Calves | Astarté Earthwise

Have you ever had the misfortune and the grief of watching someone die of cancer? You stand by knowing there is nothing you can do, except watch as they waste away in front of your very eyes. You lend your support you give all the love in your heart to no avail, and you lose sleep, you are tired beyond anything you have known, and you are working as you never have before, the sisters of fate have weaved and spun, and your being fills with a sense of hopelessness and despair, for the loss you know you will experience.

This feeling, this inkling of knowing how that feels, gives you a lens of sorts into the hearts and the grief of our farmers, these men women and children, are too, in the fight of their lives. Every day they watch the slow death, the crippling of their land, the crippling of their stock and their produce, like a cruelty unknown to city folk.

Tension builds in the long shadows of every dawn and dusk, the land is stretched so taught, not giving, not nurturing, she is simply in decline, hope fades and the dust builds and the feed disappears. Something you love and feel so connected to, is rotting and dying, this is a part of you, your soul and every fibre of your being is connected to this land.

Can you imagine looking into the eyes of your breeding stock, animals you’ve spent all your days with, seeing to their needs, their cycles of births, separations and deaths, you’ve been there together supporting each other through the good and bad, the storms, the floods, the fires, the heat and the cold, illness, predators and injury only right now, this time it’s very different.

No one but a farmer can explain this stress of this tangible tension, and what it does to your value as a human, it is extremely painful to watch your beautiful domesticated animals and your livelihood diminish and suffer. Watching the innocents that give and give, slowly lose their condition, fat bellies now gaunt, bones stretching up begging for a mouthful of green grass, there simply isn’t enough to go around, as days turn to weeks then months, it’s too much, the weakness arrives, the will to live is taken over by starvation, each day more and more animals hit the dust, their legs too weak to carry them, and they wait silently for the end of their misery.