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mitchmaine
Participanthope its just a short break for you, and you can continue to stick with us here on the site. always look forward to your comments and insight, and would miss not having you here with us. mitch
ParticipantI think the last time agriculture was efficient was never. Even the hunter/gatherer spent most of the calories gained from eating his mastodon by hunting and killing his next. Hopefully it was an even trade. The gain from farming was social order. Cities, language, art, military. Language. All the things we take for granted but they come at a carbon cost. We are just carbon based critters eating carbon based critters. Animals eat plants and animals eat animals and animals die becoming plants. Oil is just another plant. Another carbon being burnt and consumed. So its natural. Use it up.
If we torched all the oil left and touched off all the nuclear warheads left all at once, what a ball of fire, but it wouldn’t be the end of the earth. Maybe the end of man, but the earth would just keep on spinning, and some algea and bacteria and virus and fungus would survive. Maybe even some fringe folk like eskimo or lapp or newfie or some Polynesian and start all over again populating the earth. One more go around on a blank slate. Maybe get it right this time. I’m not worried. Use the oil.
Speaking of a ball of fire, the sun came out today. Burning away, growing grass for all to eat. All that energy bouncing off the earth and heading out, going to waste. All the benefit we get and take from the sun is less than five percent of the energy spent our way. Catch that stuff. Oh, wait. No one owns it. It can’t be sold. What was I thinking???????????Participantgeez andy, all this time i thought losing crops and breakdowns was success at farming? anyway, wondering if you couldn’t plow down your rye? or a tractor neighbor for you. i’ve turned under some pretty deep rye with horses. the landed horse trods it down and it gets turned under on the next pass. i found out last fall not to cut it first, if you intend to bury it. that was a mess. baling it would be a quick fix too, like erika said, and you could use it for bedding and compost and it would make the slow route back into the soil. best of luck there. mitch
Participant@jac 27327 wrote:
A while back Highway posted on here of his guilt of buying a tractor. I feel I am somewhat of a fraud… I like the concept of using my horses to achieve the work i need to do. I also despair at the destruction of the planet and her resources. Big ag for me is never going to work long term and sustainably….. but… I am also a huge fan of fast cars, more powerfull the better and the smell of hot Castrol R should be bottled and sold:D… there… got it off my chest… just waiting for Geoff to “nuke” me now..
Johnhey john,
i don’t mind mixed power. seems to make sense depending on the job. here in maine anyway, there are quite a few animal/ tractor powered farms. some horse powered only. and of course tractor farms, but even the big maine farms aren’t really. so it seems like we (farmers) have a lot more in common, (weather, markets, state and federal regulations, etc.) than we do our differences of size and power choices. and it works better in the end to stick together and have a little strength, than let somebody elses idiollogy split us up. my way of seeing it, anyway.mitch
Participanti can’t see a resemblance here to a dring harness. looks like a one peice tug. looks like a quarter strap from the britchin hooked into the backstrap? waiting to snap into a breast strap if needed. making a belly backer? just a guess. interesting how the lines pass through the lower hame ring.
Participantsuper pictures, ed. nice team
Participantgreat looking plow john. the numbers are cast into the back of the point and you might not be able to see them easily without unbolting it. that old iron is very forgiving and the nuts break easier on those old bolts than you might think. you probably know that. some plow shares go with differnt size widths of points. we have only 12″. quite a stretch to a 16″. then you would have to deal with wheel spacing. i broke a point on a hard to find plow once and we welded a short strip of leaf spring ontop of the point. it worked pretty good and had better suction that the plow had before. lookd like yours might have some life in it yet. good plowing. mitch
Participant1342h is a common number. some are different, though all have the same shape. no shin. a couple reconditioned. an odd lot.
jason, i can throw a couple pair in the truck and swing over and we could try and match a set or two. mitchParticipantjulie,
i once poured a couple concrete blocks for weight for my harrows and stood horseshoes up in the concrete for handles. they worked great. another thing they worked out good for was tying horses to. spreading manure out in the open fields was a trick to let the horses stand while you hopped on a tractor and swung a full bucket back and forth over their flanks. so i dragged the blocks out and tied off and the horses never tried once to move them. the weighed only about 30 – 40 lb. apeice and snapped into the nose ring on their halters. i like halters. don’t know how well the blocks would work hooked to a sidestrap or neck strap.
and i remember you saying your horses was inbetween sizes and hard to fit a halter to. you might be able to slip a large draft halter on over your bridled horse just for and only when tying off. just a thought. mitchParticipantfar as i know, kyle, you always hook your horses square to your load and parallel with each other. meaning matching your yoke and evener. some stuff has alot of sidedraft, like a mower, or a plow in the wrong slot, and a log on a twitchchain is all over the place, but you try and give the horses the best chance they can to help you. and cultivating is fussy work anyway. row width doesn’t affect a single row cultivator unless the row is way less than the wheel width of the cultivator. what looks like huge spacing now looks different in august. if you change the draft width (gang width) on the cultivator then you should adjust the neck yoke to suit. thats the way i see it. others may disagree. mitch
Participanthey jay,
i hadn’t gotten that far yet. they are mostly 12 ” and some bolt on and some clip in and are held fast with a ringbolt over a nub on the back of the point. they are all covered with parts numbers, and if there is anything there that works for you we could talk. i’m selling them as working parts, not antiques, so njot too much i guess.mitch
Participant@Julie Clemons 27217 wrote:
Yes, normally I am lazy and careless of my horse’s safety. But in this particular case I am just desperately trying to think of ways I can work my horse a little more and mother a nursing baby at the same time.
hi julie,
i might be wrong but i can’t imagine there are too many here with expertise on your question, especially me. so humor me and this may be more of a question than answer, but little walker might be safer hooked to you than any part of the cart or horse. if any problem started to happen you might have free hands to avoid a situation or worse case you could get out of the way,both you and she together.
or you and john could swap off, and one drive the hoss and one take the baby. hope it works out for you.
best wishes, mitchParticipanthey ed, he probably isn’t too far from you. he gets leased out to a stable in tamworth, near a place called castle in the clouds. if you turn at the water bottle plant you miss the castle and might not have to pay to get in. five bucks says you can dive through his collar.
mitchParticipantParticipant@jac 27056 wrote:
Sean I read about those ground drive balers…i think they were all John Deer’s because of the side mounted fly wheel.. it seems to take four up to pull them. I suppose if you dropped the tension on the chamber a team might manage it but then you get a lot of bales to the acre and loose hay would probably be a more efficient method…mabey:D…
Johnjohn, i saw a jd ground drive baler at horse progress days in 1998 at mt. hope in ohio. four horses were baling heavy alfalfa, and they stopped and started again in a pretty good windrow. very impressive. it had a three foot or better drive wheel made of expanded steel for traction driving a big sprocket with chain drive to the flywheel. it had an offset axle to level it out and even the height with the new wheel. not alot of changes, and put up against a wisconsin engine and fuel and oil and maintenance, i bet the numbers could have been equal. but i guess it didn’t catch on, cause we never see ’em around.
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