolgrower - not that wool prices have been substantial over the past decade compared to running costs - and two, lamb sales if you’re running a self replacing flock.
In a drought if you don’t have the manpower, reserves or infrastructure to containment feed (grain and hay or a combination pellet) you have no choice but to de stock.
Wiser operators will “lighten off” early and take advantage of the higher prices before everyone else panics and sells once the dry really sets in, because the livestock market is very supply/demand driven so a glut of supply naturally drives prices down.
If you sell off all of your livestock, you’ll have a sizeable cash injection at that point so budget to cover overheads and survive off that, not an unfamiliar concept to most of us - The issue in de stocking totally, whether by choice or necessity, is that you’ve crippled your future earning potential, and will likely have to borrow money to re establish a breeding flock when seasonal conditions recover, and on it goes.
Obviously whether you are running stock or not, expenses like pastoral board/council rates still need paying (and given the absurd property prices these days it’s always a sizeable hit) registration and maintenance on vehicles, telephone and internet, maintaining fences, water infrastructure, tracks (most properties have earthmoving equipment of their own to maintain their own internal roads) and pest management all still needs to be paid for.
This is why corporates are becoming such a huge player in the Australian agriculture industry for better or worse, and many small towns (see Yunta or nearby Peterborough) are basically dying as it’s increasingly difficult to support a family, let alone multiple generations of a family, on the income from a properties like this, despite the million dollar valuations on paper.
It would be a busy place to run.
There would be workers. Lots of maintenance people entering and leaving, who would be assisting in the station operations
Vans as also delivering food, house items
Trucks for produce and animal feeds
As I’ve tried to explain above, I’d say majority of the properties under these circumstances are hard pressed supporting an owner/operator and their family.
Labour is expensive (and rightly so, everyone deserves a fair wage for their work) so unless you’re a large corporate entity (like Jumbuck or McBrides invoked in another comment here) most family enterprises will do as much of their own maintenance as humanely possible from vehicles to water infrastructure and fencing. Spending on contractors is generally reserved for the really labour intensive, more specialised tasks like shearing, but it’s not completely unheard of for people to do their own shearing or whatever if you’re in a position where keeping costs down is more important than efficiency.
From experience living in similar isolation, I’d say one of the adults on the property would head to a regional center once every few weeks for “stores” - maybe Burra, Peterborough or Jamestown, maybe Port Pirie or Clare for “bigger” shops at Woolworths or Coles - if you’re running sheep you generally butcher your own meat and only buy in what you don’t grow yourself.
There’s no milkman coming by once or twice a week with supplies, and being less than an hour from Yunta I’d be very surprised if they didn’t collect their own mail from town.
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