Plowboy

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  • January 15, 2008 at 1:13 am #39393
    Plowboy
    Participant

    I am from Central New York. My Dad is a mixed power dairy farmer and I help out as much as possible, usually nights and weekends when I’m not busy with two jobs and my own farm. We raise and train our own old type Percherons. We currently have 8 head of horses between us with one in training now and one on the way up. We do a few wagon rides, and host a plow weekend in the spring and a silo fill in the fall. Sometimes we have 20 teams working in one field with our informal club “The No Name Gang”. We attend many work events around the area during the year. We still have some old timers around as Mentors and we charish the advice we get from them as well as the time we get to spend with them. Over the years we have lost a couple but they will never be forgotten. We use horses to spread manure,plow, cut green feed and load it with a hayloader, rake hay, move round bales, skid logs and whatever else we can come up with to use them for.

    January 15, 2008 at 3:21 pm #45286
    goodcompanion
    Participant

    Cool! I’m curious about your silo fill. I have two silos but haven’t been able to imagine a use for them–most of the grain I raise is for human consumption. How much (corn silage I assume?) do you put up? How does the silage aspect fit into your whole-farm system?

    January 15, 2008 at 9:37 pm #45287
    Plowboy
    Participant

    We feed corn silage to the cattle in the winter. It is getting to be an expensive crop and Dad always says if it wasn’t for having the big silo fill he wouldn’t bother to grow it. Everyone looks forward to it and it is an event the whole family can enjoy. We use corn binders to cut and bundle the corn and then wagon teams pick it up and haul it in. We then use a finely tuned ensilage cutter to cut and blow the corn silage into the silo ran by a belt pulley on a tractor. My Dad and I work the horses mostly but my wife and mother can both handle them pretty good in public and on the farm. Eventually we want to add some beef cattle at our farm and summer pasture the horses that aren’t working. We also have a large market garden and my parents have a farm stand at their place down on the main road. It would be nice to be able to farm more myself as it is in my blood but with a mortgage the money is made easier somewhere else. It will come in time little by little I hope.

    January 16, 2008 at 5:17 am #45285
    Gabe Ayers
    Keymaster

    Plowboy,

    Could you post some of those great photos you sent me of this family event. They were wonderful examples of modern draft animal use and the crop looked great.

    If you can’t get them to post I will try too. I’m sure folks on this forum would enjoy them. But, If you are keeping them for a yet to be published article everyone will understand. We’ll wait. But if you have a few extras, they are cool.

    Jason Rutledge

    January 18, 2008 at 10:12 pm #45288
    Plowboy
    Participant

    We are trying to shrink some of our photo’s so we can post them. Have a great shot of my wife on the corn binder but couldn’t post it because the file is too big. We have a lot of great working horse photos in all situations. I promise to post some as soon as we figure out our little snag.

    January 19, 2008 at 9:28 pm #45290
    Dubba
    Participant

    If you are running windows xp, you might try this free easy photo resizer from microsoft direct download link

    Page that it comes from scroll down to find download on right side

    January 20, 2008 at 6:37 pm #45289
    Plowboy
    Participant

    We’re still working it out but here is a link to an album
    http://deckerdalefarm.spaces.live.com/photos/
    We have Vista and it doesn’t have all the easy features of XP yet.

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