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bivol
Participantnope, you’re not crazy, i love them too!
it’s good to use every ounce of free energy we can. my great-grandpa had two grain watermills, one 500 years old!
there is something profound about them, people like them, maybe because they are a silent remainder that we can get a lot if we use in a good way what nature offers us, be it solar, wind or water energy. i’m all for wind and water power!:D
Participantgood job Car, good points!
i really like your points of focusing on humane life rather than humane death. salughtering i a quick proces, a few hours, in comparance to a life of a couple of wears. good points, we should focus on the quality of their life and their death, not only their life.
it may sound harsh, i think it is hypocrisy to care about what an animal goes through the last few hours, and not look at what it goes through it’s entire life, a few years! so, no matter what conditions it lived in its entire life (concrete crate, no sun and social interaction), it’s OK, because it is slaughtered so it don’t feel anything…
this incomplete thinking makes me sad…anyway, good job!
Participant@OldKat 14543 wrote:
bivol wrote:
Well said my friend.
Sounds like your native language tends to make compound words out of individual words, somewhat like the Germans do. What is the word for a “nun” anyway?
thank you!
it’s from a different language group than german, although i like german a lot, too.
funny how i can remotely understand czech and ukrainian and russians, some words didn’t change although our language was isolated from other slavic languages up north.nun on croatian is “opatica”, “o-pa-ti-tsa”, meaning a catholic nun
nun on serbian is “kaluđerka”, “kha-lou-dyer-ka”, meaning an orthodox church nun.
Participantthank you all for showing interest!
recently a few days ago we learned about cultivator tilling, and i was laughing when i figured they were “coming to the beginning”! here in europe plowing is still considered important, and not many people even know what a cultivator is.
this now method conserves water and CO2 content of the soil.
it’s about mulching the field after harvest, manuring it, and cultivating it with row rippers(?), as you said Stable-man, followed by a disc roller or two. than comes planting. i’ve heard a farmer in Hungary had 6.5 tons of wheat on a field cultivated in such a fashion, more than his neighbors, in 2007 which was very dry.
plowing a mulched field with an ard wold give a similar result, i guess.
still, combining cultivators and disc rollers and horse (and ox) power is a good solution, i’m in for it more than for mouldboard plowing!Participant“Farming is the important base for all else. With regard to gold, silver, and jade jewelery, you cannot eat them if you are hungry or wear them if you are cold. They cannot compare with grains, corn, silk, and linen.”
Emperor Wen of Han dynasty, China
i think it’s a good and clear idea about the essential and and less so things.
answay, the like is here
Participanthi oxnun!
i’m gled you enjoy the writing and vids, i hope it is helpful, as i learn a lot from other people here!
i guess the different colouring came with the german settlers (the chilean oxen look a lot like simmental, only not as much selected), as this practice is seen only in Chile, and nowhere else in south america, to my knowledge.
german settlers settled in chile quite often, you still have in some parts architecture reminding of german one.my videos are from istria, that’s a peninsula near italy, and histrians are nice people, one feels at home there, no nationalism or harted as it is costumary in most parts of ex-yu.
where i come from? no problem!
i am born and live in Zagreb, and am officialy Croatian. but in fact am a half-croatian (dad’s side) and half-serbian (mom’s side). i have relatives in Serbia and Macedonia, and for me national identity is not as important as for most nationally hysterical people in ex-yu. i mean, a good person is a good person no matter the nationality, and a bad one will stay a bad one no matter its nation.
i don’t want to go too much off topic here so i’ll stop here, although there would be much to write about.
we in croatian don’t have a distinct word for a person who works oxen. we tend to say “he works oxen” or so.
actually people in crioatia, bosnia and serbia speak a very similar language, even if they all like to say they have distinctive languages LOLvol – this is the word for an ox
volovi – plural for ox
volovska kola – oven wagon (in our language we have only word for wagon, and have no word for cart)volovska zaprega – this is literary translated “oxen’s hitch-together”, and could be translated as oxen yoke, oxen team or, again, oxen wagon
volovodja (volovodya) – leader of oxen
volar – a person who works about oxen, with nothing specific
distinct serbian word – rabadžija (rah-bad-gee-ya) – a commercial freighter who for a daily fee, rents himself and his oxen wagon for transportation of goods and timber extraction. still in work in mountainous parts of Bosnia and Serbia. coming from “rabota” meaning “work”.
also a serbian word (i think), but used in croatia too – kirijaš (kiri-yash) – same meaning as above, “kirija” meaning rent or wage?
all these words were interchangable and used by parts of both ethnic groups, so pinpointing wouldn’t end up in a constructive conclusion.
Rudo – (roo-do) a pole connecting the yoke to the plow. to it is a proverb (ne trchi pred rudo) atached, or “don’t run in front of the pole”, or you’ll fall and end up trampled, which means don’t be fast (on your conclustion), or, don’t jump to the conclusions!
if you have further questions, do feel free to ask!
Marko
Participant@Joshua Kingsley 14386 wrote:
I have 3 holstine bulls that I have been working with since august. My question is two are black and white that mach almost to a t as they are half brothers out of a mother and daughter. The third is a red and white, the red and white Bear and Buck one of the black and whites are a good match for size and they are a good pair to work with. My other calf the black and white is Beau he likes to be DIRTY as possible and is bull headed and a real pain in the butt to work with, he won’t lead, stand or allow himself to be yoked nearly as nice as the other two.
My question is should I keep the pair of brothers and ditch the red and white or should I keep the pair that works well and sacrifice the “look” of a matched team. Or should I keep the pair that works well together and is a real good pair to work with.
Joshua
Joshua, how well do the “good” black calf and the red calf match in yoke?
are they willing to cooperate?not worth to have to train and work 10 years with an animal who just doesn’t have the temper to work. my advice would be to train Bear and Buck so the team gets well trained to earn its keep and that you enjoy working them.and from what i red Beau isn’t enjoyable to work with…
you said you don’t want to show them in the ring, so looks are not really an issue. even more, what you said about calf called Beau is that i don’t know if i’d make the trouble of training such an un cooperating animal in the first place. he can probably get trained, but why bother when you might have one more tractable next to him
and one more thing: i honestly don’t understand why people want matched coloring. i love mismatched animals the most, and it’s a regular practice in Chile to have one black and one red animal in a team. you can tell them apart from the distance and on a glance, which is practical.
if you intend to use them for work, you should pick ones that respond best and are matched in temperament. and is you happen to go to the ring, at least you’ll jump out with mismatched steers, but you can always say it was historically a common practice…
Marko
ParticipantRod, i’ve spent some time before contemplating the matter.
steel bows are good, they keep shape, as you said, but they do have some other disadvantages. personally i’d prefer them as they outlast the wooden bows, and there is no fuss about them snapping, breaking in use or manufacture, and they can handle more abuse than wooden ones.
how to bend them?
that’s the biggest problem. they have to keep their round shape in the place of bending too. i guess the best way is as said in Oxen, a teamster’s guide: fill the bows with dry sand (if wet it will burst out of the pipes), seal, and heat the bows (forge fire, flame torch will do too) until the steel gets red. then bend on a wooden form, like the one for wooden bows, for shape. guess you can nail some thin iron sheet over the wood form if you fear it will catch fire. after bending put in water to cool down, than unseal and get the sand out. drill the holes, and – that’s that!or you can visit a metallurgy workshop, or someone who works with these pipes, i think they said they have a machine that can bend pipes in a certain radius.
advantages –
– you can drill more holes in the bows without compromising the strength, so you get a more accurate fit without those wood blocks.
they last longer, like a good yoke, and you don’t have to worry about them snapping, etc.
“easier to bend”, but only so far as they’re unlikely to snap in the final step as wooden ones are known to do.
drawbacks –
weather – steel can get very cold in cold winter temperatures, which can cause discomfort and maybe frost burns. that’s my guess though, oxen were used with steel bows in cold weather. maybe i’m worrying for nothing.
in hot weather they can get hot, so hot your animals will be discomforted, or burned. but then again, oxen shouldn’t be used in that hot weather…
here’s a web site of a couple who used oxen with a steel pipe bows in Montana, i guess they know more about steel pipe bows in winter.
http://www.singingfalls.com/gallery_oxen/oxen_gallery.htmlgood luck!
ParticipantHi!
as promised, here are new videos! they are shorter, though, as iv tried to filter out “non-ox” stuff.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fmmm7-NT88w
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmUa-n5wcQc
there is a third vid, but i’m having problems with it.
Participanthi everyone, sorry for overseeing this till now!
and OldKat and Chesnutmare, thank you for your input!well, i’m still not in position to get a horse, and for a few years i won’t be, till i graduate, but one reason why i’d get it would be its speed over an ox, IF i manage to buy land on level ground, and second, as mentioned above, it can be bought adult.
of uses it would be carting definitely, plowing, even if i’d have to make a suitable plow, i studied the chinese plow designs and find them quite good.overall, i’d like a horse that is the best ratio of price to gain. i don’t care how it looks as long as it gets the job done, and it would help to be as calm as possible, which is a strong point of horses here.
i don’t know if i’d pick a draft though, maybe a cross-breed, or that bosnian horse… they’re unbreakable…
Participantwell, what’ya wanna do with them?
carting, plowing, etc: google donkey cart africa or donkey plow or plough africa to get some extra info…
some ideas:
some say donkeys are less tractabkle than mules, and that they can’t be forces to work, you have to drag them etc.i think the biggest issue would be to learn them to walk up front, without you dragging them by their collars, at least that’s a common mistake in my country…
learning lessons should be short, fun and not very repetative – donkeys are smart and don’t like too much repetition oxen sometimes need.
“donkey will drop dead working for an owner he likes” red it somewhere
praising is important – donkeys crave attention and like to know they’ve dome something good.
do get them broken to carting, they can be very useful.
ParticipantNIIICE! i hope he does become a teamster, he’ll sure have someone to learn from!
and nice to have the knowledge stay in the family, too!Participantyep.
i guess there’s a reason why one man’s leading the horses: i presume each of them owns his own field and they both have only one horse, so they pool in the resources to plow each’s field respectively. you can seed that the horse harness where there are two horses per cars is a lot simpler per animal.
historically this was a common practice in pre-war Yugoslavia..Participanthi!
a horse cart with the driver sleeping. the horse is probably on the way home. in the past fairly common, but today outside the working animal community this is considered rare.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EkrXJaI6IRYlonger vid of horses, cattle and village in general. not quite same, but bares a general similarity to the serbian countryside, where i spent my summers in childhood.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHI_VRrD6mo&feature=relatedmaramures.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFq_FsyS_fM&feature=relatedenjoy!
Participantfound a nice video from france: has two cows of traditional breed in a cart and cultivator and plow. later horses.
notice how high-spirited, for cattle, the cows are…
figure they’re the same breed like those oxen in a vid from france, just more temperament. is that usual?:confused:- AuthorPosts
