[near horse]

@Mike Rock 27775 wrote:

Hi all,
Which is the correct rock guard for the #9? Is the 800 single suitable? Which swather double guard is correct?

Inquiring minds and all that.

Thanks,
Mike

Hey Mike,

I just ordered a set of the double haybine guards Donn and others mentioned – the number was 218. I found some online but ended up ordering from the guys he uses (info below). They were great – had the stub guards, inner/outer ledgers too.

Hope that helps.

Formerly known as Joe’s repair shop, has a great supply of horse drawn mower parts, and they will send them to you. Dan Schlabach is very friendly and will call you back if you write to him or leave a message on his phone. His prices and variety of parts seem very good. Here is your smooth sickle knife section.

Master Equipment
9108 Mount Hope Road
Apple Creek, Ohio 44606

Message phone
330-695-2603

[near horse]

Hey All,

Thanks for the responses RE: rivets on the inner/outer ledgers – as soon as you mentioned the tapered headed bolts w/ allen fitting on top, I remembered using them on an old swather instead of rivets. So that’s what I did and it seems pretty good. As far as the bar pivot pins go, I doused ’em w/ some diesel and worked the bar up and down a bunch. Then tried some dry spray graphite and it seems much better.

I should also add that I couldn’t seem to get my inner shoe to sit flat on the ground when everything was in the “mow” position. It ended up being the gag link pin being in the wrong set of holes – I think this mower was originally a vertical lift mower which I think only came as 4 or 5 foot bars and when I got this it had (has) a 6 ft bar. Switching over the gag link pin from the one for vertical lift mowers to plain seems to have made the difference. Never would have thunk it!

Now, I need to get to mowing if we can get 48 hours with a decent forecast.

[near horse]

As evidenced by the website title – this is an old school vintage project 🙁 but interesting idea to help alleviate the packing/bridging problem. Might be able to adapt to HD?

http://www.vintageprojects.com/farm-construction/lime-spreader.html

[near horse]

While not a thresher, here’s a neat idea for a hand held seed harvester (and other niceties).

http://www.prairiehabitats.com/Harvester_Hand_Held.html

http://reveg-catalog.tamu.edu/12-Seed%20Processing.htm

http://www.tractorbynet.com/forums/attachments/build-yourself/39646d1118159289-building-small-scale-thresher-668795-thresher1.jpeg

BTW – I also ran across this Old Time Threshers gathering in Mt. Pleasant, Iowa. Some horse stuff (of course). Here’s the link and a section from the Events http://www.oldthreshers.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=page.scheduleProgramSponsors

West of Grandstand – Horse Area – Harnessing Demonstration
West of Tractors – Horse Area – Horse Powered Saw Mill
West of Tractors – Horse Area – Horse Powered Well Drilling
West of Tractors – Horse Power Baling, Stump Puller, Grinder & Corn Shelling
West of Tractors – Horse Power Threshing
West of Tractors – Horse Power Treadmill

[near horse]

Aren’t most of the straw bale buildings actually pole structures with straw bale infill and then plastered? I thought those things were pretty efficient w/ R values around 50 (for what R-values seem to be worth).

[near horse]

@Tim Harrigan 27726 wrote:

Carl, I have used one of those spreaders. I liked it, but it was tough to get lime to run through it without bridging up so I had to stop a lot. I had better luck when I did not fill it all the way, it seemed to pack down more when full just transporting from the pile to the spreading site. It also helped to make a frame with 3/8 inch I think screen to set on top and screen the big pieces as it went in. Maybe the easiest is to have someone walk along behind and keep poking it with a fork if you can find some help. Looks like it was working fine for you, though.

I’ve been looking at ways to spread field quantities of lime (although nobody limes around here and thus ag-size quantities of lime are hard to find) and it seems like packing of the lime in the spreaders is always a concern. I wanted to use a conventional drop spreader designed for granular fertilizer which has an agitator and a screw system to meter out the lime.

Also, I’ve seen a liquid lime product advertised. Anyone have experience with that one?

[near horse]

@dukebelgian 27684 wrote:

Hello, I’m new to the site. Does anybody ever hear of Belgian cross geldings for sale? Duke Belgian

Sure – but where are you located? Check out http://www.draftsforsale.com to start off.

[near horse]

@Countymouse 27714 wrote:

Thanks a lot George, great to have a specific case to work with and some numbers. I’m going to try to figure out how many Calories the hogs are foraging in two ways, first by figuring out their total needs, and subtracting the whey. Secondly, I will calculate calories from the expected yield of acorns. If these two numbers match, then it gives me more confidence in the numbers. Actually, if the numbers don’t match, it’s even more interesting… Let’s see…

10,000 gallons of whey gives 160,000 cups whey, which is 59 Calories per cup, yielding 9,440,000 Calories or 9440 Mcal. I am going to figure an outdoor hog would take 1000 lb of corn to produce, I know this is a bit higher than the food requirements of indoor hogs, but I think it’s a good rough estimate given greater exercise of outdoor pigs and lower temps in winter. 1000 lbs corn x 1.6 Mcal/lb x 12 head = 19200 Mcal. 19200-9440=9760 calories from forage. So, with no supplemental feeding, your hogs would be getting 51% of their calories from forage. The supplemental feeding, or course, changes this. 500 lbs corn (800 Mcal) per year means the hogs are consuming 47% of their calories from forage (19200-9440-800=8960, 8960/19200 = 47%). Feeding 1000 lbs (1600 Mcal) means they are foraging for 43% of their calories (19200-9440-1600=8160, 8160/19200 = 43%). Feeding 2000 lbs (3200 Mcal) means they are foraging for 34% of their calories (19200-9440-3200=6560, 6560/19200 = 34%). Feeding 4000 lbs (6400 Mcal) means they are foraging for 18% of their calories (19200-9440-6400=3360, 3360/19200 = 18%). At 6100 lbs of corn, the hogs are essentially not obtaining calories from forage (9760/1.6=6100).

OK, lets see these calories are avaliable from the trees present. Forestry friends, please help me out here! A stand of oaks with a DBH of 18 inches might have a Basal area of 70 square feet per acre, which would yield about 40 trees per acre (here’s where I need the most help, I’m not sure I am even using these terms correctly!). With 10-25% oak in a stands, that would be an average of 7 oaks per acre (40×17.5%). Does this sound about right? Acorn yield is incredibly variable from year to year, but an average for northern red oak in forests around here is 75,000 acorns per acre (from http://www.fs.fed.us/ne/newtown_square/publications/research_papers/pdfs/scanned/ne_rp680p.pdf). 75,000 acornsx17.5%=13,125 acorns. At 85 acorns per pound this is only 154 lbs of acorns per acre, contributing only 1.4% of the total calories for 12 hogs (1.76 Mcal/lb= 271 Mcal, 271/19200=1.4%)… Perhaps it is possible to have the hogs collect acorns from several paddocks before deer and other wildlife get them, allowing consumption of three times this number, but that would still only contribute 4.2% of the total calories.

So, the hogs seem to be finding lots of food in the woods, but it’s not primarily acorns (unless you are feeding close to 3 tons of corn per year). Very interesting… I wonder what these “bonus” foods consist of and if they would also be available in groves or orchards of purely mast producing trees. It seems these are an important part of the diet of hogs at these lower and more sustainable stocking rates.

I read some stuff on food habits of European wild boars/feral hogs and they made mention of a few interesting points:

1) hogs will raid the cached acorns of squirrels – sort of a eureka! moment. BTW – bears do this too. Life as squirrel is rough.
2) they also root and chew on the roots of growing trees for nutrients.
3) as CharlyBonifaz states below – they make use of just about anything they can get ahold of. Lots of earthworms …. As some who’ve tried doing integrated grazing/pasture mgmnt and had hogs w/ sheep – they’ll take newborn lambs too.

[near horse]

From my days as a student in wildlife biology, it seems I recall a research paper looking at grey squirrels and acorn use that compared white oak acorns to red oak. Apparently, the white oak had lower levels of tannins than the reds as well as a different level of lipids. Tannins are known to negatively impact protein digestion although some species (like deer) have evolved a mechanism to deal with tannins. So in the squirrel study, it appeared that the red oak acorns were cached for later use while the white oaks were eaten more readily. But my point is that acorns can provide an energy dense food but one should probably make sure that sufficient protein is available for the foraging hogs.

I agree that consumer tastes can vary but IMO the “selling point” is in the “how the pigs are raised”. If there was a continuous loop of video showing conventional production over that section of pork and another loop showing a non-confinement system over that meat section, the confinement setups would go out of business in pretty short order.

Andy, I’ve read that Large Black Hogs (a breed) are supposedly better pasture animals but they also say they don’t root as much as other breeds. Seems contradictory. The LBH are pretty popular right now. Also, here’s a link to a pastured pork producer that’s using some European wild boar stock.

riverdoghog.blogspot.com/2009/03/european-wild-boar.html

[near horse]

Hey George,

Could you post any pics of the interior? I’d like to see how your hay loft is built using prefab attic trusses as well as the rest of your interior. Do you have an outside access to the haymow to load hay in?

Thanks –

PS – I too am having barn envy. Covered/dry storage is always in short supply at our place!

[near horse]

Hey Carl,

Is that 3rd picture the “famed” Earthwise Pig-in a Poke Roundup?

Seriously, I have a couple of questions. Did you breed that sow and farrow those piglets? What breed/cross are they? I always associate red with Durocs but know there’s a lot of interest in heritage breeds like Red Wattles (although I don’t see any wattles here). How did you all decide on what type of hogs to raise? They sure look good and healthy to me! Nice.

Along the agroforestry thread – the multiple use idea is discussed quite a bit in much of the permaculture literature, although they usually focus on more tropical environments.

[near horse]

It would be interesting if they met Lee the Horselogger heading the in the opposite direction. 😉

[near horse]

I missed one of the plow days here as it was snowing and blowing a gale.

At my place, it’s not dried out yet! We’re not getting the massive rains you all had in the midwest/east but it rains almost once every 24 to 36 hrs and we’ve broken the 70 degree mark about 3 times so far this spring. So no plowing w/ either horse or tractor.

Gardens?! We haven’t done diddly with our garden. Too cold and wet.

Grass is growing great though.

[near horse]

Hi Robert,

Here’s a thread I found. To search, I typed in “singletrees” into “Search” and highlighted “show threads”. I got about 10 threads.

evener/doubletree and yoke sizes ( 1 2)
jenjudkins
03-25-2009 10:05 PM

http://www.draftanimalpower.com/showthread.php?t=1360&highlight=singletrees

[near horse]

Hey Robert,

I didn’t mean to say “you” need to provide housing at all. Just so everyone knows what is or isn’t available and can plan accordingly.

In my limited experience plowing with others, there’s never any grazing available at those times anyway so no big deal. I can bring down some extra grass hay as well (if I ever get anything cut this yr 🙁 ) as a back up for anyone shy of enough feed.

I might just make 2 trips down – one with gear/equip/hay and another with horses. Sounds great!

[Author]

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