[Crabapple Farm]

We have several classes of cattle, and insufficient barn space. Right now, the oxen are on our piece down the road outwintering with the beef herd, with woods for shelter. That’s where the woodlot is, and it isn’t too hard to throw the yoke in the back of the truck with the chainsaw (though I wish I was finding more time to do it . . .). The dairy cows (only one currently in milk) and the bull are here on the home piece, with a run in shed. The dairy cow comes into the barn overnight, in a loose pen. Her calf has been staying in the barn all the time, and gets to nurse 2x per day under supervision (we want a little of the milk for ourselves). Overnight he is in a separate pen next to his mom. We also have a pony, who is currently in a loose pen in the barn also (he lost his outdoor privileges when he started harassing the cows excessively, and jumping the fence when I tried to put him in a separate paddock.)
I would second the concern that Oxen + Bull + Cow In Heat can be a bad combination. We’ve had times when they have all been together, but now we try to keep the oxen elsewhere when we’re expecting cows to come into heat. For reference, I once saw our Devon Bull (still young, around 1400 lbs) throw one of my shorthorns on the ground (mature, around 2000#) – no one was hurt, but there was definitely risk of serious injury. We also worry about the cows, especially heifers, when the oxen are fighting over them.
My oxen tend to bully the other cows (or try to, as in the case with the bull), and I would never let them share a freestall-type barn setup with the cows. With our open shed (12×24 on the side of the barn), they would fully occupy it and the cows had to stand out in the rain and snow. But at least there was a wide open exit so the oxen couldn’t corner anyone. But in poor weather, I had to tie the boys in their stall if I wanted the cows to be able to come into the shed.
My ox stall is a double tie stall, 10′ wide with a partial divider in the front. That is two say, two 5′ tie stalls only partially separated. In theory, I can put their yoke on in their stall with them still tied in, though I don’t. A box stall for a team would have to be pretty big, I would think. If loose housing, I would be more comfortable with a run-in shed than a closed box stall. That way if one is feeling pushy the other at least has the option of leaving. I wish my barn had a second entrance, so that the oxen could be in a separate adjacent paddock, and every one could have access to loose housing in the barn – the oxen on one side of a divider and the cows on the other. One of these years I’m going to build another barn (or maybe just tear out the guts of my current barn and rebuild) . . .
-Tevis

[Crabapple Farm]

Could you leave them tied in the barn for an hour or so after unyoking? To remove the Barn = Freedom notion. It would also enforce the ending on a good note – after an hour, he ought to have “cooled down” nicely.
The other thought I just had is what are the dynamics between Tex and the rest of the herd? My nigh ox is the less dominant one in the team, but he really likes to throw his weight around with the herd, and make the young ones jump when he says jump. He’s not as bad now as when he was, well, about Tex’s age. My off ox is undisputed boss, and is a gentleman about it and doesn’t feel the need to assert himself. But the nigh ox can be a real git sometimes, and used to be anxious to get back to the herd out there eating his grass and give them what for.
-Tevis

[Crabapple Farm]

It’s really hard to diagnose this sort of thing remotely.
Could be a metabolic thing, with too much lush grass. Could be a weather thing (was it a windy day? a good wind “puts the devil in ’em” as one of my mentors used to say). Could be discomfort with the yoke, or some other hidden sore spot.
Does he only act wild and crazy in the yoke, or does he act “hot” when on pasture? Does he seem to be questioning your authority, directing his attention at you while acting out, or is he more focused on the yoke, the load, the barn ahead, ?? With the halter, are you able to control him, or just not lose him? If he’s dragging you, you could be inadvertently teaching him a very dangerous lesson – that he is bigger than you.
Have you ever tried driving them without a yoke on? I like to tie mine together with a short chain or just baling twine (clips on the ends make it easier to undo and hence safer), either to halters or collars. This is enough (for mine) to mimic the feel of being linked as a team. Collars is going to “feel” more like the constraint of the yoke. You can’t do any work this way, but you can see how he is acting, and that might give you a sense as to whether it is the fit of the yoke or the load that he is fighting, or something else.
-Tevis

[Crabapple Farm]

I’ve heard that lime can kill your compost if you do it wrong. Won’t necessarily damage the chemical fertility aspect, but can mess up the biological aspect. So if you look at compost/manure as NPK, mixing lime in works. If you look at it as a soil inoculant, maybe not so much.

I would not recommend mixing an acre’s worth of hydrated lime into an acre’s worth of compost – that much lime in that quantity of compost would be pretty caustic and probably would kill off biology. Especially if you weren’t spreading and tilling in immediately.
Emptying some bags on top of each load, spreading, and tilling in promptly would probably be okay – by the time the lime has reacted with much of the compost you’ve already got the soil to buffer it. It’s also easier to calibrate your application rate and get an even spread if you put some on top of each load. It would be pretty hard to mix it into a pile evenly.
Adding lime to the bedding in your barn a little at a time is an old practice, and in that instance, you’re not going to overload the microbial systems the way you would if you added it all to the pile at one time. But it’s a lot harder to figure out your “application rate.”
Something like greensand or rock phosphate is not as chemically reactive so wouldn’t worry me as much. Lime also comes in different types, some more reactive than others. I know that Living Acres up in Maine adds phosphorus to their compost piles in order to improve nitrogen (and I think Carbon) retention, so if you do it right feeding the pile rather than the field can boost other nutrient cycles.

For micronutrients, I like to run them through a digestive system by providing them as mineral supplements for livestock, rather than applying them to the fields. I think they go further that way. I’m not looking to correct any specific deficiencies, I just keep Kelp, Redmond Salt, and usually another mineral mix available free choice.
We’ve got a decent sized flock of laying hens, who get oyster shells as their free choice supplement, making their compost high in Calcium – I haven’t had it tested, but I always figure that their manure has the lime already mixed in.

-Tevis

[Crabapple Farm]

This thread has gotten me thinking about the supply of draft horses in the northeast, and where they are coming from. I absolutely agree with Rick that within the community, there is a need for someone like Carl to rehabilitate the juvenial delinquents. But I am also wondering about the role of breeder, and how that fits into the community. Because if the folks who make their livings with horses can’t afford to pay for them, then who is going to breed new horses for them?
I’ve heard a lot of folks disparage the tall leggy carriage horse build, but if the carriage folks are the only ones who buy “new” and the farmers and loggers all want to buy “used,” then who is going to breed nice chunks for us?
But this is getting pretty far from Carl’s initial post . . .

[Crabapple Farm]

For up to 15 lambs, we’ve always thrown together a box in the truck bed out of cattle panels. When it’s cold, I use a piece of plywood for the roof (supported by lumber racks) instead of the welded wire panels. We’ve got convenient length cattle and hog panels because we use them for lambing jugs and sorting/handling pens. All held together with baling twine and wiggle wires (spiraled wire connectors that we get from Premier). Quick to put together and quick to take apart again. And more comfortable than a dog crate.
But we just got a trailer that has made everything so much better, and our truck is falling apart so we’re using the market Van as a hauling vehicle, so this year the lambs got to go to the slaughterhouse in a proper rig.
A passenger van pulling a stock trailer does get some funny looks as we go down the road, but it works.

[Crabapple Farm]

I’m not familiar with a EHE, but I use a two basket Sitrex. A basket type is going to do a better job of spreading out the hay – especially if it’s been raked into a windrow. In many conditions, you won’t need to spread it out fully, and flipping it with a “fluffer” is all that’s needed. But when the haying window is tight, getting a more even spread is nice. When the dew is heavy or there might be a little rain overnight, I like to rake it in the evening and ted it back out in the morning, so less surface is exposed to the wet. It’s a tradeoff, as more handling means more leaf loss, especially as it gets close to being fit for baleing. But at times it’s what gets the hay in the next day before real rain hits.
On the downside, I’ve never seen a ground driven tedder of that type, so you would probably need a pto forecart.

[Crabapple Farm]

I’ve never used one but have thought about them in the past. I’ve mainly seen them advertised for grooming arenas and such.
I imagine that in order for the rotation to happen consistently you would need to be working a pretty uniform surface. Because the rotation is based on the difference in drag between one side and the other, either from angled teeth or an angled frame, I would think that anything like a stone on the wrong side could stop the rotation or reverse it. Not a major problem, but it would make the action very inconsistent in a field with stones or weed/crop residue unevenly distributed.
Smaller rotating weeders work on the same principle, so it seems like it is a scalable design – and a set of smaller rotating harrows might work more evenly in real field conditions than one big one.
-Tevis

[Crabapple Farm]

I’ve known Mark for a long time (since we were kids), and have met and chatted with Kristen a few times up in Tunbridge. There is no question that Mark is his own brand of crazy, and Kristin must be too for marrying him. But it is a good sort of crazy. I worry, though, about folks taking Essex farm as a model – I think it comes through in Kristin’s book that the only way it works for them is because they are crazy. And it also comes through a bit that “works” is in the eye of the beholder.
That said, we do vegetables, beef, lamb, eggs, grain, dry beans, fruit, seeds, etc. etc. on our farm, and have recently been talking about what it would take to do milk legally (and the scary thing is that it has sounded like we’ve been serious in that thought). We must be some kind of crazy ourselves.
I definately know about the media spinning stories the way they want. I will say this, though – more well-respected publications often put in a lot more effort to get their stories straight. There was an article about the small-scale grain resurgence in the December issue of Smithsonian in which I was featured, and I was really impressed that the editor ran the bulk of the story by me first to get the facts straight. Of course, the author made up the main quote that he ascribed to me, but it was a good quote so I can’t complain too much, even if I never would have said such a thing. Similarly, a couple years ago I was mentioned in an article in the Chicago Tribune, and that article was well written and accurate. The local press has been much worse about misrepresentations, and I definately read articles about other people differently, having seen a couple written about myself, and so knowing just how far some reporters will go with fabricating their story.
Kevin – you mention there not being any combines in the area, so people must not have grown grain recently at all. I don’t know the history on that coast, but here in New England, folks stuck to the reaper binders up through WWII. With good reason – several old books I have mention the then-current conventional wisdom that combines work well in the drier climate out west, but binders are better in a moister climate. If you’re coastal, folks may not have used combines there because they felt the binders were better for the climate, even though everyone on the other side of the mountains used combines.
The reason binders are better in a moist climate is that you can reap the grain sooner (soft dough stage) and let it after ripen in shocks or in the barn, protecting it somewhat from rain as it is doing the final ripening. With the combine, it needs to stay dry as it ripens. Around here, the folks getting into grain recently are all using combines and using dryers – lots of propane and electricity.
I got a 66 Allcrop this fall, that I haven’t had a chance to go over yet. I’m hoping to get it running before harvest time. But I’ve still got my eyes looking for a decent binder – if I find one, I’d like to use that, and then use the all-crop as a stationary thresher for the most part.
-Tevis

[Crabapple Farm]

I think this tools was developed at Rodale and is being manufactured by I & J. My understanding (I don’t have one and have never used one) is that it works effectively on a limited number of crops and that timing is important. Rye and vetch is what I have mainly heard it being used on. You need to roll it when the plant is in bloom, before it has set seed. With rye and other annual cereal grains, at least, once they have bloomed they generally won’t come back if you mow or crimp the stems.
That roller has pretty serious crimpers on it, that crimp the stalk every few inches along its length. I don’t think you would get as effective of a job with something not designed to do it. And if you’re planting into the straw, you want the cover crop to be dead, because cultivation won’t be an option with all that straw.
You could probably get a pretty effective kill with a disk if your timing was good (though you might have to go at it crossways a second time). But with a harrow, you’re disturbing the soil so you will probably get a flush of weeds coming up through the mulch, which will be hard to deal with.
A sickle bar is certainly an option to lay down a stand. The advantage of the roller is that it leaves the stems connected to the roots, and so you can go through with a no-till seeder or transplanter or what not and the disks will cut through the residue. If you mow with a sickle bar, all that residue can move around and is more likely to plug up subsequent operations. Depending on what you’re planting and what your planter is like. I haven’t tried it yet, but some year I’m going to try no till with a mown cover crop, probably using hilling disks to mark out furrows to transplant into (I think just a single hilling disk is less likely to clog with trash than a seeder).

[Crabapple Farm]

Turning the oxen out overnight is certainly feasible. As is small paddock sizes. If you are worried about turning them out on lush pasture in the spring, just give them a small paddock at a time, after feeding hay. If they are only on it for a day (or night) there isn’t much danger of them damaging the pasture from overgrazing (though if it’s wet they can plug it up quickly). In the fall, they are used to grass, so the lushness isn’t really an issue (in my opinion).
It is definately something to consider when buying a team, as some breeds are much more likely to “put on condition” than others.
One trick about limiting feed during the summer months is that it is going to make them really want to sneak some grass anytime you are trying to work them in the field. Muzzles can help, but it can be a real pain getting them to stand in a lush field if they are on short rations. A bit over a week ago I was trying to cart some wheat straw out of the field by myself, and I had to stop loading the cart every couple minutes to tell them to back up – I had undersown the wheat with clover, which at this point has well overgrown the stubble, is really lush and way too tempting. Eventually I quit and decided that I needed to leave that task for a time when I could have an assistant so someone could stand at their heads and keep their minds on the job. And they’re pastured with the milk cows and have more condition than they ought, so they certainly aren’t starving.
The best way to keep them from getting fat is to work them. It will really only be an issue if you are going to use them only occasionally, but want them to work hard on those occasions. If they get overweight, it just means that you will need to work up to difficult tasks, as they will be out of shape. If they are skinny but haven’t worked much, they aren’t necessarily going to be any more able to do serious work. Unless you’re going to be in pulling competitions at the fair (trying to be in a certain weight class), I wouldn’t worry about them putting on a few extra pounds during the summer in their old age.

On the cattle as tillage question, compaction is certainly a serious concern. It depends a bit on your soil type how big of an issue this is. Last fall and into the winter I fed our beef herd hay in a field section that I was planning on plowing this spring. We had some thaws turning it to mud, so there was some pretty serious compaction. I used a chisel plow on that section, as deep as I could with the tractor. With that loosening, we had a real nice crop of winter squash. I don’t think the squash would have done nearly as well if I hadn’t been able to loosen the soil up after the cows plugged it.
Cow plugged soil doesn’t seem to erode much here – with all the little holes to puddle in I think the water can’t work up much velocity. But we’ve got a heavy soil, which in the cattle yard is a pretty sticky muck – in a lighter soil erosion might be more of an issue than the compaction that I worry about.
-Tevis

[Crabapple Farm]

A farm I worked at about a decade ago had a Yeoman’s plow. It’s a real nice subsoiler design. The draft is less with the Yeoman’s than with the typical chisel shank, because it is designed so that only the point is breaking soil – by the time the shank is going through, the soil is already fractured.
But in sod, two shanks will still be a good load, depending on soil and depth.
I would suggest putting rolling coulters in front of the shanks on your frame, so that you’re not tearing through the sod with the shank.
When I was using it, it was in vegetable fields that had been tilled for years. We were running three shanks about a foot deep with a ~25 hp tractor. To go down to 16 inches he’s drop down to a single shank in the middle of the bed – but he felt that even one “rip” per bed would open up the subsoil to roots.
One concern with the Yeoman’s is that it is a solid shank, so hitting a big rock (if you’ve got those) would send shock right up through the frame. I think both I&J and White Horse’s Subsoilers have trip-type shanks (spring and hydraulic, respectively, if I remember right). The point on the yeoman’s is small enough that most rocks would slide past, but if you’ve got rocks you’ll hit one eventually dead on.
-Tevis

[Crabapple Farm]

Sanhestar, over here that type are normally called corral panels. And run over a $100 depending on length and gauge, paint or galvanized.

On the fencing issue, I think you really only need one strand of rope or tape at the top, lower strands can be plain smooth wire. If the horse is moving, their head will be up and they’ll see the rope or tape. If they’re head’s down below that height, then they are moving slow and will notice the less visible wires. Tie the top wire into the smooth wires every so often, because rope and tape are typically poor conductors. The smooth wire will do a better job getting the current all the way around the fence.
There was a thread a while back about electric fencing issues, with lots of grounding advice. It does sound like your fence doesn’t have enough juice, and that your horse needs to learn respect for it.

[Crabapple Farm]

@Rod 8010 wrote:

The problem arises however, as you infer that you need to start with the right soil and it needs to work economically. In case’s where for one reason or another the farm may not posses all the ideal conditions then we need to cooperate with others who can supply what we lack. A highly acid soil or a shallow soil come to mind. There are so many soil variables, wetness, solar aspect, depth to rock, drainage class, slope, till ability, acidity, etc. QUOTE]

Rod,
Yes, it makes more sense and is in a way more sustainable to amend soils where practical to enhance production, whether that amendment is buying in lime or minerals or some feed.
But I also think that this is more of an economic problem than a biological one. Any soil that supports healthy vegetation (and there are almost none in the Northeast that don’t, except where bulldozers have recently been) can be agriculturally productive without amendment. But the productivity may not be ample enough or marketable enough to sustain the farmer. It comes back to Carl’s point of asking the question of the land: what can it provide?

Jen:
The only true “closed loop” fertility-wise is the entire earth. And the earth imports energy from the sun. Carbon and Nitrogen are readily imported onto the farm from the air. The vast bulk of biomass is from air and water, not the soil. The amount of matter actually extracted from soil in an animal or vegetable is pretty small. It adds up, certainly. But erosion accounts for a heck of a lot more nutrient exportation from the average farm than the product sold.
-Tevis

[Crabapple Farm]

I want to argue the idealistic viewpoint:
I think that it is possible, and hence should be the ideal, for a farm to be a net fertility and energy producer, not consumer.
It is of course highly dependent upon soil and climate, but I think is basically true in all instances. But on many soils the systems that would work from a fertility sustainability point of view wouldn’t work from a human economic point of view.
The top six feet of soil, which is to say the biologically active area that is accessible to plant roots, contains a store of nutrients that could, if used wisely, maintain production for millenia, functionally limitless on a human time frame. Most of that fertility is in mineral compounds (silt, sand, gravel, and in my fields stones and boulders) that are not accessible to plants as is, and so are discounted in normal fertility analyses. But over time, biological, chemical, and physical activity break them down and convert them to a form that is useful to plants. So for a sustainable closed loop farm system, nutrient exports must not exceed the rate at which nutrients in the parent soil are being converted into a useable form.
Option one is to reduce exports, option two is to increase the rate at which nutrients are made available. The best option is to do both.
Since active biological activity is the best way to enhance the conversion of minerals into useful fertility in soil, farm systems based on maximizing biological activity are most sustainable.
Undisturbed soil is way more active than plowed soil, hence the emphasis on livestock and grass-based farming systems. Well managed grassland is a net producer of fertility. The same is true of a well managed forest. Animals are in no way necessary from a fertility standpoint – they just provide an economic reason for and way of harvesting that fertility.
Plowed cropland if done really really well might break even, but most forms of tillage are going to result in a fertility drain, because the soil biology gets disrupted to the extent that it cannot replenish the nutrients lost. If combined with grass-based farming, the fertility of the undisturbed grass land can be harvested, transfered to the cultivated land (in space or time, by rotation) and turned into marketable crops. On the Vegan Farming question, there’s no theoretical reason why domesticated animals need to be in the equation (we’ll ignore the rodents and invertebrates and such that ought to be in the field, because most vegans seem to) – but maintaining undisturbed soil and then harvesting fertility from it to feed your cropland becomes pretty uneconomic without them.
The ratio of undisturbed soil to plowed ground is key, to keep the fertility balanced. I haven’t yet figured out how to determine how much fertility is being produced in our fields, and hence what acreage of tillage our farm can support. But my rough sense is that I want at least four times as much pasture and hay land as I’m plowing, and maybe a fair bit more. And I’ll keep buying in minerals and lime and some feed, because, well, it’s more economically advantageous to pillage from elsewhere than live within your means. And I’m not good enough yet to resist that temptation.
On the energy question, as Erik points out, all energy (well, except nuclear and geothermal) is solar in origin. And the best damn way that’s ever been invented to capture solar energy and store it for future use is photosynthesis. And metabolism is the best way to convert photosynthetically stored solar energy into useable kinetic energy. I’m talking horses and oxen eating grass, people eating food, doing work. Farms can and should capture solar energy, convert it into useable forms, and export it. That’s the basic premise that only fell apart about fifty years ago, when farms started importing more energy than they produced. Nitrogen and carbon are free for the taking from the air, the role of the farmer is to bioaccummulate them.
-Tevis

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