[OldKat]

@Rod 9087 wrote:

Both I guess. I can tie them but usually not very close to the work for loading etc. and they are impatient, pawing the ground, and head tossing and rubbing.

Do you tie them up much when they are not in harness?

Mine use to do that same thing, but when an Amish guy that I know in South Texas farmed with them for about 3 or 4 months last year he tied them up virtually around the clock for the whole time he had them. When I got them back they had stopped doing this. Not saying it would work with your horses, but it sure did with mine. I have no idea how long they would have to stay tied up each day, or even if this would help, but it was amazing to me how well mine responded to it.

Mine will paw if I am measuring out feed and they are tied up where they can see or hear what I am doing. All I do is say “AHHH, STOP THAT!” and they do.

Don’t have any thoughts on how to tie up when you have nothing to tie to. Plant trees I guess!

Good luck with your horses. I am interested to see what other ideas that the others may have.

[OldKat]

@firebrick43 9082 wrote:

The rope on the gum trick is a twitch and they do make twitches that you can apply and then clip to the halter so you can use them by yourself

We have 4 horse, 2 appy’s which we do drive/farm with, a riding paint, and 1 large Belgian that we pair with the appy’s to do the work.

The other horses I have no problems with but the Belgian we bought her when she was 14. She is our most trustworthy work horse, kids can crawl around her, knows the ropes and is gental. You can do her front feet fine but her backs you cant work on for some reason. I can tilt them up to clean them but not pick them up to trim them. I have tried running the cotton ropes over her neck and letting her abuse herself, we have worked with her feet for months on end, we have put her in stocks which she is completely comfortable in until you tie her back feet, she breaks the unbreakable straps. So I do what an oldtimer suggested to me.

I watch her walk or tip up her rear foot slightly so I can see how much needs taken off.
I take a scrap of plywood and walk her until her back foot is on it. Take a cheap 1 inch wood chisel and a ballpein hammer and “chisel” off the majority of excess hoof at a ~20-25 degree angle from horizontal. I then go back and to a second angle at 75-80 degrees at the front to round off the toe. And then wearing leather gloves will take a rasp without a handle on it and touch up the sharp edges, all while her foot is on the ground. I have a small section of 2/4 scrap that I make her walk on to do her heels or I just harness her to a cart and run her on the asphalt for a couple miles and that takes care of her heel.

She will move her foot sometimes but is not vicious about working on it and I dont get beat up. Works for both of us and the results are quite acceptable.

Innovative. I would have never thought about doing it that way, but it sounds like a workable solution for you.

I have zero problems trimming my mares feet, but I have a heck of time getting farriers out to do the work. (There are 14 of them in our county claiming to shoe horses full time, but most sit down at the Rockin’ B Cowboy Supply Store and complain all day that they can’t make a living in that business. Go figure!)

I trim the mares feet myself, but don’t do any shoes. Since I have disc between L 4 & 5 (I think) that tends to slip out when pushed too hard, I can’t always count on doing their feet when they need it. For a short term fix I take them out on asphalt for about a 2 or 3 mile walk, and BINGO … I buy another week to ten days for my back to heal up before I have to do their feet again. You do what you gotta do.

[OldKat]

@Rod 9077 wrote:

Thinking about this thread made me realize that one big thing keeping me from using my team for odd jobs is the insecure parking situation. I have lots of little jobs that I would love to use my horses on like the tree branch in the pasture that needs to be cut to fire wood length and carted to the wood shed (I have a few of these to do). I could take my pickup and chain saw and load it easily or use the horses and a cart and do the same. But with the horses I need to park them while I cut the wood and load it. With electric fences I usually have no convenient place to tie them while I work and don’t trust them to stand for the length of time I need to do the job.
That’s the case with a lot of odd jobs and those type of projects are numerous on the farm. Clearing trails and roads , working in the sugar bush, hauling things around etc. It seems to me if I could solve this problem a lot of opportunities would open up for the teams use. I find I keep saving those type of jobs for them but get stuck on this point.
Using them for bigger jobs is a different story. Hooking to mow or ted for an hour or more with no need to be in park mode, except for a few minuets now and then, is a very different challenge. Any ideas out there as to how others approach this problem?

Rod,

Are you saying there are NO places to tie your team while you do your other work, OR are you saying that the team will not stand quitely tied up while you do your other work?

Just curious.

[OldKat]

zopi,

1) Welcome home 🙂

2) Thanks for your service

3) Have fun with your draft goat project, doesn’t sound impractical to me. Sounds, ahhh … interesting! 😀

All The Best,

[OldKat]

@BachelorFarmer 9051 wrote:

Geoff, I’ve used sisal all my life for squares. I wouldn;t touch poly for square bales. Round bales I wouldn;t touch sisal as it rots too quick. I use the 9000 sisal.

I just burn it all afterwards.

I buy all of my hay, but I want sisal on square bales & poly on round bales … if possible.

[OldKat]

@CharlyBonifaz 9054 wrote:

that’s exactly what I threaten mine with if he doesn’t behave……
on the other hand, I couldn’t eat him, knowing him by his first name; so if it is the butcher, someone else may enjoy some really tough beef :rolleyes:
elke

… if the ox is a Brown Swiss and unless he is really old and or thin he should have a fairly nice carcass. I’d put him in a pen and feed him grain for about 45 days & just when he was thinking that he had it made … BAM! :p

Just kidding. He should probably be okay. In fact if you have lush grass, save yourself some money and skip the grain. Just get him good and fleshy before he visits the abbatoir.

[OldKat]

@Haflinger Puller 9009 wrote:

Donn,

If you can afford to why don’t you take a couple of acres out of production and plant Alfalfa. The roots go down about 15-20 feet, break up the hard pan, bring up minerals from deep in the earth, and gives you 4-5 harvests of hay a year, (about 4 to 5 tons of hay an acre) depending on the climate. Alfalfa does this all the while building your soil back up, and you not having to invest in a tool you’ll only use once in while at great expense in purchasing cost.

Alot of people don’t take into account how long that land has been farmed up there depending where you live and how long it was settled, nearly 400 to 500 years. The ground we farm has been going on over 100 years now, and we are taking ours out of production to build back up. I don’t know if you have blister beetle problems in New York, but here in Oklahoma high quality alfalfa hay can go from $7 to $10 dollars a bale. 25 -30 bales each cutting = $700 to $1000 dollars a year.

I love this forum. We can give each other suggestions and not cost anything other than experience that we each have gained over the years.

Many of the farmers in Argentina do just this in about a 5 to 7 year rotation. I forget the exact rotation, but it is so many years in alfalfa, so many years in soy beans, then corn and then an annual grass and/or some clover, for grazing, then back to alfalfa. Something like that. Unfortunately alfalfa doesn’t do very well in our area, or I would try this myself.

[OldKat]

@lancek 9028 wrote:

Hey a few weeks back I seen a post for folks haveing trouble with horses and pigs! I just bought a big bore for fatting and brought it home to the barn. We unloaded it and the gelding I have got real interested in what we were doing, I figured that he would spook once the pig started squealing but he never baulked when it started making comotion. Well then we also baught a tractor off the same guy and went back to his house to bring it home, when we got back mr pig had found the side door that my son forgot to lock and proceeded to get out. We started to try and get mr pig back into the barn but he had other ideas!we chased that pig for hours and the horse even got into the action buy trying to act like a quarter hores moving back and forth trying to keep the pig from geting buy, well it turned dark and we got tired so we gave up for the night and went inside hoping the pig would stay near the house. Well the nexted morning I went out side and lo and behold there was the pig standing next to the horse routeing for all he was worth I grabed a bucket of grain and ratteleed it to get galahades attention [ the horse]and he came right in the barn with the pig right behind I was able to get mr pig into his stall and galahade into his and they both enjoyed corn for breakfast! well then I let galahade back out into the pasture and left mr pig in the stall for fating but now galahade keeps coming into the barn and sticking his head in mr pigs stall and stands there looking at him ! Now I wonder do I have a horse thats love sick for A Pig or is he just looking for more grain?:)

Maybe a little of both!

[OldKat]

@Rod 8977 wrote:

I liked the cord wood dump wagon and wish I could see the front of it to see how it was made. Looks handy.

The comments below the pictures don’t seem to line up with the pictures, but there was someting about “more pictures in the next several days”.

[OldKat]

@Biological Woodsman 8966 wrote:

This is the address for the web site of Jean Leo Dugast in France.

If you use Google you can use the language translation feature beside the address bar to get it to open in English. This group seems to be doing some cool stuff in Europe. There are several links to other events that will open in English once you have that feature engaged.

http://percheron-international.blogspot.com/2009/05/debardage-labour-saint-sixte.html

Thanks for the information.

[OldKat]

@BachelorFarmer 8962 wrote:

Yes, that is the idea. I have only ever seen the one motprised unit in my whole life. So perhaps in more advanced regions these ground drive units were sold. My design would be, instead of attaching to the side of the wagon, used in front. The team would be hitched to it with a central tongue. The wheels would be wide set for stability. The driver would sit centrally and the elevator would extend on a slight angle out to the drivers right, travelling back on a 45 degree slope to behind into a wagon centrally hooked to the loader. This way the team is permanently hooked to the loader and when the wagon is full you just pull the draw pin and drive away, backing up to the next wagon, and so forth. Someone else would have to be hauling the wagons away to the barn…. Unless you designed a small dump wagon with stake racks or a bale basket type thing that you could leave hooked on, then just pull up at the barn and dump off the load and then drive back to the field for another load.

I suppose if you are all alone, then neither of these is practical. I just know that on my own extremely hilly topography I try to avoid stacking bales on wagons. I’ve had enough hay topple off and roll down the hills. I love the bale thrower wagons, but they are too heavy for a team to pull on my hills being 8′ by 8′ by 20′ long and holding 125 bales of 50 lbs each. That is the down side, as the horses now only rake hay, everything else is out of scale for horses to do safely.

NOW I understand what you are looking for. If I have it right now, I think I am with you. There was a somewhat similar design for a self propelled hay wagon that was sold by maybe New Holland or New Idea. It had an offset for the operator that actually cantilever out in front of the vehicle and the input chute was located almost dead center of the front of the unit. I think the drive chain that elevated the bales and moved them back to the back of the wagon (with “fingers” on the chain moving down a medial groove in the floor) was ground driven, but the unit was motorized for self propulsion.

My understanding was that they quit building them when a couple of people had their legs wrenched off by catching their feet of their legs in the chain drive. Ugly. Anyway, the story goes that the lawsuits ended production. There were at least 2 or 3 of them around our area in years past, but haven’t noticed any lately.

I saw the first load of this years hay going into a barn today, so the equipment will be out in the fields in full force soon. I’ll see if I can locate one and/or I’ll ask around and see if anyone still has one so I can shoot a picture or two for you.

[OldKat]

@BachelorFarmer 8958 wrote:

further to my above post:

I’ve always toyed with the idea of a ground drive hay elevator. Basically a section of pipe bale elevator mounted on something like a corn binder chassis which has tapered funnel like pickup arms. The elevator is offset so you would drive the team up alongside the bale and it would be guided towards the elevator, from thence it would be whisked up into a wagon which is hooked behind directly to the loader.
You would have to modify the standard elevator chain to have a tooth every few inches to ensure a quick pick up, and gear it a tad faster than ground speed…a simple matter of pulley/sprocket adjustment. The pickup head would just slide along the ground on shoes and be free to bob over humps etc, and the pipe elevator could be raised and lowered by a simple lever or winch to accomodate varying terrain or hay conditions. I have in mind a light open welded steel tube framework, perhaps even a mounted attachment for a forecart (If you’ve ever seen the old Farmall mounted corn pickers for their rowcrop tractors you will get the sense of how it would be mounted if it were an attachment . Still a purpose built implement would likely work better and save the hassle of installing a cumbersome piece of equipment and tying up the forecart. This would enable quick baling on the ground, then automatic loading. If you had something like a low sided thrower wagon, then you could just let the bales dump in and just have someone toss them back, much easier than building a load on a moving wagon….

I once saw the essence of what I’m thinking of attached to a flatbed truck, it ran down along the drivers side and the driver just drove along the row of bales slowly while a gas engine drove the elevator and a man stacked the bales on the truck.

… but what I think you are describing has been around for 30 or 40 years minimum. Maybe I am not following what you are actually saying though.

The ground drive elevator/loaders on the market may have required forward speeds faster than a team would generate, but I don’t think so. Not sure if anyone makes them anymore. At one time they had gotten real cheap, maybe $200.0 or so in our area when almost all hay was being round baled. As more and more people have gone back to making square bales for “horse quality hay” the demand has pushed the prices back up. The last time I heard a price on one changing hands it was over $1,000.00 and that was for one that needed some repairs. This was probably 8 or 10 years ago.

If I am thinking right, what you are describing would attach to the side of a wagon and as you drove your horse(s) along the row of square bales the shoe would direct the bales to a chain drive lift that would dump it on the floor of the wagon. Then someone riding on the wagon would stack them. Is that the concept?

[OldKat]

@Plowboy 8954 wrote:

It’s still in the early planning stages so far but I’ll keep you posted. We probably would use a disc or disc + spring tooth harrow. I think 20 might be hard to manuever with a moldboard plow. In any practical situation I think one man working more than 12 would be too much but it would be fun to try once.

Yep, I’m sure you are right about discing or harrowing with 20 head rather than turning soil. Actually I consider discing to be plowing, because most of the plowing done in our area (tractor wise) is with an offset disc. Virtually no one uses a turning plow anymore, because it creates such a hardpan in the heavier soils.

If you know far enough in advance if & when you are going to try this out I might even be able to get my company to pay for my flight up there. I am required to visit company facilities in field locations at least once yearly & haven’t gone out yet this year. Last year I went to Alabama, but this year I was thinking about loacations in Northern Pennsylvania and New Jersey. It would be a (relatively) short hop from the northern most parts of PA to where you are in New York, at least relative to where I live.

Sounds cool, I hope y’all do it!

[OldKat]

@Plowboy 8942 wrote:

Old Kat, I hope you get to do it someday. It is gratifying to drive a big hitch especially when you’ve raised and trained most of them yourself. We had a 12 planned for this year but time and horse constraints wouldn’t allow it but next year looks good at this point. We have 8 of our own but one of our friends bought the hitch gear at an auction for a 20 so that may happen at some point. I’m not sure if it would be practical but it would be an achievement and something that may be a once in a lifetime thing. My friends/mentors that want to do these things are getting older every year so we might be busy the next few years.

You would plow with a 20 horse hitch? What time of year would you do that? I might be interested in coming up to your place to see that! (Seriously)

[OldKat]

@James Campbell 8940 wrote:

it is an oliver # 23 You plow with one side at a time and you can switch sides . we have belguim drafts and nice sandy loam about 2 feet thick
as far as shipping it would probably be around 150.00 where are you located?

James,

I am in Texas. I have never seen a sulky plow for sell down here, so didn’t know what the prices run. In fact I have never seen one down here period.

I was curious about the soil, because mostly what I would have to plow is fairly heavy black clay and I am skeptical that a team could pull a moldboard through that stuff. Which may explain why most of the land near me was never farmed until after tractors were being used.

[Author]

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