[Gabe Ayers]

#1 yea
#2 yea

Thanks,

[Gabe Ayers]

Marchi, despite having one of the highest riding percentages, bucked off his first five bull of the eight possible at the finals and finished third for the season. This ended his quest to be the only person to ever win back to back World Championships. He will be back, he is young and has many rides in front of him. He doesn’t respond well to the pressure and seemed to look off much like his mentor Adriano from Brazil.

We love the Brazilians, they are great bullriders. They never get the same scores as the Americans, and there are no Brazilian judges…

Marchi was our favorite last year, but we were pulling for J.B. this year, but are happy that the sport got through another year without anyone dying….

It is just an entertainment sport and much better than football, baseball or
nascar…..

The sport will continue to evolve. It has changed annually to make it more fair, but there are still judgment calls by officials that reflect human error and bias.

[Gabe Ayers]

Try Farmer Brown
http://www.farmerbrownsplowshop.com
585-567-8158

Or Call Tommy Flowers or email
803-259-3350
hannies@bellsouth.com

There is a fellow in Ga. named Gene England that has hundreds of Oliver plows and parts, he is also a tractor dealer and will mail parts anywhere.

Gene England
Gene and Matt’s Tractor Sales
HWY 8, P.O. Box 220
Winder, Ga. 30680

geneandmatt@msn.com
720-867-3179

Good luck, Call is right, I have never seen an Oliver without a number on the moldboard, but I am not a plowman as these fellows above or Carl for that matter.

[Gabe Ayers]

I bet it was the Versus channel or it used to be known as the Outdoor Life Channel.

Scott, you are right, the PBR starts all their events with the blaring statement of “This is not a Rodeo”…. it is indeed just bull riding and hypes the sensationalism of bull riding as the most dangerous sport on dirt. It is interesting to see the research about the spectators. They are not the Nascar kind that ask the conflicted question “did you see any good wrecks”….

I think most of the serious fans want success for the rider’s and the bulls. Most of the fellows that do this are quite humble and serious athletes and the bulls are highly prized and priced.

It is just sensationalized entertainment….and I enjoy it. I guess having a young son (Brenton Chaffin) of one of our practitioners that has been in the top ten High School bullriding for a couple of years has refined my interest. He will probably make it to the top PBR level one day. We also have another practitioner (Jerry Atkins) that was once on his way to the top and was seriously injured and his wife decided he was just going to raise bucking bulls from now on….

The incredible Colorado bull rider Cody Lostrow (sp) world the world title (and a million bucks) last night continuing the history of no rider east of the Mississippi ever winning that PRB title. The closest thing is a fellow from NC named Jerome Davis who was seriously injured and is now paralyzed from the waist down a few years back and now raises bucking bulls and teaches young guys the skills. One of his students (J.B. Mauny) was second this year and was the only person ever to ride all eight bulls at the finals.

PBR is just pure entertainment that is not mainstream stuff, but nonetheless has the pitfalls of judges assigning points for the rider and bulls performances and thereby reeks with partiality. It also is an international sport with contestants from five countries.

The season is over for the year now and will start up again in a couple of months.

[Gabe Ayers]

I vote for Carl’s refined version of the group mission statement, of course by now I have forgotten what we are calling the group….??

Carl, I don’t know the suggested woodsmen’s handles, their names were Ian Snider, Ben Sumner and Ronnie Tucker.

We probably have plenty at this point, but the more names could have been good in the core group a couple of weeks ago when nothing was happening with the effort.

Carry on good folks! I’m off to the truck driving part of our work for me today…have to deliver the black locust decking to the job site to get the back half of the payment on the product. It ain’t no log check…..but a value added check….

[Gabe Ayers]

Oh absolutely, the bulls are incredible. We are watching third and fourth generation sons of the first bulls we ever saw buck. There is an interesting quest for breeding super athletes, that have good attitudes and don’t go after the riders when they are on the ground. But man – they can buck….

There are bull teams and stock contractor competitions. It is a pro sport.

[Gabe Ayers]

I really do want to hear from everybody.

Yep the drafted Chairman is included in “everybody”…..

but we have several others on the short list that haven’t weighed in either. I have sent a reminder to my nominees to this committee, hopefully more will participate.

Thanks for all of what everyone is doing.

[Gabe Ayers]

To promote low impact, improvement, forest management – using modern draft animal powered techniques.

At some later point we can add a goal: To investigate, research and explore appropriate technologies to support animal powered techniques of improvement forestry.

It is in general one of the goals and objectives of HHFF. It is not a part of the mission statement.

I think this entire wording concern is more for our satisfaction than the public or general perception of our group, or certainly not the eventual success of the group.

Thanks woodsmen.

[Gabe Ayers]

Definitely Wild Black Cherry. Over mature in that it is declining and rotting from the inside out. As several commented there is probably good usable wood on the outside portions of the log. Worth sawing and saving on stickers for drying to a stable commodity.

Here is another one, what kind of wood is this? Oops the species may be on the link description…close your eyes when you click on it….just kidding, that sounds like a cool aid story…ha! Just kidding, it is black locust decking….

[Gabe Ayers]

Where do you guys get the rims or bubble pads?

We are on some real rocky sites (rock garden) and it would seem the protection of the entire bottom of the foot is in order with out horses for for a while.

[Gabe Ayers]

We have used the beta lines for the last couple of sets of loggers lines. Logger lines are made of two different colors, one brown, one black so we know which horse we have in our hands when we pick lines up.

But the problem that always happens with this plastic coated nylon is that the plastic wears off at the point it passes through the line ring on the hame. So we have a piece of of line with just nylon and the plastic dangling and being trimmed back to keep it from hanging and giving an inconsistent signal to the bit.

So we have switched back to different color leather lines. Just because some plastic feels like leather doesn’t make it leather. I personally like the feel of leather in my hands instead of the plastic. There are some that have concerns about the nylon not breaking in an emergency, which the leather will.

We just tend to like leather were we need a memory and nylon where we need strength. Our harness is a combination. It has leather on the backpad and britchen and nylon or bio plastic (oxymoron) where we need strength.

Thanks,

[Gabe Ayers]

Pirate Farmer,

I think the treadmill is geared such that a normal walking pace creates a PTO rpm that is adequate to drive what they are attaching it to. The centrifugal wood splitter seems to have plenty of rpm’s to operate quick enough, but it does also seem that power provided by the animal comes into play. I did notice that sometimes on a big knotty or crotch piece they would hit it twice to get it split. I am not sure how it actually works either, but if the effort is to great it withdraws and they just hit it again. It is a neat compact splitter and has not hydraulics or fossil fuel required, which is cool.

The splitter is worth just about the same as the treadmill.

The feature of elevation of the tread also seems to make a big difference. The Weavers did use some small ponies on these treadmills to run one of the treadmills they had set up, but the elevation was much steeper on the smaller animals than the larger. I suspect a true heavy draft would be on slightly less elevated, but I am yet to confer with Tim Weaver or actually experience it myself. The photo attached on the earlier message was just an experiment to see if I could get him up in the thing. As with every task we have asked of this horse he complied.

It is a jump up even for a full sized horse, so yes it would be a launch for a small donkey or pony. We also have thought of making a stool or ramp to help them get on and off, but haven’t done any more than think about it yet. The Mennonites just walk them up there and back them off. If there were a stool or ramp used it would have to be well based, wide and stable to keep the animal secure about climbing up such an incline. The fact that the animals have no blinders and full vision helps I would think.

We’ll share what we experience when we get time to mess with this. Our wood needs in my tiny little earth sheltered passive solar home is minimum. We pretty much are spoiled and burn locust slabs from our decking projects.
It is excellent wood and a coveted commodity in our circle of friends. It splits easy and burns slow and hot, lots of BTU’s in black locust.

I will connect with the Weavers and see if we can get some more detailed info on this next week. Thanks for the interest.

Regards,

[Gabe Ayers]

Well I don’t have any personal idea because we have not actually ran it ourselves yet.

The Weaver boys could have split three cord a day if they had a stout enough horse to keep it running. They were using some smaller maybe 1200 pound crossbred looking horses on the treadmill at SDAD. Tim Weaver told me and I can well imagine that the stouter the horse the more one can get done with them.

I am hoping to get Tim to write some about the whole experience of putting a horse on the treadmill for the first time and how he season’s one to long periods of work on this machine. The angle of the deck seems very important to the comfort of the horse and their ability to transfer their power into the moving floor underneath them.

They sent this treadmill home with us with no instruction, which I guess is another version of me being thought of as Mr. know it all and thinking I didn’t need any education on the tool. Well I do and will follow up on this Robert as time goes on. We have a nice stack of wood to split sitting beside it so we will find out.

The step up into the device is considerable about two feet or more off the ground so getting one to lead into the treadmill is a matter of the horse trusting the leader pretty well. Then just starting slowly and engaging the splitter and see how long they can walk while we split. That’s just my guess.

I didn’t pay real close attention to the young Mennonite teenagers that were running it but we skidded lots of wood and they split it all quite quickly while shifting around to keep the other two treadmills operating all the other stuff they had set up. One was an automatic bandsaw blade sharpener, then a refrigerator, freezer and washing machine and irrigation system.

I’ll let you know what we think after lowering the angle and putting our old stallion on there for a while.

[Gabe Ayers]

Oh Geez guys, I am not wanting to be divisive. I hope I can get this posted before it disappears again. I wrote on this the other night in response to John’s post and the computer crashed before I could hit submit.

I am not against “appropriate technology”, which is this case is a euphemism for machines – fossil fuel fired machines. I drive a truck to and from work, load with a knuckleboom and haul with a truck, use a forwarder often – with all logs and wood that was cut with a machine (chainsaw), all fossil fuel fired.

My point and this is my only point – on this subject is that the phrase will compromise much of the purity of our efforts. We all know we can’t operate without it nor do we want do given the poor markets for our services and goods produced. I was just suggesting not including that phrase in our wording because it will come back to haunt us in the future when folks dismiss our efforts as not about animal powered forestry.

For instance, write a grant to the National Center for “Appropriate Technology” and ask them for support to train folks to work with animals in the forest and you will be told it is not an appropriate technology and is heritage based historical technique not appropriate for the future. We know they are wrong, so we don’t want to invite criticism by using a phrase that allows someone to lessen the quality of our efforts as those efforts relate to animal power being truly appropriate as all the power needed to accomplish many of the tasks of forest products harvesting.

This is only semantics maybe and it is only my opinion and it is up to the group as a whole to decide how to word our mission, goals and objectives.

I hope we can get on to other things now that it is clear I am not opposed to the use of fossil fuel machines, heck – we all have a responsibility to do our own part to run it out as quick as possible… I know I do my part. Now I’m off to ride the fire from our mother’s guts to town to buy salt, sugar and more bullets….weekly routine with the old lady, y’all know where it’s at….

Good work as usual Scott, keep it up.

What’s next?

Sincerely,

[Gabe Ayers]

Nope, not going to answer your questions Bumpus.

I think I already have and what it seems you are looking for is approval to high grade. Not going to get it from me man – if that is what you want to do go right ahead, you don’t need my approval.

If you want to discuss this further in a way that allows better communication, why don’t you drive on down to the mountains and we talk in person.

Call first to be sure I will be around.

[Author]

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