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Episode 6: Farm Day

Episode 6: Farm Day
Visit a farm with Suhasini and learn what is different about sheep and goats.

Transcript

Join Su as she spends a day working on a farm.

I'm fairly curious about what farm life is actually like in Australia, how the people at the farm live, what challenges they face. I got this advice from my dad: try to build a rapport with it first, pat it and build a rapport and then hopefully it won't kick you. But he said this advice would work with Indian animals, I don't know about Australian animals, so, we'll see if that happens, yeah.

Indian animals, Australian animals. Adjectives describing countries often end with -ian - Indian, Indonesian, or -ese - Vietnamese, Chinese. But what's the informal way of saying Australian?

I've never actually been to an Aussie farm and so I'm really looking forward to interacting with the animals.

Aussie. An Aussie farm. So let's see Su interacting with Aussie animals:

So you need to get two hands going at once. Another one on the front, or two on the back.

Two hands going 'at once' - 'At once' can mean 'immediately' but here, 'at once' means at the same time. Listen again:

So you need to get two hands going at once. Another one on the front, or two on the back.

Cows are sacred in India so, you know, I had to do a little prayer first, but milking was easier than I thought. I was really scared that the cow would kick me or something but it didn't so it's good.

One cow, many cows. So what's the plural of sheep?

Okay, so what we've gotta go and do, we've gotta go and bring these sheep in so you can go off with Nate.

Sheep... yep.

The plural of sheep is sheep. You don't say sheeps. Males and females can both be called sheep, but as with most farm animals there are also words for males and females. Listen out for the word for a male sheep:

It might look cruel what we had Suhasini doing today, putting a ring on the tails to take them off, but we need to do it to keep the blowflies away, especially this time of the year with a bit of moisture in the air, the blowflies, and they get what's called flyblown. The cure is better than the disease because if they get maggots in the back of their body etc, they can get very sick, so that's why we put the ring on the tail. And we mark the rams because otherwise the meat goes off. If we don't take their testes out the meat goes rank and then you can't sell it at market.

We mark the rams - a male sheep is a ram and the plural is rams. Female sheep are called ewes. So what do you call a male duck?

So you know the difference, how to tell the drakes from the ducks.

No.

You know what a drake is?

The male...

A drake is a male duck. What is a female pig?

We're gonna go and feed the sows.

Sows. Female pigs are sows and males are boars. What's a baby pig?

Hold it!

No, no, no, no, no, no.

Yeah, hold it. Got it?

No, no, no.

It was really scary because the mums and aunties were protective about their pigs, so when we picked up a piglet they weren't very happy and they tried to jump at me and I was scared, but that was a scary experience.

Piglets. Baby pigs are piglets. We'll finish with the expression 'ups and downs', which means good things and bad things:

Yeah, it was really good fun. It had its ups and downs. I did a lot of things today but I did things that I've never done before.

Oh, it was great. I was asking Laurie if he will give me a job after this so, hopefully I get the job. I'd love to come back to a farm and yes, spend time here, definitely.

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