[dlskidmore]

I’ve been away awhile (IT department blocked this site from work). It seems like scythe is the tool of the month, I’m hearing them recommended everywhere. Most of prepping hay by hand seems straightforward, but I’ve not been able to get any details on shocking. Some folks do it as part of bringing in loose hay, some skip that step, I think it protects half dry hay from rain? How is it done?

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@bdcasto 34583 wrote:

It is made using 16 foot cattle panels bent to make the hoop and covered with alluminized bubble rap insulation and painters canvas tarps.

How did you bend the panels?

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@near horse 32361 wrote:

Why so tall?

The corn is entirely decorative. The church decorating committee uses it to build this giant tepee thing at the harvest festival. The bigger the stalks, the less work this process is. But if I stand a high risk of failure, it’s not worth it.

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@tsigmon 30682 wrote:

Isn’t some form of that practice is how mad cow disease is spread?

Feeding an animal parts from the same type of animal always seems like a bad idea to me. I also don’t like feeding herbivores animal parts, but chickens and hogs are naturally omnivores and should have some animal protien.

As for chickens, I’d look at insect sources. There are several systems for culturing insect larvae from compost products.

The frying thing sounds like confit? Historically they used a bath of fat to exclude oxygen and moisture from the resulting fried meat. Sun dried tomatoes work on the same principle, get rid of the water, immerse in oil…

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@Carl Russell 30426 wrote:

like headers and tail pipes on a hot rod…..:p

He He… Shared that one with the family. The car guys were amused.

[dlskidmore]

Might do to build up a response to a dinner call, acclimate her to accepting your presence while she eats. May someday need to catch her for vetting after she tangles with something too tough.

Have you tried llamas for herd guarding? Not too compatible with dogs I hear.

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@jac 29865 wrote:

Like it or not our percieved wealth is built on other folk working for peanuts.. if we were to pay the going rate for a shirt to be made by an American or a UK worker then we couldnt afford it !so our standard of living drops.. simple. Once every developing nation in the world decides they want the same rate of pay as the west , then what ???

*nod* Unions had a place in making work safe and reasonable to do while raising a family, but the upward spiral in common labor pay is a big part of the problem. Common labor wage goes up, everything made by common labor becomes expensive, common labor complains they can’t afford all the cool stuff made by common labor and demands a pay increase. Specialized labor goes up in proportion, as they see the value of their dollar go down and they demand pay increases too. In the end, the dollar buys less, and everyone is just as well or poorly off as they were to start with +/- a little luck, people who responsibly saved money loose out, people who irresponsibly lived off credit beoynd their means win, and the structure of our society suffers. Such “growth” has to occasionally collapse. Better several smaller ones than one doozy, but politicians see the small ones and push at interest rates and tax refunds to “stimulate” the economy and postpone it all for a later, larger, crash. You have to let things get bad for individuals that invested poorly, or society will not be shaped to invest more wisely.

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They have apparently reworded it as “Sustainable Development” since I was in school, but it still means the same thing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainable_growth

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@goodcompanion 29862 wrote:

Good grief. What kind of ecologist could possibly endorse a concept like “sustainable growth?”

The same brainwashed ones that order “green” appliances be shipped from other continents, and buy “green” food that has more chemicals than plant/animal products in it. Politicians and advertisers come up with this junk, and everyone keeps parroting it around and putting it in textbooks because it sounds nicer than reality. They can believe in this stuff and make “green” industries rich and feel all good about themselves.

Reality is harsh. It doesn’t go over well with the masses.

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@goodcompanion 29860 wrote:

I kind of have to disagree with this. Just because we live in a time when the word is so misused doesn’t mean that it is an impossible concept.

Sustainability is possible, but the buzzword in my college ecology classes “sustainable growth” is not. At some point you will run out of land, or watts of sunlight to collect. We can keep growing on the technology front, but technology grows it fits and starts, not in a reliably “sustainable” way.

Nature cycles. If deer overpopulate, they become more suceptible to disease or predators. The population declines, the deer recover, and begin to ascend in their cycle again. Humans can’t get away without a down cycle forever.

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@near horse 29854 wrote:

Not everyone is going to be able to or want to start a small farm but that doesn’t preclude them from wanting to support those ideals. So what do they do? What are their options in supporting those ideals with their consumer dollar? And how do they find out about those options? Usually requires marketing of some type to inform people of those options as well as a product and a place to buy said product.

I’m still living on the consumer side, and generally am so tired of the hype and meaningless labels that I don’t pay extra for any silly labels in the grocery store except “local”. (Although last time I bought peaches because they were advertising local peaches, I got the wrong variety and saw the sticker when I got home proclaiming how far it had come.) I’ve heard too many stories of “cage free” chickens that are still kept in communal barns, or “pasture raised” animals that are still primarily fed corn. I do pay extra for “grass fed”, “pasture raised” or “non-certified organic” if I know the farmer, or if I know someone who knows the farmer. I got a very tasty (but hugely oversized) pastured turkey last year that way. I also like to go to the public market, and tend to select produce from tables where all the products are in-season. I’m sure the guy with banannas on the table is just a reseller, the in-season stuff I am more likely to believe was grown local even if it’s a reseller. When I buy corn, I look for the guy who came with a pickup truck full of corn who’s only there during corn season. When I buy apples, I buy the variety that I know they will run out of quickly and probably didn’t come from the cold storage unit. Whenever I’m out in the country, I like to stop at farm stands that I pass by. (Hey, can you leave them open until after the big local attraction closes? The tomatoes I see on my way to the attraction won’t keep well in the car all day.) There are little things you can do as a consumer without reading advertising hype, but the more urban you are the harder this is. People in NYC pretty much have to take a little country vacation to get to know any farmers that are not at the overcrowded farmer’s markets.

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@goodcompanion 29842 wrote:

Possibly the only way to truly redirect the nature of business is to cut capital out of the equation and engage in reciprocal exchanges on an extremely local level.

Money is just an easy accounting system. I give you four dollars for your goods, and I’m saying that society owes you four dollars worth of goods and services for what you did for me. The problem is that our current dollar was broken when they got rid of the gold standard, and started printing money to lend out to banks. Easy credit throws everything out of whack, throwing the cost of expensive items like land in an upward spiral that no-one can afford with cash any more.

Someone smart figured out that new home building was an economic indicator, and a large group of idiots then decided to start supporting the new home building industry to make the economy look better, and wrecked the economy in the process. You can’t let the tail wag the dog. Pushing at any one economic indicator makes that economic indicator read false, it does not help the general economy. The current economy is the sum of our resources extracted and our labor provided, our future economy is the stability of what we are doing, nothing else.

Not that I care what the money standard is, the denarius was the value of a common laborer’s day. For all I care we could have a potato standard, with the value of the dollar set as two pounds of potatoes.

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@goodcompanion 29831 wrote:

Our collective willingness to be “greenwashed” is pretty high, I guess.

…Most of me believes that capital always works to the detriment of sustainability in the end. On the other hand a total lack of it isn’t so great either.

I always find myself an outsider to either pole of these arguments. My father is an energy conservation engineer, not because he’s “green” but because he’s a cheapskate, and hates to waste money on fuel he doesn’t have to. I’m in the same boat, hating waste but not being a total environmentalist. I think the green movement needs to be more self-aware of what’s really preventing waste, and what’s just internally generated misinformation and marketing hype. Like the window farm people that think they are going to save the planet by trucking purified hydroponic fertilizers into the city and running a small growing operation that is dependent on electricity generated at a coal burning power plant. Or the guy I knew that proudly ordered his lawn mower from Switzerland that has all the same “green” features as my reel mower I picked up at the local hardware store. (He consoled himself by the end of the conversation that he had probably gotten a higher quality one for his extra money and transportation overhead.
) It drives me nuts some of the things I see, although mostly I bite my tongue because people like their happy delusion that everything at the “natural” market is better for the planet and that their dollars are doing real good in the world.

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@Vicki 29774 wrote:

Anyone want to address safety issues in pulling down hang-ups and “widow-makers”? Some leaners I’ll pull, but I’ve been reluctant to approach others, not sure how they might fall or flip.

I was surprised they were working with such a short chain. I only have limited experience with small stuff, but a snag tends to build up potential energy as you pull, and move in unexpected ways when that energy releases.

[dlskidmore]

The output might not be easily available to Rural Heritage, but it couldn’t hurt to call the nearest public TV station and see if they are interested in recording it. Our local public TV produces a good number of documentaries about local topics.

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