[Tim Harrigan]

@near horse 25295 wrote:

Dennis Keeney, the Leopold Center’s first director, said he firmly believed that cows should eat grass but said the real point of the matter was whether or not the Leopold Center has the independence, not only to criticize conventional agriculture if necessary, but also to state facts about crops are grown and livestock is raised. Pressure from outside groups, and from supporters of conventional agriculture within the university, may make it so that “the center can’t be governed anymore.”

This does seem to be the heart of the matter. It seems there are always organizations that encourage discussion and diversity of opinion, and organizations that see discussion and diversity of opinion as a threat to the party line. At the institutional level it takes courage on the part of upper-level administrators to protect your culture and values. Sometimes you see it.

[Tim Harrigan]

@dominiquer60 25285 wrote:

Thanks for the link Wolfgang,
It seems simple enough to make. Tim are there any guidelines to adhere to when making one of these eveners? It does look like it could soften the start some.
Erika

I have not had a chance to use one much or evaluate it so I can’t say exactly. I think I would hang it from the staple rather than from the ring. I would also put a few more holes in it to distribute the load correctly for teams that are not the same size. I think the main thing is that the teams will have to start together. If they don’t, I doubt if you will see a softer start.

[Tim Harrigan]

@CharlyBonifaz 25262 wrote:

what is the difference to your regular evener? is the latter fixed and the other one can move up and down?

Good eye, Wolfgang. The vertical evener hangs from the staple of wheelers. The load is hooked to the center hole, just like a standard horse evener. The chain from the bottom hole goes to the lead team. So the force distribution is similar. Some have additional holes for load adjustment for different size teams.

[Tim Harrigan]

@dominiquer60 25258 wrote:

Do you have any photos of the vertical evener, it would be neat to see? I knew that they exist, but for the sake of time and lack of need, I just used another short chain today.

Erika

I can’t find any pictures, I will get down there one of these days when the weather breaks, I will make a point of getting some pictures.

[Tim Harrigan]

Good job with the 4-up. That timing is good training and important for them to learn. Tillers designed a vertical evener for 4-up oxen. One of these days I want to do some testing with it to see how well they share the load.

Do the wheelers have a blanket on?

[Tim Harrigan]

@dominiquer60 25241 wrote:

Dick & Jane wheeled and Abe & Will were lead ( Tim I really had no idea that I stole you names until weeks after I had named them, sorry, it was totally not intentional, but great names):)

Erika

Well, it was either Will and Abe or Pythagoras and Isosceles. But Will is willing, and although Abe is not as willing he is certainly able. So it all worked out. When I first met Betty McGurk I had a team named Dan and Patch. So did she. Small world.

[Tim Harrigan]

I agree with Erika on this one. Management is such a big part of the system and I have seen dismal small farms and large farms that were very well done. The potential negative impact of small farms is much less so a lot of them manage to fly under the radar, but if you look close, farm size is probably not the first criteria most folks would choose in deciding where to buy their milk.

As far as water quality impacts I think some of our largest farms are doing a better job than many of the smaller farms because they are so closely monitored and regulated while many of the smaller farms have been able to overlook some of the problem areas. This is sort of a hard assessment though, because large farms carry a lot of other emotional baggage for folks regarding odors and animal housing/welfare issues, road traffic, etc.

The line between what is too big and what is OK is fuzzy and where you draw the line seems to float with what catches your attention. My biggest regret is that many of the advances in animal housing over the last several years may have improved material handling but it has been at the expense of the animals that have to live there.

[Tim Harrigan]

Oh yeah, I tried to forget how long ago that was. 1974.

[Tim Harrigan]

It is hard to tell where this is going.

http://poststar.com/app/blogs/?p=62323&cat=259

http://www.nytimes.com/gwire/2011/02/11/11greenwire-anti-reg-republicans-crying-over-spilled-milk-20605.htm

When you try to track down the origin of some of these things you see that the news media do a dismal job of getting things straight. Again and again it is more important to tell a good or amusing story rather than to get it right. To me it looks like an astonishing lack of creativity in the reporting process, looks like the writers read other newspaper articles and use that at their source. WTF kind of reporting is that? I still don’t know exactly what the thought process at EPA was to get this going but it is clearly rooted in the Clean Water Act. While milk is a great and healthy food, if it finds its way into waterways it is not water friendly. Biological Oxygen Demand (BOD) is a measure of how much dissolved oxygen (DO) is removed from water as microorganisms breakdown the organic fraction. Dissolved oxygen in a healthy stream is usually 5-7% range. Degraded streams with lower levels lose desirable species such as trout which are replaced eventually by carp etc. In the worst cases the DO drops so low the waterway will not support aquatic life. BOD is measured as mg O2/L of pollutant. The BOD of milk is about 140,000, liquid cattle manure is 10,000-20,000, raw domestic sewage is 300-400. So a milk house release has the potential of sucking 350 times more O2 from a waterway as a similar size release of domestic sewage. So a spill of any substantial size is a fish kill: repeated smaller releases will probably degrade the stream over time. Still not very neighborly, and not a good day to be a fish.

So there is a certain amount of logic to it, but I guess the epa nerds have a hard time framing the issue. And there is the Limbaugh effect where there is no news, only entertainment, and could there possibly be an easier target than the epa, particularly if you are chronically unencumbered by facts? And I suppose an army of journalists with a copy deadline and absolutely no knowledge of science. Arrrgh.

[Tim Harrigan]

Maybe this is the reason CH never joined the EU!

[Tim Harrigan]

Like Erika said, you can eyeball the rows but without a marker you will put a lot more effort into trying to keep a straight and uniform row width. The reality is that you will have plenty to think about just driving and keeping an eye on the planter components. I even made a row marker for one of my Planet Jr’s.

[Tim Harrigan]

Several years ago I lived on a small dairy farm in Switzerland for about 1 year. About 20 cows. The house and barn were in town with the cropland in the surrounding area. We stored manure in a pit by the barn, but the barn was about 300 feet back from the street. There were other dairies in town, though, and some of them had 3 or 4 ft high retaining walls right at the street where they stored bedded manure. When it got to the top of the retaining wall they would just stack it neatly, like stacking bricks and build it up into a wall. So you would walk down the street right past the manure piles. I don’t remember odor or flies being a particular problem, maybe they were and I did not notice it, or I forgot about it.

In the morning and evening, I, along with the other dairy farmers would haul milk to the laiterie on carts in milk cans, probably 50 L or so. We would dump it and weigh it and then rinse out the cans in a fountain outside the laiterie in the center of town. It was cool.:cool:

[Tim Harrigan]

I don’t think penetration will be an issue in tilled ground. I think the problems will be when the planter unit hits a rock, particularly if one planter wheel hits something and it tilts hard, not sure those tines will provide the stability that you might want. But whatever you do will have some issues to solve. Probably the most problem free set-up with be to mount in on a 3 pt on the back of a fore-cart with a winch to pick it up for transport and turning. You could also put a row marker on the fore-cart. How will you mark your rows?

[Tim Harrigan]

How will you pick it up to turn it? Tines might drag a lot of residue. Looks good, though. Looking forward to seeing how it works.

[Tim Harrigan]

Nice, Donn, thanks for posting the pictures. You have some nice firewood anyway. I had a nice day today ground skidding ash that I dropped over the last few weeks when the snow was so deep. Most of the snow is gone but the ground is still frozen. Will and Abe had a lot of spring in their step today, seemed happy to be out there, 30 degrees with sunshine. None of us had much bounce last week in the snow. You sure have some nice ash trees.

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