[OldKat]

Ixy: the state where I live is a milk deficit state, i.e. we import milk mostly from Florida, Michigan, Wisconsin and California. All of these except for some parts of Florida are at least 1,000 miles away. Crazy isn’t it? Just 35 or 40 years ago we were a milk exporting state. Now virtually the only people that are making money or even breaking even in this state milking cows are foreigners, mostly from the Netherlands, who have outside capital backing them. It is also rumored that they blatantly disregard many of our laws such as labor laws, workman’s compensation etc. However, I have no way of knowing if this is true or not. Bottom line is the locals have bailed out on the business here much as they have elsewhere.

However, there was an article in Stockman Grass Farmer probably 2 or 3 years ago about a fellow from somewhere up in the mid-western part of the country that was sick and tired of the cold winters so he headed south. He used an entirely grass based approach to dairy farming and breed his cows so that they freshened in mid September, which is generally past the worst of the un-Godly hot summer. He dried them down in mid-June and he and his wife took off to more comfortable locales for several months before starting over again in the fall. Using this model he had bought and paid for not one, not two but three dairy farms in about 10 years. He now has each of his two sons set up with their own places. Keep in mind that this is in an area where the average native born dairyman can only break even if he is extremely lucky.

Since you are already familiar with intensive grazing perhaps you should look into this to see if anything he is doing is applicable to your situation.

[OldKat]

bivol, I think Ixy and you are using two different definitions for the word “farming”. Near as I can tell she is talking about grass farming; turning forages into protein through intensive grazing. She is probably not doing a whole lot of turning of the soil or much other intensive work that would require serious motive power, be it mechanical or animal generated. She is correct, using the model she is working with you could almost scale it up indefinitely without having to go to tractors and such since what she is doing is more closely related to ranching (in terms of activities she is engaged in) than to what you are calling farming; which would be plowing, disking, harrowing etc. If you think about it the massive herds of bison that roamed the plains of the US and Canada were doing essentially what she is doing, mob grazing a given piece of land and moving to fresh grazing. Think of the scale that those herds of up to a million head or more involved. Far as I know there weren’t any John Deere tractors following them around.

RE: why farms need to be tenanted?
because it gives living space to more people. more people live on and off the land, and that’s a good thing.
also, because of social peace and integrity. if you were to be in a situation to seriously consider shifting your large-scale farming to ox-power, how would the rest of economy be likely to look? and would there be a place (in the economy) for this much people to be living in the cities? on what economic grounds? or wouldn’t it be better to enable them to go back back on the land and work it, and so solve the problem of employing and feeding them?

bivol, do you think the average person living in the city would be able or even willing to work the land? My guess is most would prefer to stay right where they are and starve to death rather than move to a rural area and have to provide their own sustenance. In fact in the socialist redistribution schemes where this has been tried that is EXACTLY what has happened, most notably in Cambodia and in China. People were forced from the cities at gun point to form a rural socialist paradise and many, many starved in the process or were executed because them refused to participate. With all due respect I don’t think this is a viable solution.

[OldKat]

SimmentalShowGirl; not sure what your plans are after college, but if it involves cattle breeding in any way I highly recommend you find a copy of Man Must Measure by the late Jan Bonsma. It is very hard to find and even harder to master, but worth every second of the time you invest coming to understand what he was saying. If you are not familiar with him; he was a noted animal scientist from South Africa who literally spent his entire life coming to understand virtually every aspect of beef cattle production.

His little book is not impressive to look at, really only a few hundred pages thick. After you have read it about 20 times you MIGHT grasp everything he has to say. I have probably read it 40 times or more in the past 30 years and I almost feel that I have it down. Of course, you youngsters can learn things quicker than dinosaurs like me can. Having heard him speak and reading his work literally turned everything I ever thought about raising cattle flat upside down and I had been around it my entire life. Here is a link to an online article by Stockman Grass Farmer editor Alan Nation talking about application of Jan Bosma’s concept of environmental compatibility & adaptability for cattle, really all animals if you get right down to it. http://www.stockmangrassfarmer.net/cgi-bin/page.cgi?id=570 Mostly deals with decisions southern breeders must make (which obviously does not apply to you), but it illustrates how everything is not as simple as some people would like to think it is when breeding cattle.

Maybe you have figured out that I am one American, who is not overly impressed in our contributions to the beef industry. I think the Europeans, the Australians, the South Africans and some South Americans, especially the Argentineans and maybe the Brazilians have done a far better job picking cattle that are adaptable to their respective environments than we have done. We pick a breed that fits our fancy (for whatever reason) and then try to make it work where ever we are, whether it really belongs there or not. Sometimes it works out well for us and our cattle and sometimes, quite predictably, it does not.

When I think about the color thing I always remember what an old man told me one time when we were discussing hair coat color. He said that he “ran” about 350 commercial cows, which in our area would probably mean mostly Brahman x Herefords and he used 20 Angus bulls on them; 10 Black and 10 Red. He said over about a 15 to 20 year period he had observed that his black calves consistently brought 3 to 5 cents more per pound through the sale ring than did the reds. Sounds like a good reason to use all black bulls, right? Well his next statement was … “but all other things being equal my red calves wean off 50 to 55 pounds heavier”. Takes a lot of 3 to 5 cent units to overcome 50 to 55 pounds more calf on the scale. This is true for my area but maybe not yours; so don’t apply this as a universal truth. Anyway, I asked him why he didn’t just use all red bulls and he said that he didn’t sell all his calves across the scales and he had buyers that specifically want black calves. It is just those little things that can make all the difference to a producer in a specific locale, so study your market carefully before you make your production decisions.

Anyway … don’t have a clue about how you should market your black steer, but I wish you all the best as you head of to the university to further your studies. Which university are you planning on attending anyway?

[OldKat]

@Ixy 26882 wrote:

Good luck finding a home for him – I can’t help at all. I wanted to comment however that your simmentals are absolutely NOTHING like ours!

Conformation wise or color wise or both, Ixy?

Not sure why we do this in the US, but as soon as we get a new breed over here we start “improving” it by tinkering with frame size, conformation type, color etc. Not sure most of our improvements are all that great. Not that Simmentals are all that new here now, but they look nothing like they did 25 years ago or so.

The color thing is a total joke. Virtually every breed now has registered individuals that are black. Why? Because black is somehow superior to other colors? Absolutely not, it is because the American Angus Association (black Angus only, Red Angus have their own association here) has developed a marketing program called “Certified Angus”. Restaurants and other retailers of beef promote that fact that they are selling “Certified Angus” beef.

Want to know how it works? At every slaughter plant there is a person that classifies cattle that are eligible for the program. If an animal comes along whose color coat is at least 51% black in the opinion of the classifier that animal is considered “Certified Angus” and the carcass is rolled with a stamp indicating as such. I once had a big Limousine X Holstein that was sired by a “Black Limousine” sire, he was solid black with two white feet. He weighed 2,400 pounds or so and would have rolled “Certified Angus”. What a bunch of crap. Has carried over to the show ring in the market classes, too. Few judges are willing to use a market steer that is not black as Grand or Reserve unless it is so obviously superior to everything else that they have no other choice.

Because of this the black bias thing the black cattle typically bring 3 to 5 cents more per pound than any other color or color combination. However, in my opinion it is false advertising and in no way means that the consumer is getting a certain quality of beef. In Argentina they once did something similar to this and the quality of the cattle in their version of the program degenerated so much that now black cattle sell at a discount to other color cattle. I suspect that it could do the same here someday.

[OldKat]

Wow! Very nicely done video; one of the best I have seen of people using animals in work situations. Nicely narrated and the work was explained very well. I am impressed with the effort. You are not just messing around cutting your fire wood either, quite a bit down already.

BTW: I have been sitting here catching up on posts that I hadn’t read and I have my little girlfriend, Xena, the miniature Dachshund camped out in her usual place when I am in my recliner and using my laptop … right on my lap. When your video started playing she jumped up and sat right in front of the screen watching intently. As your guys were working she kept whining and tilting her head side to side with her nose just mere inches from the screen. I have never seen her show much, if any, interest in any videos that I have been watching. Guess she liked this one, too!

[OldKat]

John,

Somehow I had missed these pictures. Nice setup, beautiful country. Cute kid, too. A kid with a set of lines in her hands can’t be messing up too much.

[OldKat]

@FELLMAN 26725 wrote:

Here in Scotland we are having the driest spring for years and years some crops are suffering from drought and the ground is like metal, it has helped a lot with calving and lambing but a wet night will do alot of good 😀 Pleased to read that your Halflingers are going good after your long break.

I can relate to your dilemma FELLMAN; we are now officially having the driest year, year-to-date, here since 1957. We are only about .45″ ahead of (behind?) the driest year on record, which was in the 1870’s. We are now “enjoying” the 4th driest ever.

Hope it changes soon for both of our sake.

[OldKat]

@goodcompanion 26549 wrote:

At least the extra rain produces grass….

Up here in the champlain clay plain the summers are almost never dry enough for me…most crops suffer from it in the heavy soil. So I am switching to rice. No joke. Seems like with climate change that heavy rains are likely to become more normal–hell, who knows, but seems that way at the moment.

It certainly seems that way here. Our county agent says that it doesn’t rain here anymore; we have continuous drought interrupted by occasional flooding. Maybe that is an attempt at humor, but it sure seems to be true.

Want to hear something interesting? When I was in college I had a friend named Ricardo who was a graduate student from Uruguay. He grew up in the rice producing region of that nation. His research project and the topic of his thesis was germinating rice in temperatures that were expected to be 1.5 to 2.0 degrees colder on an average annual basis globally. The question was could varieties of rice be developed through selective breeding that would germinate and grow in the colder temperatures? That seems almost funny now.

BTW: He did his research in some greenhouses that belonged to one of the timber companies, but which were not being used at that time. By setting his flats during the winter months and carefully managing the temperatures he was able to model the conditions he was trying to study. The answer turned out to be yes and in fact he succeeded in germinating some varieties at temperatures up to 3 degrees below what was previously believed to be possible. I forget how many generations of rice it took to achieve this, but it wasn’t many. It was nowhere near as difficult to accomplish this as he had expected. I exchanged emails with him a year or so ago and he now heads up the South American operations of an international rice trading organization. He was what I call a focused individual.

[OldKat]

It can be a little discouraging when it is so wet that you can’t get in your fields, but don’t complain. We use to have that problem now and then, but about 10 or 12 years ago the weather changed and we virtually don’t get any rain anymore other than a couple of brief periods a year when it will rain like heck for a week or so then stop for several months. Right now our only period of significant rain since last August was on Christmas eve and through the first couple of weeks of January.

Since our “normal” rainy period of October 1st through March 1st only yielded about 7.0″ (should have been 22.0 to 25.0″, as that is typically our main rainfall period of the year) we are in big trouble as we are heading into the “dry season” when rain is very spotty at best. We are already in the “Exceptional Drought” part of the state.

It has been like this probably 60 to 70% of the time since about 1998 to 2000 or so. I am sick of it. In fact I have been selling cows off for two years, and will sell out as soon as the last of my hay is gone, if we don’t get substantial rain first. Creeks are dry, rivers are drying up fast, spring flush of green grass lasted about 3 weeks and now it is gone, too. It looks like August out there in late April.

If we can get our house and property sold, which isn’t likely in this economy, we are going to relocate to another area somewhere around NE Oklahoma, NW Arkansas, SE Kansas or SW Missouri. Ain’t easy pulling up and moving when your family has roots in the area going back to the 1840’s, but we have no choice … we can’t handle anymore of this. Don’t complain about the rain … the extreme alternative is far worse. Trust me, I have experienced both and too much rain is far better than what we are dealing with.

[OldKat]

@Countymouse 26489 wrote:

I have ordered several parts for projects from Agrisupply before. They carry more parts than they list online too, if you want something different than they list you can simply call. Alot of the parts are foreign made, but if you are making your implement than it’s made in the USA anyway… That’s how I look at it at least. I have no experience with wooden bushings. I suppose if they were used historically and people have success with them, than they must work OK at least. I would have guessed that this was an application where steel and grease would be better. That said, it’s probably not worth the effort to swap bearings if you can find replacement parts…

Andy, I have used AgriSupply before too. There are not any of their stores anywhere near me, but there happens to be one in Tifton, Ga which is not terribly far from where my daughter lives in Alabama. When we were visiting her last fall we drove over and picked the stuff up rather than having it shipped. Cost came out about the same when you figured in fuel, but we wanted to make a little road trip that day and see a part of the country we hadn’t seen before.

Their store was massive, think ½ the size of a big box hardware store like Home Depot and set up much the same. However, it was almost all ag related stuff. I could have spent the day there looking at everything. You are right though; much of their inventory is foreign made. That said I am not sure anyone is making discs, bearings, axles etc for disc harrows in the US anymore. The only thing Chinese made that I ended up getting was the axles. The rest was made in India. I thought: how bad can you screw up an axle anyway? Obviously the Chinese can as the 30” axles I ordered measured anywhere from 29.25” to 30.75”. But they seem durable, so I went with them.

Am building my own harrow, because I can’t find horse drawn equipment here that is not all rusted out or broken. Most of it goes for yard art now and those people will pay way more for worn out old crap than I can afford. I would have jumped all over a disc like the ones that Murray or Gordon bought, but they are just not available anymore in my area.

[OldKat]

Nice job on the CT, Jim Garvin.

Does Leep George; About 3 years ago I saw one of those home made chickem pluckers at an Amish community near Beeville, Tx. Looked nearly exactly like the one in the video, but I think it may have had an extra row or two of fingers further up the tub.

For the life of me I can’t remember how they got the electricity to run it. Must have had a generator there, but I don’t recall seeing it or hearing it. It worked though. Someone had brought in about a 24′ cattle trailer with a solid roof on it and the floor was completely covered with chickens. There were probably 3 Amish men and 20 Amish women cleaning chickens for them and they were getting after it. I was wondering where they got the design for that plucker. Guess I know now.

[OldKat]

I’d bet that with all the range cattle in your area there are some old style “bulldog” Quarter Horses around. Look for “Foundation” QH’s; mostly these will be Warren Ranch, King Ranch, Four 6’s etc bred horses.

Many of the first generation QH’s came out of mares that were Percheron or mostly Percheron. These were the old style Percherons; probably weighed no more than 1,400 pounds or so and were probably 15.0 hands tops. I think it was lancek that said many a western field was plowed with Quarter Horses and he is right. They are cheap right now and would be acclimated to your area.

You may even find some broke to drive. I’ve seen them in my area and where you live, if you are within an hour of Bradenton, is not much different than where I live. I use to live in Wauchula and then Dade City, so I am kind of familiar with that part of Florida.

Good Luck.

[OldKat]

@Smalltown 26365 wrote:

Thanks OldKat. My family works on the blog mostly. I believe my sisters had the most to do with the playlist. We’re in Alabama.

Oh, I remember that now. You are up near the Birmingham area somewhere. I think we talked about AU last fall.

[OldKat]

Yes, really nice pictures and I am sitting here listening to your play list when I should be asleep!

Just curious, Smalltown, what state are you in? Don’t see any mention of it on your blog.

[OldKat]

@Michael Colby 26078 wrote:

Nicely put, Carl. And it hit home with me as I continue my recently-started journey with my new mare. I’ve had to constantly remind myself that taking a step back after two steps forward is not only okay but required for the relationship we’re building. But it takes a lot of patience and a lot of counting to ten or walking away when the communication starts getting wacky. Hmm, kind of like marriage….

Good observation. 😉

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