[goodcompanion]

Try Norm Macknair, lewistown, pa. http://www.macknair.com.

[goodcompanion]

@Crabapple Farm 3741 wrote:

It seems that everyone’s jumping on the mangel wagon – Johnny’s and Fedco are both offering seeds this year.
Fedco (bless them) mentions a good Mangold (Mangel) reference from Britain:

http://www.mangoldhurling.co.uk

Check it out, it’s worth looking at, even if you have no interest whatsoever in mangels, mangolds, or any other type of beet.
A new event for next year’s NEAPFD?
-Tevis

Along the lines of Mangel hurling, you should also try badminton played with a radish (with the top still on) instead of a birdie. A good radish will hold up for about a half dozen volleys. I call it “Radminton”

[goodcompanion]

Any hope of reviving this thread?

I am talking to someone hoping to make local gin, with all applicable permits in place–they are contracting with me to grow around a ton of various trial crops for the mash. It seems to me that mangels would be super in this regard.

As far as animal food, the chief reference I have come across is a supplement for dairy cows. I don’t know how pigs would do on them, maybe quite well? I had never heard of them being used for human consumption.

Anybody planting these suckers for this year? How about swedes?

[goodcompanion]

Sam,

I would suggest apprenticeship to whatever farm you find that turns you on.

I offer two apprenticeships just during the growing season right now and am full up, but consider us down the road. I get a lot of applicants but I am partial to anyone who is really serious about a future in farming.

In general, apprenticeship offers you an understanding of draft power applied in a dynamic, real-world situation where people are trying to make a living. As such the skills you acquire may be directly applicable to your future when you will also be figuring out how to make a living.

Prior to your apprenticeship I would also suggest, as Hal and Vicki did, an intensive workshop. This costs money but a good start in the field is worth every penny. I have heard good things about Tillers and here in Vermont, fairwinds farm offers excellent workshops.

[goodcompanion]

@dominiquer60 6465 wrote:

Donn,

I think that this is a good idea. It is hard to say with the economy, but I have a feeling that if we(all small farmers) don’t run with the local food movement now it will be hard to keep the momentum going if/when things get worse.

Erika

Couldn’t agree more.

[goodcompanion]

I think we all recognize that projects like this are the direction things are headed. Collaboration instead of competition, local differentiation instead of corporate homogeneity. But when personally involved, it’s important not just to do the right thing, but not to do it too soon. Always a tough call.

An example I read somewhere was of someone seeing Robert Fulton’s steamboat Claremont in 1810 or whenever it was, then drawing the conclusion that steam was the future, and investing their life savings in steamships. But steam wouldn’t really take hold on the seas for another fifty years. Not wrong, just right too soon.

This is not to suggest that Cortland won’t support such a store for another 50 years, but rather that it is all in the timing: weighing the energy, capital, and good intent available, the costs and obstacles involved, and the degree to which the general public is ready. Donn, I think you’re as good a judge of these things as anyone.

[goodcompanion]

Then without a question you can do this with devices already available. The amish make quality one and two-horse treadmills, some with a pto takeoff. You could certainly charge a battery with one. The treadmills ran somewhere between two and three thousand–I can probably find a reference for you if you are interested.

I’m just not sure how many hours on the treadmill it would take for an hour behind the wheel.

[goodcompanion]

@Hal 6862 wrote:

I know very little about energy and mechanics (and maybe it shows based on my simplistic previous post), but I am confused by this analysis (not saying it is wrong, just not sure how it works). Don’t different conversions lose different amounts of energy? It seems to me that a device that converts grass into burnable pellets would use huge amounts of energy compared to a horse chewing on grass and grains. Or perhaps all life processes use much more energy than I realized?

My understanding is that all changes in forms of energy entail loss, or dispersal (second law of thermodynamics, in the vernacular, is that you can’t break even). So when the horse eats grass and turns that into metabolic energy that you can use for work, you are getting at best ten btus, or calories, or whatever standard unit you’re using, for every hundred btus, or calories of grass consumed. I don’t know the exact ratio. It’s possible that the ratio for burning pellets is similar, but then you have to expend energy going out and cutting the grass and somehow making pellets out of it, then burning them to release the energy, most of which will be lost in the process.

Other changes in energy are less costly. For instance if I have two simple gears meshing together, and I turn one to make the other turn in the opposite direction, clearly I’m not losing 90% of my power. But I am losing some from the friction of the gear teeth against each other, the air resistance on all moving parts, the friction of the wheel turning on its axle, and so on.

As Bret pointed out, the pros and cons of anything you might do are quite involved. You have to be a physicist in order to make any real sense of the planning involved, beyond the basics. We talked to an alternative energy consultant a while back and came back with a real sense of paralysis: all the available options (for electricity generation) are money pits compared to the grid. And generate pitiful quantities of power for the expense.

For me, I’m not a physicist and I’m pretty prepared to do without most of the stuff we use our ever-so-convenient electricity for when the time comes, and hopefully compressed air from wind and draft power will serve me for the rest.

If a device yields results and is simple and cheap, I’m all for it. It doesn’t matter how “inefficient” it is if it can be made by you and sustained by you, and does useful work for you (isn’t that part of what brought many of us to draft animals in the first place?) Conversely it may not matter how “efficient” a device is if you can’t understand it, repair it, and obtain parts for it without the whole market economy to help you do so.

Along mechanical lines, I am most impressed by devices of outstanding longevity. Read about a steam engine in England that functioned without a break pumping water from a mine from 1852 to 1964. And the steel windmills and their medieval predecessors that pump water and grind flour year after year without complaint.

But if it’s distance and speed you’re after, such things are possible without cars. I had a friend who built a crazy contraption of two time-trial bicycles bolted together with a clear experimental aircraft nose cone in front. The bikes were side by side and had flanged wheels that sat on a regular railroad track. He and his wife, both in their late fifties, averaged 45 mph, a little slower uphill, a little faster down. (don’t try this on a track with a lot of train traffic)

I have a different friend that built a car that ran directly on wood gas and drove it from Brisbane Australia to Canberra (about 1000 miles) fueled only on roadside deadwood. Average speed 40 mph.

[goodcompanion]

I wish someone with skills in caloric analysis, like David Pimentel, had ready figures for comparing energy generated from a draft treadmill versus energy generated just burning grass pellets and powering say, a steam engine connected to a generator with them. I’m not Pimentel, but here goes:

I know you lose energy with every conversion. The path you are suggesting, near horse, goes:

sun > grass > muscular energy > stored electricity > motion

five steps, with substantial loss at each step. This suggests that you would need much much more land base to support this battery car one mile than to just drive the horse one mile. Since there are two steps of conversion from horse to car, you might have fifty or a hundred times less energy in the motor of the car than you started with in the muscles of the horse. I don’t know, but it’s always astonishing to me just how much you lose. Maybe only the lord of the manor could drive such a car with twenty farmers charging up his batteries between their chores.

But let’s say that you were going to power your car directly with pelletized grass and somehow gassify that grass and run an internal combustion engine, or power a steam car like in the old old days:

sun > grass > heat > motion

only three steps, but some of them are technically difficult to accomplish. You need a pelletizing system and an engine that can burn grass pellets and generate high rpm without a lot of attention while it runs.

The amish make a lot of use of treadmills so I’m told, but most often use them to power equipment directly or to make compressed air and store it in something huge like a railroad tank car. The compressed air is later used to power shop equipment and the like.

I love that idea and hope to implement it here soon–when the horses are busy elsewhere, compressed air could be pumped with a savonius rotor instead (when the wind is blowing). I’m most compelled by using the rotor to directly power machinery through mechanical transmission–for me even the compressed air is secondary. I’ve been so depressed by the efficiency math on low voltage electricity and the technical nuisance of inverters and net metering that I’ve settled on more primitive, direct pursuits.

[goodcompanion]

What I am trying to manage for is drainage of water from areas of my “perched water table” in order to have those lands passable to humans, stock and horsedrawn vehicles earlier in the year (currently not reliably dry until about July). They are not quite cattail wet, but almost.

Given the fact that these problem areas are in little bowls, ditching them out would involve a lot of work. Plus, the whole area is very flat so it’s hard to see where to ditch to. So I’m still thinking willows. The loss of some grass to “willow groves” wouldn’t matter too much.

[goodcompanion]

Binghamton’s not so very different from Cortland, and my main memory of the co-op there was years of fatigue, long meetings, several relocations, and ultimate failure, resulting in the co-op morphing into a small health food store owned by the one member who really took a serious interest in it.

As a co-op, though, the place always looked down in the mouth, as if it really wasn’t sure if it was emotionally ready to move out of members’ basements. And it ultimately didn’t have the moxie to turn itself into a quasi-whole-foods-supermarket like some other co-ops did, e.g., Burlington, Ithaca.

Donn, perhaps your topic isn’t co-ops per se, but even if you are aiming to make a local food store with a moderate price point, they are similar in terms of challenges. The chief thing in your favor is the changing times–arrangements requiring loyalty, collaboration, and sharing tend to thrive in times of adversity and scarcity, even here in the U.S.A. They tend to fall apart in times of affluence. So maybe the co-op, local general store, is poised to make a comeback. I guess if it were me I wouldn’t be ready to put much money at risk, though.

[goodcompanion]

@Donn Hewes 5899 wrote:

I have never done it, but the 12A is a 5 foot pto combine that I think will be very manageable for me and my pto cart. My horses and mules too. Erik Andrus (aka good companion bakery) explained to me why traditionally binding and threshing were separated. It involved cutting at the right maturity to not loose it from the stem, but then curing the crop completely before it was threshed. With a combine you are trying to cheat a little on both ends. If you wait for it to fully cure on the plant you may loose more in the cutting. Combines in this way resulted in a lower quality flour. Erik, help me out if I didn’t get that right. I think I will try to use my combine because I have one. Perhaps I can err on the side of loosing some grain.

Not to mention the old way used the sun to dry the crop rather than fossil fuels. Approximately 6 billion gallons of fuel are burned annually to dry combined crops. If you can do it the old way and there is no need.

I err on the side of losing grain too sometimes, that’s no picnic either. Rodents everywhere, both in the field and everywhere the bound crop was transported. I’m still dealing with the aftermath of that.

[goodcompanion]

@Robert MoonShadow 5696 wrote:

Erik ~ I was just reading your thread in equipment about your delivery wagon – did you ever decide on the style & wheels, etc.? I also had a thought to go with it… is there a way for you to keep a loaf or two warm while in the wagon, being delivered? Because, as I’m sure you know, nothing advertises a bakery like the smell…
…come to think of it, that applies to pig farms, too (but not in a good way) 😮

{I just pictured a wagon delivering fresh baked goods, with the aroma of all that good stuff wafting in the breeze throughout the neighborhood = sort of like the music of the icecream truck}
If you want to try out its effects, I live on Doumecq Rd, just outside White Bird, and I’ll take two of everything you’ve got. 😀

I pack my loaves in paper bags (per state law) and then into wooden crates, vertically, 3 rows of six loaves. Usually the last load of loaves is pulled and packed mere minutes before leaving for market. This means that the loaves retain their warmth from being all packed together. Usually they are still warm several hours into market. So people do already know me for warm bread. But most of the smell, unfortunately, I’m not able to take to market with me as most of it goes up the chimney.

[goodcompanion]

Rod,

I actually have acquired a wagon gear from just such a wagon for the project. I have stripped the box off, planned some changes to the springs, and am moving the front wheels (44″) to the back. I plan on ordering new front wheels (34″) so that the front wheels can cut under the frame somewhat and wagon can make sharper turns. Vergennes involves close quarters!

For me, making the box is the easiest part. Almost all right angles, it’s like building a little house. I’ll keep everyone posted on progress. I hope it will be ready to hit the streets in April.

[goodcompanion]

Fortunately I was able to gnaw through the valve stem on one of my intact tires and re-inflate my lungs with the pressure from the tire, otherwise, well…I’d have been just another breathatarian-victim statistic.

So, ever since I’ve been understandably wary. First time I meet anyone, I ask, do you like to eat food? If the answer is no, I’m really on my guard.

[Author]

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