[OldKat]

@jenjudkins 11196 wrote:

Is that a pun?

That may be a lot like the answer I gave the pastor at our church when he sent me an email saying that a person, not associated with our church, wanted to donate about $5,000 for a set of (electronic) bells for our steeple. I was in a hurry to leave for a football game at the old alma mater, so I quickly typed “Sounds good to me”. He hasn’t let me forget about that double entendre.

[OldKat]

@Mark Cowdrey 11175 wrote:

Alright I have to pitch in. “Desparadoes” is a Guy Clark song. Tom Rush also did a very passable if somewhaat more produced version of it in the early 70’s. In the same vein, check out Guy’s “Let him roll” on that same “Old Number One” album. That said my copy of JJW’s “Viva Terilingua” has some pretty deep grooves in it! BTW, old “Jacky Jack” Walker is originally from NY state.

Mark

That’s absolutely correct. He and someone, (Kris Kristofferson maybe?) also had a duet release on it. I forget about Guy Clark’s version, because the popular version (at least where I live) was the JJW one. The Highwaymen had a cover, too. I really didn’t figure anyone would recognize Guy Clark’s name. You have to be pretty much into outlaw country music to know Guy, Billy Joe Shaver, Ray Wylie Hubbard, Townes Van Zandt, Kinky Friedman, etc, etc.

I guess maybe these guys have / had a bigger audience than I thought they did. I didn’t think anyone outside of about 300 or 400 miles from Austin would have ever even heard of any of them. Interesting.

[OldKat]

@Joel 11121 wrote:

No ,Sir, it isn’t.

” There were old men with beer guts & dominoes, playing Moon & 42…”

….I was grown and he was almost gone.”

Wow, I wouldn’t have thought anybody on this board would have even known who Jerry Jeff is. He played the Summer Music Festival at our fairgrounds in June, but unfortunately I was out of town that weekend. Heard it was a great show.

[OldKat]

@twistedlines 11031 wrote:

Hello everyone, does anyone have pics or plans they would like to share on building astone boat. Thanks so much

In one of Lynn Miller’s books, I think it was the first one, Workhorse Handbook there is a drawing of one with some dimensions. It is not real specific, but there is enough to go by.

He doesn’t give any details on the the hitch part, but as long as you can make it stout with articulation up and down & side to side you should be okay.
If you have any questions, send me a PM and I will tell you what I did on mine.

I’d love to tell you that it works like a charm, but truth is I completed mine in late May and then immediately after we had a round of extraordinarily hot (and dry) weather set in with temps some 10 degrees above our normal lows and 15 plus above our normal highs, so it is still sitting right where I unloaded into the barn. The weather has started to turn a bit now, so we will be hitching and pulling within a week or so.

Good Luck!

[OldKat]

@Joel 11107 wrote:

Semantics. Mentors do not charge money for their knowledge.

Mine only saw my team 1x. He told me how to harness them. He drove them around the corral 1x.

When I had a problem he told me the same damn story everytime. The end was changed to help me thru my problem.

When I met him he had a 14hh 1/4 horse that wore a 21″ collar. Wally was his riding horse as well as his roping horse. At 93 he still shod his own horse.

As a younger man he was a cowboy in MT. When he was my friend he lived & worked on his son’s ranch.

We were friends, me & this old man.

Joel, that is a line from Jerry Jeff Walker’s song Desparado’s Waiting For A Train. Coincidence?

[OldKat]

Wow! Great stuff here. Somehow I had overlooked reading this thread before. Sure a lot to think about. Thanks all for sharing your stories about your mentors.

[OldKat]

Thanks Carl. I understand what you are saying. That is an interesting process. I guess I actually knew a little more about this subject than I gave myself credit for. My first cousin got his degree in Forestry; I guess technically Silvaculture about the same time I got mine in agriculture. However he actually stayed in his field.

He was the Silvaculturist for the City of San Antonio, Texas for several years before starting his own tree service. I have stayed in contact with him, sort of monitoring what he is doing. Interestingly, his company has sort of morphed over the years into something similar in its philosophy to what you have detailed in your post. Keep in mind that most of his clients are homeowners and other small landholders, so the tracts of land he works are much smaller. He does not use draft animals in his business.

His philosophy is to work with people that value his services and will pay a premium for them. He told me several years ago “There are not that many truly wealthy people in San Antonio, but I probably have 60 to 70% of them as clients. I get them usually as referrals from other satisfied clients. They listen to and accept what I propose for their place; otherwise I don’t take the job”

He once told me something that I found interesting; he asked “Do you know how you can tell if a tree has been pruned correctly and if the trees on a tract of land have been managed properly?” When I said I had no idea, he said “When you look at it and can’t tell that a tree crew has even been there then it was probably done correctly”. He focuses on removing damaged, decaying and diseased limbs & trees first. Next he deals with trees that are leaning too much, on sites that are poorly suited to their growth potential, etc. Finally, opening spaces in the canopy for younger, more valuable trees to grow. Doesn’t sound a whole lot different than what you are practicing.

[OldKat]

I enjoy reading the stuff you logger types post, though honestly two thirds of the technical terms you use go right over my head. No big deal, because I’m not likely to ever actually use any of the info you guys talk about …still, interesting to read. One question; what does this term “TSI” that some of you have mentioned in several recent posts mean?

[OldKat]

@dehutch 11068 wrote:

This is really a nice restoration.
As someone with an interest in acquiring a rubber tired, smallish ground driven manure spreader I notice that they tend to have their tires mounted “backward” when compared to lugged tires on the typical tractor. Ed seems to have his mounted the other way. I’m wondering whether the advantage of mounting them “backward” is more theoretical than real and whether anyone has mounted the tires one way and then reversed them to see if there is a difference?

I don’t know the answer to that, but have wondered the same thing.

Ever notice the oldtimers would put one tire facing forward and one facing backward on their tricycle tractors? I’m told that would help them back out of a wet spot, but always wondered if that had ever truly been tested to see if it was worth the effort.

[OldKat]

Rod,

I have gooseneck cattle trailer, but when I am only going to haul one or two head I use someone else’s bumper hitch trailer. Currently I use the local high school FFA chapter’s 16′ stock trailer for these smaller hauls. Formerly I would borrow a bumper hitch trailer from an old man down the road.

His trailer had a nice latch on it to secure the main gate, but just a pin on a chain to secure the slider. On Good Friday of 2002 I was hauling a few pairs to a different pasture and had the pairs in the front part of the trailer and a steer that was going elsewhere in the back section. I was in a hurry to get home, because we were going to church that night. When I checked the latch on the main gate, I probably never looked at the pin on the slider.

I had hauled these animals about 25 miles when I passed through our town. I decided to stop and drop my daughter off at our house, and when I was just about to start stopping for the stop sign about 150′ from our house I felt the truck & trailer lurch. When I looked in the mirror to see if I had run over something I saw the steer rolling down the street! That was a sight I won’t forget any time soon.

Fortunately we live right on the very edge of town and he headed out of town. We were able to hem him up in someone’s yard and get the trailer in close enough to use the space between their garage and their fence as an alley way to get him back on board. He wasn’t too scuffed up, but had the bark knocked off him in a place or two. He wasn’t too keen to get back in trailer after that, though. Ironically I still have him. He is my baby sitter any time I have new animals, or when I want to keep a single animal in a specific pasture. Throw old Stormy in there with them and they will be fine.

I think maybe you and I have the same guardian angel, because it could have turned out worse. Much worse. Glad your ordeal wasn’t any worse than it was though.

Bottom line time … you are correct, check those latches and use those safety chains as a backup.

[OldKat]

@mstacy 10871 wrote:

I just started using portable electric fence. I’m running four corner posts, staked out with guy lines. I put the posts about 60 feet apart (roughly 1/12th acre). My four cows can graze that down in 2 to 3 days.

Does anyone have any clever ideas for moving animals from one pasture to the next. So far I’ve just been leading them into the barn on halters, moving the fence, and then leading them back out. This works ok, particularly with docile animals, but I’d like to figure out a good way to leave them in the field and “open” the new fence and move them over before breaking down the old fence.

If you have worked out any ingenious gating and fencing methods for management intensive grazing I’d love to hear about them.

-Matt

I may not be answering what you are asking, if that is the case; sorry! What I have done with good results is create a series of semi-permanent cells (paddocks) of any given size, 2 acres, 4 acres, whatever … size makes no difference within reason. I make these rectangular in shape, maybe 2 to 3 times as long as they are wide. I use high-tensile strength electric fence wire on T posts using Gallagher insulators. I try to keep the long sides as parallel to each other as possible.

I put a 16′ wire gap in both ends, at a corner for a gate. The “gate” itself is simply an electric fence handle, I like Snapper brand, on each end of a single wire. I put a hot loop on the posts so that I can attach the hooks from the gate handles. When I open the gap I lay one end on the ground, then disconnect the other end and roll the gap up and set it out of the way to be used later.

To graze the cells I stretch polywire tape, Turbo tape or similar, from one long side to the other using insulated gate handles on each end. This is like a really long gap. Between the semi-permanent wires I stretch the poly tape at whatever slice of the paddock I want, maybe a 1/6th of it, 1/8th whatever. I use insulated posts with a built in pig tail on top to hold up the tape, maybe every 30 feet. Then I go about the same distance down the cell and do the same thing again, this becomes my back wall fence.

The cattle graze in front of the first polytape fence until I am ready to move them. Then I unhook one of the gate handles from the hotwire on one side and drape it over an insulated post. Then I go unhook the other end so that the tape is no longer hot. After about the third time the cows see you doing this they will be standing there waiting for you to get the tape out of their way. Go past your old back wall fence about the same distance down the cell and set up the tape and posts that you have just pulled up for a new back wall. Takes maybe 10 to 15 minutes once you get the hang of it.

You can just walk the wire down the cell that way until you reach mid-point. At that time I usually start all over again coming from the opposite direction. This gives the grass in the first side time to recover. Hope this makes sense.

[OldKat]

@Carl Russell 10510 wrote:

Scott, I have had several of these experiences over the years. It is often so unexplainable, especially in comparison to other much better days, that I have found myself pondering all of the things that you have already mentioned.

For me it usually works its way back to what did I do that was different. Was I distracted by people(LO) watching? Was I trying too hard to make up for lost time? Did I push back too hard when he leaned into me when I was harnessing? Was I too unyielding?

The fact that the attitude persists, leads me to believe that the problem resides in the relation between teamster and horse. In my experiences it tends to come down to the horse having one of those days where they feel they need to assert something extra, and me being too rigid. Not having the patience and flexibility that is required sometimes to get to the other side where the horse once again trusts me. This usually is made very clear the next day when I have redoubled my resolve to focus on the horse and what the horse needs, and miraculously I have a completely different horse.

Just my thoughts, Carl

Once again someone posts something on DAP that I have been struggling with. Excellent observations Sir Carl.

Recently I had noticed my mares being “pushy” and rude towards not only each other, but with their pasture mates which consists of an older gelding and two Angus bulls; one mature and the other a long yearling AND my wife and me. I had previously posted in another thread about how one of my mares had kicked the older gelding and as a result the pecking order changed. Since then both mares have hammered old Hobo so consistently that I finally had to put him in a separate pen, by himself.

However about the time that I decided they could no longer run together, one of the mares (Rachel) cornered him in his stall and tried to kick him. When she did he wheeled and hit his left eye on the hay rack. At first it just watered, but within a few days it became irritated. Eventually it became so inflamed that the vet had to be called in. Diagnosis: uveitis complicated by a fungal infection. He has been at the vet’s office 3 of the past 6 weeks and gets treated at 3:30 AM every morning before I head off to work and at 7:30 PM when I get home. He is also wearing a Guardian UV blocking mask. Four treatments a day would be ideal, but when you work 60 miles away from home there is only so much you can do. Then throw in a crushing drought, and all that entails, temperatures that were 18 to 20 degrees above “normal” (whatever that is) for most of June and July, frustration that my early retirement just went bye-bye, etc, etc. Anyway, all of this started getting to me and I really started resenting Rachel for adding this additional burden to my already growing list of woes.

I know she is pretty much just being a horse and has assumed the role of Boss Hoss, when I am not present … but still, whenever she would lay her ears back and bare her teeth at one of the other animals I found myself wanting to punish her. Soon her attitude towards me started changing, too. She basically became what Jason referred to as a “punk”. . Within the confines of my everyday dealings with Rachel (and to a degree with Maggie) I had started looking for opportunities to find fault with her. It wasn’t long until she picked up on this and started acting up. She seemed to be going out of her way to be confrontational with me and that was making me even madder. I could tell that Maggie was taking it all in as well and even she started getting “punky”. Finally, about a week ago I decided 2 things; 1) I am the Boss and 2) I need to start acting like it.

The first thing I did was tell myself; “slow down” every time I was around the horses so that they couldn’t pick up on my anxiety and frustrations with the extra care I was having to give Hobo, as well as the other issues that were not really even related to anything the mares were doing. Next I changed the routine around the lot. Rather than letting the mares run loose while I am working with Hobo, or doing anything else, I have decided to halter both mares the minute I walk through the front gate. I tie them up and make them stand tied while I am doing anything else (including while they are eating, which I was already doing) and only when I am ready to leave do they get untied. I don’t let Rachel play Boss Hoss and run everybody else ragged while I am around. The kicking, running, biting and squealing has virtually disappeared. I am calmer, they are calmer and suddenly they are much more receptive to working with me and for me.

I think that there is always some sort of psychological dynamic to consider when dealing with any living being and horses certainly are no exception.

[OldKat]

@Biological Woodsman 10438 wrote:

My understanding is that equine have a circular nerve at the bottom of their stomachs that when the stomach contracts from being empty that nerve basically shuts down the progress of food through the digestive tract. It kind of makes sense they would work that way as evolving from animals that in the wild may have to travel miles to get forage on the steps of Mongolia and then further to get water.

That is something I’ve noticed when folks tuck pulling horses to get them in weight classes. Once they stop getting water they stop eating and they stop pooping.

I have never been able to make myself do this type of shrinking stuff, but have seen it done and the horses can go for long periods of time without food, even when working. It is certainly a wonderful feature to have beast of burden with so much tolerance of variance in their life needs to be of great service to mankind.

Once I had an apprentice working in the woods with us and he decided the horses need some hay in the middle of the day, so he took their bridles off and put a bale in front of them at lunch, while I was driving the log truck. Well he didn’t bother to get them some water too and that evening one those horses became colicky and it took hours with the vet and hundreds of dollars to save that horses life. It is funny because that particular apprentice went on to become a veterinarian himself and learned an important lesson on working horses and feeding in the midday from that experience. Water is the most important ingredient in their diet.

We don’t use any treats either, tends to make the horses think about eating instead of working. The best reward for any beast of burden is cessation of demand or whoa. Feeding an animal from hand makes them think that anyone may have treats in their hand which doesn’t bode well for visitors, particularly little kids reaching up to pet them on the nose… The boss horse in the wild doesn’t feed them by hand, just takes them to where food/water is….

Of course I think the horses do think we are going into the woods or fields looking for something to eat, because they definitely will browse leaves when they can reach them and if you don’t have a head check on them they will try to graze.

I have nothing to offer in regards to Rick’s initial post in this thread. I can say that Jason’s point about water in the diet seems to be dead on correct.

EVERY time, except one, that I have had a horse with any kind of digestive problem / colic issue there was some tie to not getting enough water in them. I have become almost fanatical about keeping clean, uncontaminated water in front of them anytime they want it.

My daughters aged saddle horse gelding will go off water just about anytime there is an abrupt change in the weather. He then gets a condition that my vet calls a “pre-colic” where he starts to get somewhat constipated and looses his gut activity, i.e. no “gut sounds”. I wasn’t aware of the nerve thing that Jason is talking about in the bottom of their stomachs, but it stands to reason that this plays into the equation. Anyway, to offset this problem I feed him a couple of tablespoons of a generic form of Metamucil and some re-hydrated beet pulp.

BTW: Use to be when he started getting out of sorts and stopped pooping I would call the vet, have him tube him with mineral oil and give him a shot of Banamine. This is an expensive way to get him to poop. Now he gets a Fleet enema and 20 minute ride in the horse trailer; a sure fired proven way to get his bowels moving. That said, keeping him drinking plenty of water is still the cheapest, surest way to prevent this problem.

[OldKat]

@Biological Woodsman 10632 wrote:

I would go with the military elbow bit, it is adjustable and you can use it as a
straight bit or with leverage if you need to adjust there forward rate of travel.
It is the only bit we use on all our horses, except a couple with egg butt snaffles that are really soft mouthed, but a draft animal can run away with anything other than a lever bit and sometimes even with those. Try them individually in an enclosed area first and then put them together after you have a feel for how they go with what you put in their mouth.

Jason, I think I have seen you mention these bits before. I googled them and see that there is a mullen mouth version and a lowport version (at least). Which version do you use and where have you found to be a good place to buy them?

The nuclear hot days of summer here seem to be waning (hasn’t been over 105 in weeks!) and I am anxious to start working the girls again, but I think I want a little more control than I have been getting out of the eggbutt snaffle.

[OldKat]

@FintanK 10299 wrote:

I must admit it makes me laugh nowadays when I hear people I know talk about how often they go to the gym and how conscious of the impact of climate change and peak oil they are.

Then they head of to their air conditioned gym to expand a hell of a lot of energy on excercises which are 100% inefficient as they don’t create anything at the end.

Why people don’t save their monthly membership fee and get outdoors is beyond me. If they bought themselves an axe and got a pile of rounds (for free) they could chop firewood all day at the end of the day have a pile of firewood to sell or use and eventually arms like a lumberjack.

As any who has ever chopped firewood with an axe will tell you chopping wood with an axe is one of the most exhausting physical excercises in existence.

Then there are the people who won’t run outside and prefer to run in an air conditioned room on a treadmill, which needs electricity derived from oil to operate. Why can’t they just exercise outside and reduce their carbon foot print?

I could rant on about this topic for hours, so I’ll stop now.

Well at least I’m not the only one that noticed the irony of this situation. Kind of funny isn’t it? People will work that hard for no real discernible production, outside of the positives it provides for their bodies. I use to work with two guys that worked out 3 to 4 times a week in the same gym near our office. One time they were giving me crap because I didn’t go to the gym with them to work out. So I told them; “I’ll tell you what, you come over my house next time we are off and let’s go build fence together. I’ll pay you $10.0 per hour and we will work for probably 9 to 10 hours. That is 90 to 100 dollars for the day. At the end of the day we will have a contest to dig one hole for a corner post each; 14 inches in diameter by 36 inches deep. If you can hang with me, I will pay you an additional $100.0 for digging that hole. If you can’t, I will only owe you one half of your days pay. Fair enough?”

Both of these guys were money grubbers and I thought for sure one or both would jump on that, but neither one would touch it. Maybe it was the work, maybe it was the thought of being out in the heat and humidity that long or maybe it was because they knew that there was no way in hell they could match me on that last part. Anyway, neither took me up on it. Guess what, I never heard them bragging again about how long and hard they worked out in the gym! :rolleyes:

Oh, and BTW: Your point is well taken about electricity usage, but you might want to know that only about 1.5 to 2% of all commercially generated electric capacity in the US runs on oil these days. That is down SHARPLY from 15 or 20 years ago. Most is still carbon based fossil fuel, so I get what you are saying. Currently about 50% is from coal, 20% from natural gas (and increasing rapidly, almost all new capacity is simple cycle gas fired turbines) about 19% is nuclear, with the rest being everything else. Hydro-electric is about 7 or 8%; so you can see as of right now all of the other alternative forms, wind, solar etc are not contributing a significant % of our electricity needs. That is likely to change, but it probably won’t be as soon or as dramatically as some people would like or think it should happen. These figures were from 2006, the last year for which I have seen numbers posted. Things have not changed a whole lot since then.

[Author]

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