[Andy Carson]

I did a mini-fallow last year with various harrows and a disc.  This worked OK, but required a lot of passes.  In most areas, grasses were turned under, or cut up and dried out over time.  In wetter spots, the rhizomes were just spread around and remained moist enough that many “caught” and the total amount of grass was not effected greatly.  I would worry that serial plowing would have a similar effect.  If you invert something twice, it’s right side up again…  On top of this, you have all the negative effects of plowing (poor water retention, water runoff, weed seed exposure, erosion, plow pan creation, burial of organic material, etc).  Also, the power requirements for serial plowing are enormous.  Perhaps there is a place and time for this, but I do not know where it would be.  Perhaps if you have lots of non-grass weed pressure and you don’t care to plant anything in that field that year???  I would still think of something else in that situation, like a single plow and a vigorous cover crop.  I am biased philosophically because I do believe in the value of min-till and serial plowing is pretty much the opposite of min-till…

[Andy Carson]

For now, I tend towards a more hybrid approach, plowing when needed and using min-till as much as I can get away with.  I would like to be able to go 3 or more years between plow downs.  Having no plow and no spray, in my hands, doesn’t seem to work year after year.  I get a build up of some types of weeds (especially rhizomatous grasses) that can’t be easily controlled with min til.  Fallows help, but do not elimiate the problem.  After these weeds build up over a few years, I think a plowing is appropriate.  Perhaps this is partly a cop-out, but I don’t see it as that.  Plowing every third year of so is still allows me to capitalize on many of the advantages of min-til, and also dramatically reduces the amount of plowing that needs done in spring.  We’ll see how this goes…

[Andy Carson]

I have some experience trying to min-till without herbicides.  Weed control have been my main issue, and directs everything I do.  I do not believe this is simply a matter of just pulling smalller no-till tractor implements around.  The lack of spray (roundup or similar) is a huge factor.  That said, I do believe that with clever crop rotations and weed resistant crops, this is possible.  I did have a good 1 acre crop of sunflowers using these methods.  On my land, I don’t belive I will be able to grow anything that is not weed resistant for a while.  Hopefully, some day my weed pressure gets low enough, but that day is far off for now.

On the positive side, I have noticed improvements in tilth of the soil since I started doing this.  Also, the extra organic matter on the surface holds moisture better and more uniformly.  These are noticiable benefits that are apparent in a couple years.

[Andy Carson]

Does that big circular ring with gears on the inside (pic #2) fit over the top of (and mesh with) the exposed gears in pic #1?  I think the circular ring was attached to sweep arms, and the gears increase the speed to the output shaft at the base of the triangle in pic#1.

[Andy Carson]

I am always impressed with the beauty of Erika’s fieldwork.  Can you cultivate through that straw, or do you get such good weed control prior to mulching that you don’t have to?

[Andy Carson]

“As for the hay I still think loose hay is the answer to all of this!!! ”

It sure seems that way, doesn’t it?

[Andy Carson]

I am a great supporter of Biodiesel, but just not on a small scale for at-home use.  Here’s why.

The cheapest Biodiesel converter sold by US freedom Biofuels (the company in Geoff’s photos) goes for $8740 without shipping.  They say the conversion of oil to biodiesel can be as cheap as $0.8 a gallon, all in, which does seem great.  This is especially true if you it is working to the machines capacity producing many gallons of fuel per day.  This is more than the fuel we are talking about, though.  If we are talking about 20 gallons a year, this is providing a potential benefit (not taking into account oil price, harvesting, tillage, storage, etc) of $16 a year (20x$0.8).  At this rate, it would take over 500 years for this machine to pay for itself.  If you want to machine to pay for itself in 5 years (which seems like a reasonable minimum), you would need to produce 2185 gallons of biodiesel per year ($8740 /5 years /$0.8 ).  2185 gallons at 7 lb/gallon = 15,300 lbs of canola oil.  At a 30% yield of oil, that is 51,000 lbs of canola seed (~25 tons).  Now you need a silo too…  That comes to 16.6 acres of canola, assuming 3000 lbs/acre yeild.  This is not a side job anymore… 

This paints a pretty grim picture, but it is only a small fraction of the equipment needed and assumes a best case scenario in alot of cases.  Organic canola is, I am pretty sure, not going ot yield like this.  You are goign to need a combine (or at least use of one) for these volumes.  You need a high volume press of some sort of other oil extraction tool.  You will need extra farm equipment and/or more animals to deal with this increased land area.  Add all this up and I wouldn’t be suprised if we are talking about 50 acres of canola to make this profitable.  That means you would likley need more land, and a loan.  Even if you have all that and it works out on paper, you need costumers who are going to buy your biodiesel at $5-6+your living dollars a gallon (price of canola+processing+your living).  Probably easy to unload some of it, and probably easier when diesel gets more expensive (of course this is going ot drive up the price of canola too) but can you unload 50 acres worth or 6500 gallons?  That’s alot of customers…  Again, this seems like a fulltime job, not something you fiddle around with on the side to make 20 gallons…

[Andy Carson]

I would probably be using the engine to power a small threshing machine, but I get your point and I think it is a good one.  Where did you see these little steam engines?  What were they hooked up to?

I think your math is right about the biodiesel, but I have concerns about

1) The cost of the equipement to raise the canola (Any special planting/cultivation equipment, harvesting/threshing/or combining, as well as oil processing

2) The labor cost of growing canola.  It might be more work to grow an acre of canola without spray than 150 acres of hay.

3) The recurring energy and chemical expenses.  The processing I have seen is an acid/base catalysed transesterification in a heated vessel.  This means you have to buy the chemicals and heat the vessel every time you make a batch.  Somehow this doesn’t get icluded in the calculations, but it ought to be.

 

This is not to say that it is a bad idea, I just think that with the expense and equipment involved, it would be better to make lots of it and trade it, or make none of it and trade for it.

[Andy Carson]

Both biodiesel and ethanol require processing and cropland for the raw material.  I wonder about the utility of steam power for this application.  As it is an external combustion engine, it is more flexible in fuel sources and can use poorer quality fuels, like firewood and other combustable raw materials that migth be on hand.  In long distance applications, this technology is limited by the weight of the fuel and boiler water one has to haul around.  On the farm, one can make a short trip to pick up more fuel and water, and this might be less of a limitation.  This might allow this more flexible technology to make use of firewood fuel gathered in woodlots in the winter (rather than take cropland and be processed in an already busy season).  I wouldn’t want to get into designing a new steam engine, but I would rob one off of something and adapt it.  Perhaps there might be new modern steam designs that are more efficient.  Turbines?  A small boiler and water tank are within many peoples manufacturing skills.  I have a use for a small steam-powered engine (probably semi-stationary on skids).  Perhaps if I get a system like this working well, others would be interested in other applications for a small steam engine, perhaps on a PTO cart to be oil independant.  Does anyone have any ideas on were I might find a small (maybe 10-20 HP) capacity steam engine that I might aquire/adapt to experiment with?  I am all about taking parts off of other things, but I don’t even know what would have something like this…

[Andy Carson]

I did see it, but was not sure how to react to the small balers.  They seem to work conceptually in the same way as regular balers do.  This means that if youa re going 4 mph down a windrow, they have to bale that windrow at 4 MPH.  You can’t slow down and give the baler more time with a tractor.  I suppose you could make the windrows thin and also very even, but this seems hard.  If you could make them thin and even, a regular baler would be fine too.  It is possible on paper to pick up half the windrow, and then come back and pick up the other half.  This seems like it would be hard to do in the real world, but perhaps possible.  If this was possible, though, it would probably also be possible on a regular small baler too.  I turned this around a couple times in my head, and wasn’t able find a way that the small balers help a lot, but could certainly have missed something.  Do you think they would, JL?  If so, why?

[Andy Carson]

“In regards to powered forecarts, I have not always seen the point, I mean if you are running on fossil fuels, and don’t have religious limitations, why not just use a tractor?”

This is a good question and an excellent point that I think is worth time answering.  I’ll start with a short answer and see if anyone wants more details as to my logic.  The short answer is that, in my mind, an internal combustion engine is really good at producing rotational, high rpm power.  This is exactly the kind of power that is easy to apply to complex machines with lots of little moving parts that rattle and hum (balers, combines, etc).  The internal combustion engine also produces this power at a relatively light weight, so it is not much to haul around.  Moving heavy things, for an internal cumbustion engine, requires weight and traction (which removes the lightweight advantage of the IC engine) and alot of gearing (and associated drivetrain losses) to reduce a high rpm engine speed to a slow ground speed.  It also requires the hauling around of traction devices (big tires) that make this possible, which happen to (by no accident) lead to ground compaction.  Engines without this weight and tration devices are not good at moving stuff.  Think of a 20 HP self propelled lawn mower.  These produce tons more power than a single horse could dream of, but a single horse can pull much much more than that lawn mower could dream of (more weight, better traction).  The lawnmower is another good example, because we can all relate to them and they give you an idea of just how much power is put to cutting grass, how much is devoted to hauling the machine and/or peoople around.  It’s clear that the self propelled or riding mowers have a much larger power requirement per foot of cut.  This is because (for reasons I can explain in detail, but might be boring) internal combustion engines used to transport must produce much MORE power than they need on a regular basis.  For complex machines with a defined load, the IC engine can produce just enough.  Animals used for transport can produce just as much power as they need, because they have internal physiological reserves that can be tapped when they need a little more power for a short time.  Perhaps this shouldn’t be suprizing, because animals are naturally good at moving themselves around on unpredictable natural terraign and so adding an implement/or wagon doesn’t ask them to do things that they are good at.  Conversely, the bulk of this thread demonstrates the myriad challenges on converting the animals ground force into high rpm rotational force to run complex machines.  I see a hybrid systems as a good way to let the IC engine do what it is good at and the animals do what they are best at too.  I hear what you are saying about still consuming gas, but these hybrid systems consume much much less gas.  I am a believer in peak oil, but I think we are a long way off from not having enough oil to run things like chainsaws and other small engines that might be used to power (but not propel) a baler.  That said, I will admit the noise does interupt my spirit of Zen when working animals.  Taking care of 8 horses, when I only need 8 for  a few days of baling and 6 of them sit the rest of the year, would also ruin my spirit of Zen. 😉

[Andy Carson]

As much as I like the weight/horse pattern, it might be a red herring here.  Even if the baler weighs 3000 lbs, it doesn’t mean that it needs to weigh 3000 pounds.  They designers of the PTO baler were clearly not thinking of making a machine that would be applied to ground drive horse systems…  Still, the weight and extra traction can’t hurt, especially if you are hauling around a baler anyway.  I saw a couple videos of the I&J heavy duty forecart being used on a small square baler, and it seemed to work in the videos with 4 horses.  I suspect that these demos represent the situation SOME of the time, if the windrows are well lied out, conditions are right, etc.  I suspect that the power is just enough in this situation, though, and they clog from time to time, which leads to time consuming futzing.  Does this sound about right?  This would explain why the GD baler conversion refered to by Donn earlier is a more effective design.  There is more weight is on the drive wheels.  The extra weight allows for extra horses (like 8) without sliding the wheels, and this provides the needed torque to get through rough stuff, even though it takes less than 8 horses worth of power on average.  It is a clever use of that extra power (on average) to draw a wagon to collect the bales behind, like is recommended in the GD baler design.  That way, the 2-4 horses worth of extra “on demand” power is always there for the baler when it needs it, but it is effectively “scavenged” by the wagon when it is not needed by the baler.  The wagon is heavy and has a lot of momentum, so having a brief extra power draw from the baler won’t stop it.

[Andy Carson]

I agree Roscoe,

I googled up the weight of a small square baler at about ~3000 lbs, but this seems to vary a lot.  Put that weight on ground drive wheels, and you have enough weight to do alot of work.  Working forward from the I and J model, the light duty cart weighs 750 lbs and is for 2 horses.  The heavy duty cart might be pulled by 4 horses and weighs 1500 lbs.  The ground drive converted mowers I have read about use 8 horses, and, low and behold, they weigh 3000 lbs.  Anyone else see a pattern here?  This is another clear demonstration of just how important weight is.  This means that if you are going to build a GD cart for a baler, you have to pull 3000 lbs for the cart + 3000 lbs for the baler.  Even at 10% rolling resistance on the flat, this is 300 lbs draft (maybe two horses worth) more draft than would required if the ground drive was on the implement.  This is a big difference, that only gets bigger with hills.  This is a great point, Roscoe.  To put it another way, these ground drive things run on weight, so any weight that is not over the drive wheels is a waste.  A forecart design is intrinsically limited here, as the whole concept is to pull something behind it on wheels of it’s own.  No wonder that historically drive wheels (or bullwheels) were always on the thing they power. 

PS.  It might be possible to make a heavy duty cart that would still take alot of weight from a baler (or other implement), by moving the support wheels of the baler far rearward, to make it very “tongue heavy” and incorporating a hitch design for that very heavy tongue.  This could also be done for other heavy duty implements that run off of PTO, but how many of these are there?

[Andy Carson]

“Let me know when you build the ultra-heavy-duty forecart for 8 horses with crawler tracks and a power-regulating flywheel!”

I find all this stuff interesting, but really don’t have enough land to justify such a thing.  I realize that some of this seems impractical, and it might actually be.  They are ideas that would need some tinkering to get to work.  I like to do the mathmatic modelling to see how much might be gained by the tinkering, and because I feel it is a meaningful thing I can contribute.  My rough guess is that the crawler tracks aren’t worth the complication compared to tractor tires.  They might yield a 30% reduction in weight, but this is might only result in a 3-12% improvement in efficiency (depending on hills and wheel design).  The flywheel, though, still seems like it would be as it would translate more directly to driveshaft power.  Still, either of these somewhat complicated design aspects is not near as important as the simple addition of raw weight over the drive wheels.  You are right, Bendube, that the bulk of the work is probably in getting these or other designs to work in the real world.  Still, I think it is meaningful to make sure the concept makes sense on paper before going to the trouble of building and troubleshooting a piece of equipment.

[Andy Carson]

JL, I used to rides bikes alot too, so know what you are talking about. Part of the difference is conceptual and part of it is just language. The conceptual part is that a bicycle, just like an engine, produces power independant of ground speed. You can tire yourself going slow up a steep hill or going really fast on the flat. Very different speeds, but the same exhurtion/power output. Conceptually, this is because you are pushing on the pedals at a given force producing a certain torque. This torque is translated through gears to the wheels producing a forward force that you feel. When you use a lower gear, you feel the increased force pushing you forward because the torque is multiplied. In common language, alot of people call this an increase in power, but it is not power in the physics sense. It is an increase in torque at the cost of forward speed. Because power (in the physics sense) is force x velocity, you can slow velocity and increase force without changing total power.  When you go up a hill on a bike, you feel the need to shift down because getting up the hill requires more force to maintain a given speed than on the flat. One might either increase power (power proper) by increasing force while keeping the same rpm and forward speed, but we all know this is tiring. It is usually better to shift down, keeping power (power proper) roughly the same while increasing torque and instantaneous force so the hill can still be climbed at a slower speed. This is intensy confusing because people use the word “power” all the time when they really mean “force”. It is also confusing because there are so many examples (bikes, cars, tractors) where going slower due to gearing means you have a mechanical advantage. It makes one think that slow is always more forceful (some would say powerful, but this is not power in the physic sense) and fast is always weaker. When it is the speed itself that produced the power, like is a ground drive system, this relationship doesn’t always follow.

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