Johnny MacNamara's move from Queensland to King Island pays off

Mention King Island to most people and it's premier specialty cheeses that mostly come to mind, but for Mr MacNamara, it's been the place where he's been able to buy a block of dirt and begin to set up his empire.

Situated at the stormy western entrance to Bass Strait, the isolated island, home to the Roaring Forties, has laid claim to 60 shipwrecks in the last two centuries, but Mr MacNamara, 32, isn't one of them.

He came to the island for a holiday with his now-partner Renee Bellekoop, and saw its potential.

"I was doing a bit of truck driving, a bit of contract mustering, mechanical work, scrub pulling - we were all a bit down with the drought when I met Renee in Blackall," he said.

"We ended up coming down here for a trip and I saw there was no such thing as a drought down this end.

That was four years ago and the 'little block' of 70ha, which runs one beast to the hectare, has since quadrupled in price, and more.

"Some of the really good country's up to $10,000 an acre - I just snuck in there before it all happened," Mr MacNamara said.

Just as friends are doing in western Queensland, he started by putting up an exclusion fence - wallabies are rife on the island, with no natural predator and no market for their meat - then he purchased about 350 superfine Saxon-cross Merinos, along with 30 cows and calves to bring the grass down to a better level for sheep grazing.

In doing so he went against the trend - where once there were 300,000 sheep on the 1000 square kilometre island, it's estimated there's only 1000 left now, as locals proudly trot out the statistic that over 20 per cent of the beef produced in Tasmania comes from that little dot in the ocean.

Some would question the viability of running wool sheep in an environment with a 965mm annual rainfall but Mr MacNamara says they're working well for him.

He had a 90 per cent lambing when he joined, and says he doesn't mules but doesn't have too much trouble with blowfly.

"There was a point where I thought I had fly and it probably wasn't far off - that was because I shore later in the new year, about February," he said.

"There was a lot of burr and rubbish getting into the wool, so I decided to (shear) while it was green and it paid off big time.

"That's something I've really learnt - you've got to shear before it dries off."

He switched to shearing at the start of November, and has only just shipped his wool to Melbourne for sale, to assess the outcome of that decision.

He counteracts footrot by scattering lime sand on his paddocks to bring the soil pH up. "I wouldn't say I've overcome footrot but I don't have it as badly as some," he said.

The only threat to his lambing may be sea eagles, which he found eating dead lambs, but he doesn't know if they killed them or were just feasting on the carcasses.

Another reason Mr MacNamara chose sheep over cattle was because of the sand blows that develop on the more fragile coastal country.

"Cattle would see that," he said, pointing to a small patch of bare ground on a nearby rise. "They would go and rub in it and roll in it and play with it, but the sheep don't seem to expose the land like that."

The Italians wearing the suits produced from his wool - on average he's sold eight 190kg bales of ultrafine Merino wool a year, averaging 15.2 microns for $4100 a bale - would be surprised to know that the sheep were initially crutched in a makeshift shed crafted out of a shipping container.

Mr MacNamara was trucking his sheep to another grower's shearing shed until he made enough money to put up his own two-stand shed, shearing under the watchful eye of master classer Michael Morward.

Since then he's been slowly working at building his numbers up, hoping to run 500 full-grown sheep, but has had to hold back on those plans while he slowly improves the pasture at a rate of 14ha a year, using a mixture of lucerne, rye, cocksfoot and phalaris grasses, plus strawberry and white clovers for natural nitrogen.

It was while he was fixing a dozer for a fellow Islander, Neale Burgess, when they got talking about the difficulties faced by young people in raising the finance to get into agriculture, that the pair agreed to a lease to buy arrangement for Mr Burgess's 600ha farm.

That keeps Mr MacNamara pretty busy these days, running 300 Angus breeders, 300 young cattle and 100 bullocks, plus a handful of Dorper sheep and a Percheron horse stud.

He describes the Red Hut Farm, with its view to the ocean, as the prettiest on the island, thanks partly to a waterfall that runs continually.

Peacocks and turkeys roam through the pasture alongside the livestock - again, they have no natural predator - and Mr MacNamara said they were helping him out by eating snails, one of the pests he has to deal with.

Much of his time now is being spent redoing the fences on the farm when he's not doing the necessary animal husbandry jobs.

Knowing that not a lot of stock work can happen in winter, he plans to go back to the myriad of jobs he undertook to help pay for his initial purchase - mostly contract fencing, dozer and grader driving, or mechanic work, but also as a kelp harvester.

That involves wild harvesting the long brown seaweed strands that wash up along the rocky west coast and taking it to purpose-built kelp racks for drying then pulverising and exporting for use in a variety of products, from icecream to toothpaste.

It's not all work and no play in summer either - while most weeks on the island involve starting at 6am and working until 6pm, the long hours of daylight mean there's plenty of time to don a wetsuit and go swimming, snorkelling or fishing, finishing up with dinner on the beach at 9pm.

Mr MacNamara has also taken up AFL, playing for the Norths Bulldogs in the three-team island competition, even though leeches abound on the southern-most oval.

His philosophy of honouring the place he's in, to make the most of the opportunities on offer, seems to be paying off.

"Blackall was where I wanted to buy, but I've learnt to listen to what the country is telling me here - that's all you can do," he said.

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