altivo

Went to the dentist this morning to have my teeth floated. Nothing wrong found, the only problem with it is a 90 minute drive each way in yucky traffic (but I like my dentist and would prefer to keep her rather than switch.) They always take my blood pressure, which is often high due to the stress of driving (I hate driving, and in city traffic I really hate it.) Today, though, it was down 20 points or so from what they recorded six months ago.

Then Gary and I went to our friends out near Pecatonica to help them unload and stack hay. They were getting three racks today (for the city folk, there are about 130 bales to a rack, each bale weighs 40 to 50 pounds.) Our first load is expected to arrive on Monday, so this was "practice." We unloaded one rack, sending each bale up the elevator to the barn loft. Then John went to take the empty back and pick up a second load. Unfortunately, a tire on the hay rack went flat on his way back. He managed to limp home slowly, but we couldn't maneuver the rack into position for loading until the tire gets replaced (it would tip over if hitched to the tractor to move it.) He went back to get the third rack, but by then we had to come back home to take care of our own animals. Fortunately they had additional help coming for the evening.

While there, we saw the two foals they had this year, both fillies. One is seven weeks old, curious and brazen, eager to be patted and have attention paid to her. The other is under a month, and still pretty shy. Both were cute, but baby horses are ALWAYS cute.

Current Mood: tired
Current Location: Home in the oak grove

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

heavens-steed.livejournal.com

Yes they are ^^

From:

schnee.livejournal.com

They definitely are, yes. ^^

From:

avon-deer.livejournal.com

One of the farmers who I used to live near did not bother bailing, and instead made traditional "stacks" in his field. Others rolled them. Bails were for some reason, a rare sight in East Yorkshire.

From:

altivo.livejournal.com

The round bale things are popular here too. Trouble is they typically weigh 300 kilos or more, so you have to have equipment to handle them. The old fashioned square bales can be moved by hand, and are still favored by horse people. Trouble is, the equipment that makes those bales is a real Rube Goldberg thing that is hard to adjust and maintain, and breaks down frequently.

Old-fashioned haystacks are a lost art. Hardly anyone alive still knows how to make them properly, and of course, moving loose hay is labor intensive in the extreme. I have old photos of my grandfather putting up loose hay in a barn, using a team of horses. It doesn't look any harder than the ways we do it today, but probably took longer.

From:

gabrielhorse.livejournal.com

Keep in mind I'm a city boy, but don't they move those square bales with hooks? I've got to admit its work I've never done (to date)... How long did it take you to empty one load?

From:

altivo.livejournal.com

These are the old fashioned square bales, about 18x18x36 inches. They weigh somewhere around 45 pounds. A tool called a hay hook is usually kept handy, but we only use it to pull a bale loose if it is wedged between others. You normally handle the bale by the two cords that are tied around it lengthwise to hold it together.

There is another type of square bale that is much larger, about four feet square on the end and five or six feet long. Those weigh several hundred pounds and can only be picked up by machinery. Small horse farmers rarely have that kind of equipment.

You occasionally see photos of someone, usually in a cowboy costume, using a hay hook over his shoulder to hold a bale he is carrying on his back. I've never seen anyone do that in real life, but it could be done. I prefer not to get hay down my neck, myself. The hook is a rather wicked tool too, so you wouldn't want to slip and hit yourself anywhere with it.

With three people working, one climbs onto the hay rack and hands or tosses bales down. One stands on the ground and feeds bales onto the lift or elevator, which is a sort of conveyor track with a central belt that has little steps on it that grab a bale and slide it up the incline to the top where it falls off the end. The third is in the loft to catch the bales coming off the lift and stack them neatly so as to make effective use of available space. Bales have to be loaded onto the elevator at an even speed, both to keep from overloading the electric motor that drives the conveyor and to avoid a jam up at the top if the person in the loft isn't able to move fast enough. It takes us about an hour to unload one rack that way.

(At our place we don't have one of those elevators. They are expensive new, and hard to find used and working. So we have to throw the bales by hand, but we pile them on pallets on the ground floor level rather than put them in the barn loft.)

From:

gabrielhorse.livejournal.com

Good stuff to know. I'm gonna save a copy of this- if I ever stop by, it may come in handy :P

From:

avon-deer.livejournal.com

I got a finger sucked by a foal once. Talk about melting. :D

From:

jumpyfox.livejournal.com

My grandmother grew up on a farm. Back then, you wiped your ass with the sears catalog and you plowed the outhouse stuff into the fields in the spring time. Also, the doctor was miles and miles away and there was no car and my grandmother's sister died of a fever and that's just the way it was back then. People died of fevers and if your crop failed, you went hungry. Well, eventually, my grandmother's family had enough of the farm, left it to the relatives and moved to the city, where her father died when a steam shovel fell on top of him and burned him to death. That's the way it was back then!

I'm so glad I'm not stuck with a family farm. My grandmother moved away from the farm at an early age. She still has relatives that own a farm in Missouri. They are getting too old to work the farm and they don't want to impose the farm upon their kids but they are just getting too old. I guess if my family willed me the farm, I would take it, but I'm very glad I didn't inherit a farm. It's just a shit load of work.

Amish country is not very far from Cleveland. It's a whole different world down there. Down in Amish country, they pop out about eight to twelve kids and they put the kids to work in the fields barefoot with all those sharp objects.

From:

altivo.livejournal.com

You have a typical city dweller's impression of the farm, about a century out of date and very negative.

Yes it's work. So is anything. Folks in the city don't seem to appreciate the fact that they would have nothing to eat if farmers weren't still working out here.

From:

jumpyfox.livejournal.com

I like the way the Amish people farm. They use minimal energy resources. It's kind of cool. I love going down to Amish country. They don't even drive cars. It's urban planning at it's best. There's no Wal-mart, no zoning, no polluting, you can walk to the store and get pretty much anything you need even though you live in the country and people are content to live that way!

On a different topic, I read an article about no-till farming in scientific American magazine. It's supposed to be the best method for soil conservation. The draw back is you have to use more herbicides and it works best when crop rotations is used. Also, the planting equipment tends to be more expensive. Still, more birds and wildlife prefer it when the fields are not plowed.

From:

altivo.livejournal.com

No-till farming works, and does conserve soil, but doesn't produce crops at a level that will meet today's demands. It's an excellent conservation practice where it can be used effectively.

Unfortunately, with suburban sprawl eating up more and more farmland and fewer people willing to work on the farm, no-till isn't likely to become a widespread practice. I'd say we are more likely to see the return of farming with horses as a result of today's escalating fuel prices than we are to see common use of no-till methods. (And I'm sorry to say the likelihood of the draft horse's return is also pretty slim.)

From:

jumpyfox.livejournal.com

Living in the Cleveland area, I have an excellent solution for suburban sprawl. You simply need a regional population loss and dying industry that isn't replaced with anything. The ex-urbanites were pushing out the Amish until the economy in North East Ohio went sour and just stayed that way!

From:

altivo.livejournal.com

Well, yes. We're seeing that here at this moment as well. If the economic disaster that is the Bush Administration deepens a little more into a general depression, then the slowdown in sprawl and land destruction for tacky suburban houses will stop... for a while.

From:

goldenstallion.livejournal.com

Dear Rider.

A farmer was accused of child abuse. He gave the farm to his kids.

(Ba-da-boom!)

Couple of things. Bear shortened Thunder yesterday and there were four beautiful hoof peels about 3/4 inch thick lying in proper formation (correct for each hoof) on the table when I got home. Heh, and all I had to do was buy him the new halter the previous day. Bear is my hero. But Bear also told me it went very easy this time with no fuss or problems and, in fact, Thunder was the perfect gentlegelding (yaay for small wonders). Yes, the little guy has turned a new leaf and is much friendlier and nicer than ever since he was a tiny foal.

Hay. In Alaska the standard bales like you just bought cost $8 to $10 dollars now. Were $6 to $7 when I had horses there. That is for Timothy or Broham (grasses grown locally). Some horse owners buy extra-packed bales that are a little bit longer but weigh probably 100# to 125# and are usually puregreen alfalfa. Those are shipped up from "The Lower 48", often in truck trailorloads by people that get together and pre-order it but also through the various feed and tack stores there.

A few of the guys at work did not totally understand the concept of hay. "Can't the horses graze?" Well, you see, they can and do all Springsummerfall but in the Winter, there is this thing called snow and it covers the ground and then the horses cannot just graze, although they will hoofpaw the snow to get to the grass. Trouble is, the grass is dormant in the Winter so does not grow and very shortly a field or pasture of grass is cropped too short and is too poor in quality for maintaining the horse's nutritional needs. So we cut and bale and store the hay in barns to feed to the horses during the Winter months. Cuz we are smart like that.

Storage. I have always wanted the kind of horse barn with stalls and center or side isle downstairs and a hay loft, upstairs, in which to store the hay, and then it is a simple matter of climbing a ladder or stairs each feeding time and dropping hay down through openings above each stall for that purpose. So the work is really once, the day(s) you conveyer the hay into the hay loft. My grandparent's ancient barn in Upstate New York was built just after the Revolutionary War, and it used a pully hung from a beam that extended from a small double door at one end of the hay loft for rope-lifting the hay up. Back then it was with a kind of net you filled with the hay with a pitchfork then hand-hauled the net up and swing it inside and dumped and pitchforked it into the opposite end of the loft until it was fully packed with hay. It was a horse and cow barn and both animals eat hay in the Winter so that worked pretty well. Was a huge, Mansard-roofed (the barn roof most people think of shape) barn, built of oaken beams and boards and all nailed with wooden dowels and tenon-mortise joints. Spent many enjoyable hours exploring and checking it out as a kid. Since been torn down cuz it was falling apart even fifty years ago.

Hay conveyors are wonderful inventions.

Yes, foals are as cute as the cutest puppy or kitten. Natural cute, the good kind rather than the contrived cute such as tribbles or furbys.

I laughed to see, in Alaska, a round bale that had been set on its side (the really big ones) and the entire center had been eaten out leaving the outer shell like a piece of culvert lying in the pasture. Well, of course the outer shell of the round bale is yucky with dirt and mold and the horses naturally go for the better hay in the center, leaving it like that.

Here horse owners usually have a steel hay rack for the round bale so the horses are forced to eat from the sides and not walk right over on top and ruin much of the hay by so doing. Same with cattle. I think it also tends to slow them down a bit. The bale is moved with a "tine" on a tractor frontend loader or three-point hitch, a fork lift, etc. stuck through the center of the round bale. Not sure how one would stand it on end though, I know from experience they are HEAVY! I love the smell of hay and horses and even horse manure once it has cured a while. Fresh poo of any kind stinks.

Rambling, flying, mount.

Imperator

From:

altivo.livejournal.com

Good news about Thunder. I look forward to seeing his improved self.

When we had Archie and Asher boarded for a couple of months while we were setting up our barn here, they had round bales. Stan used one of those rack things that holds the bale lying flat. I wish I had a photo of the way Asher would stand eating his way into the bale like a worm into an apple. Only his butt would be sticking out, with the rest of him buried back to his hindquarters.

From:

cabcat.livejournal.com

Baby animals are always cute :)

I don't mind city or weekday traffic as people have a sense of purpose and have a destination in mind. I hate weekend meandering traffic at erratic speeds and indecisive manouvering.

From:

altivo.livejournal.com

I'm not indecisive, but I just don't view driving as an aggressive competitive thing. Around the Chicago area, that seems to be how most people treat it.

I have no interest in racing, or reckless passing just to get ahead of someone who is already traveling at the safe legal speed.