[Andy Carson]

Thanks for thoughts, Jean. What would you guess you mini weighs? Was it an easy job?

PS. I would consider a mini, too, but an kinda enjoying my current horseless lifestyle. The other animals are so much less work. 🙂

[Andy Carson]

I am toying with the idea of getting a drivable animal “helper” for cultivating. Has anyone used a small cultivator like this with goats? A back-of-the-envelope calculation tells me that two large goats would cultivate better than one. Tim’s draft data says a single row horse cultivator takes 85-135 lbf (110 lbf average) to pull. It cultivates both rows, though, so I cut this in half to get an average of 55 lbf for a single row. This is 12% of 450 pounds, which might be the combined weight of two large wethers. Given this, one goat (based on it’s body weight) seems margional for cultivating a single row, but I have seen photos of single goats pulling cultivators… All I know of this is what I have seen in photos, and do not know anyone that does this so do not know if using goats for work like this is really practical. I do like the pasture improvement and weed eating bonus that goats provide. I have also read that because of thier browsing, one can pasture a few goats with cattle and have little or no impact on the amount of cattle the pasture can support. This makes sense to me too and I have really gotten into pasture improvement lately.

Thoughts anyone???

[Andy Carson]

My dog is back to guarding the chickens when i am gone. He was injuring one a day for almost a week. What I ended up doing was getting a shock collar and hiding while watching him with the chickens. It took hours of watching to see what he was doing. I saw he goes on a patrol route every half hour or so checking out places like under the steps, holes in the hay stack, the wood pile, and other places one might expect small animals to hide. Eventually, he finds a ranging chicken in one of these holes. If he does, it still not a problem unless the chicken flies out in a panick. If it does, he pins it with his paws. If the chicken freezes, he will let it go and walk off. If the chicken tries to get away, he bites. This is why it takes so long to catch him and why one one hen was getting injured. I caught him doing this only twice after watching for hours and hours. When i caught him, I shocked him at highest setting for the longest time the collar would let me. I don’t usually like this kind of treatment and i am glad he didn’t know I did it or that i was even around. It could have done some serious harm to him trust in me. This way, he hopefully believes that chickens will shock the crap out of you if you bite them. He’s defianately notnafraid of the chickens and stillngoes around them, which is good. Hopefully he is only afraid to bite them. Two long shocks seem to be all that was required, because I could not catch him doing this again. I tied him when i was gone for a few days while i was evaluating if he learned his lesson, then put him in a pen with a old hen for a day. No harm came to the hen, so i gave him a chance with the whole flock today. No problems with the chickens and he killed a groundhog. Hopefully this problem is over, but i will be vigilant for a while.

[Andy Carson]

My butt used to get sore sitting on my disc, so I wore a pair of padded bicycle shorts under my pants. It seemed to work great, and I already had them. If you don’t want to pad the seat, you can pad yourself!

[Andy Carson]

I was thinking of using the buck rake to gather hay and transport it to the stack, rather than having to rake into rows/piles and fork it onto a sled/wagon. It seems this would save raking and forking time, but I am really just guessing, I have never done this. I think a dump rake is also a great idea.

[Andy Carson]

How about something like a buck rake that you pull behind the single? It could save the raking. How is the scything going? I got one too, but still need some practice. How are you stacking the hay once it’s gathered?

[Andy Carson]

My dog got skunked last night at about midnight. I never got a warning bark so I figure my dog thought this was a critter he didn’t even need help with. Surprize!!! The smell woke me rather than the barking… Not that I am wishing he called me out to get sprayed, but I almost felt like I was sprayed after washing him off. Just out of curiousity, are “real” livestock guard dogs supposed to leave skunks alone or are they just supposed to pester them and get sprayed? I suppose in a perfect world, the dog would pester the skunk into leaving without getting sprayed, but I don’t see how that would work…

[Andy Carson]

That’s great Jen! If your dog is like mine, you may learn that there are several different types of barks. If he does a single “woof” or a few widely spaced “woofs,” I don’t go look. If the barking is intent, though, I always go check it out, even if it’s 3 AM. This gives me a chance to tell him “good boy,” which really seems to help him (my dog is less of a natural guard). Also, because he tends to bail and hold critters (rather than kill them), and that gives me a chance to dispatch them. I have only killed possum’s this way, but it’s still useful. ‘possums (in my experience) aren’t really that bright, but ‘coons seem to have an impressive ability to learn how to get food and evade defences. Given time and a food incentive, I bet most would learn lessons like “that dog is big, but it can’t get at me if I stay over here” or “here’s the hole in the fence” or “the people in that house leave at 6:30” or “I can rip through chicken wire” or “if you open this hatch, there are chickens on the other side!!!” I believe in aggressive measures to remove ‘coons quickly before they learn these lessons.

[Andy Carson]

I completely agree with the challenge of teaching my current team to drive from behind. Somehow, the “at the shoulder” position seems more natural and efficient. I really want to examine the possibilities of how to cultivate from the “at the shoulder” position with a single person before going down the “drive from behind” route.

Putting the cultivator in front of the oxen (and driver) seems to have some potential, but I think it will be hard to keep the cultivator from “tipping” one way or the other. I think you would have to have the bulk of the drag come from the back (to keep the cultivator strait) and maybe just have the nearest tine forward. This would mean you would have to make a tool that was as long as the ox plus the chain and the rear cultivator. Big and complicated in my mind, and you wouldn’t exactly be able to pick it up to turn it at the end of the row. This problem seems more complicated than I had origionally thought. I am becoming less suprized a tool like this doesn’t already exist… Still thinking about this, though…

[Andy Carson]

The thing I can’t get around turning this in my head is that if i am working from the front and the cultivator is in the rear, visibility is going to be an issue. I am now thinking about a cultivator that is pushed ahead of the ox, buck-rake style. This would enhance visibility and pens up more possibilities for steering. Still conceptualizing this…

[Andy Carson]

Yeah, seriously, a spear. My spear is designed for killing boar (link below, but I paid less). It’s what I take with me when I check out “bumps in the night” that my dog is barking at. These critters tend to hide under and behind stuff so you can’t get a good swing at them. Getting a good angle for a spear is easy even in hiding places and again, you don’t have to get that close or cause the animal to panick and/or do something crazy. It also doesn’t blow holes in buildings, wake up the neighborhood, or cause you to loose your hearing like firing a rifle in a building will. It also makes a bigger hole.

http://www.coldsteel.com/boarspear.html

You could probably clamp a knife to a pole for the same effect…

[Andy Carson]

The trap holds the raccon by the hand and is chained to a post or something secure. I spear the raccoon. It’s quick, quiet, and very effect. I have tried a club before, but wasnt happy with it. You have to get close and sometimes miss the mark as the animal is in a panick. The raccoon doesn’t know a spear is dangerous until it’s too late. If you are interested (I was), you can disect the ‘coon afterwards (I did). Thier body cavity is filled mostly with digestive tract, but is loose and quite flexible. The heart and lungs are suprizingly small and high on a raccoon, so you will want to aim kinda high.

[Andy Carson]

Raccoons are very curious and easy to trap (at least in my experience), so that is a good thing about them. I bought some dog-proof traps and keep them set and baited in areas the chickens frequent all the time. I bait them with marshmallow, as the chickens, cats, and dogs have little interest in marshmallows. It takes the pulling action of a “hand” to set these traps off anyway, so I feel they are a safe and low maintainence insurance measure. I have to rebait every now and then b/c ants will eventually eat the marshmallow, but this takes a while. I also have the bottom parts of permanent fences reinforced with hardware cloth and electric or barbed wire keeps them from climbing over the top. Raccoons are thick here, I had a problem a while ago and took all sorts of steps to see that it didn’t happen again. I probably only needed a simple live trap once I knew the nature of the problem, but I chose to take other steps as well. Waiting to respond to a visit to the hen house was not an acceptable strategy, in my mind, b/c one visit kills too many chickens.

[Andy Carson]

Great job everyone! I really like how the news gave time to cover this event.

[Andy Carson]

I think it is a good design feature to be able to adjust the number and placement of the wheels. I have attached a link below to some work by Tillers demonstrating the effect of different wheel placements in cultivators. Some placements make them very hard to stear.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNZFn3-d-N0&feature=channel&list=UL

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