[Rivendell Farm]

This is my first attempt to attach a picture to a post. Hope it works.
I ordered the spring loaded hold downs on line and have installed them on the cutterbar. They were too wide to fit between the single point guards, so I ground a little off each side so they’d fit. I suppose they fit better between the narrower, double guards. They do a nice job of holding the knife sections tight against the ledger plates. I’m looking forward to trying it out soon.
This may be a dumb question, as I may be overlooking something obvious, but what is the purpose of the small, loose fitting piece of metal that extends through the top of the hold down spring? Bob

[Rivendell Farm]

I bought one of those steel grass boards some years ago from the local Amish welding shop that rebuilds mowers. They’re probably available from places that sell parts for horsedrawn mowers. I found you don’t need them on second cutting if you have the three stub guards on the inner end of the bar, but in first cutting I needed a grass board to make a visible path to follow the next time around. This is especially true if the hay is lodged, since the cut alfalfa or clover looks almost the same as the uncut. Bob

[Rivendell Farm]

Mike,
Thanks for the info. I’m only a little over an hour’s drive east of D. A. Hochstetler, I’ll have to stop in sometime. Bob

[Rivendell Farm]

Andy,
There is a new pasteurization process that doesn’t involve heat. Instead it uses a filter fine enough to remove bacteria. It would be suitable for small operations. Bob

[Rivendell Farm]

Mike,
Where do you get the spring loaded hold downs, and the German made sections? Bob

[Rivendell Farm]

Jeremy,
I’ll be interested to hear the responses on the question about putting the horses out on pasture after a day’s work instead of feeding hay. A lot of the Amish around here don’t like to let their horses out on the spring grass until after the heavy work like plowing and discing is finished. I’ve always put them on pasture instead of feeding hay, after all it is much more nutritious than hay, and I’ve never had a problem. They do become a little “loose” on the grass, compared to hay. Maybe keeping them in is just more convenient during the busy spring season. Good question. Bob

[Rivendell Farm]

This is a discussion where a diagram would be more helpful than a whole pile of words. Bob

[Rivendell Farm]

I use team lines to the outside of outer horses, and the outside of the center two with short cross checks from bit to bit across the front. It works with well broke horses and steers better than horses checked back to their neighbor’s collar. The Amish here use something similar, even expanded to eight abreast. As they say, “One horse won’t run away with a 10 foot disc.” They don’t worry about not having lines on each horse. I’ll admit it doesn’t sound like the safest setup, but it’s simple and inexpensive. Bob Kidwell

[Rivendell Farm]

I like the idea of Recreational Horses, but the RH refers to the Rural Heritage site that has a discussion forum called the front porch. Bob

[Rivendell Farm]

LED’s would be a good choice. They not only use much less power, they hold up better under vibration and general abuse than incandescent bulbs do. Bob

[Rivendell Farm]

Devin- Those wouldn’t by any chance be pictures of the Laing’s barn? That’s the barn I attempted to describe back at the beginning of this thread. Bob

[Rivendell Farm]

One of the best setups I’ve seen was built by a Suffolk horse breeder in Canada. The scale was bigger than what you’re talking about, but you might use some of his ideas. He had a row of about 12 tie stalls on one side of the barn. The horses faced mangers for hay and grain feeding. Beyond these was a work aisle for bringing in feed. Behind that was the year’s supply of hay in the center of the barn. I don’t remember where grain was kept, but I assume it was in a secure granary in the barn. Behind the row of stalled horses on the other side of the aisle there was a manure composting area about 4 four feet below floor level and opening to the ground level on the outside for easy manure removal and spreading. The covered manure pit was divided in two halves so composting pigs could work in one while the other was being filled. A diagram would make this much more clear, but the idea is to keep in mind minimizing labor requirements as much as possible. A box stall would be nice in case you have a sick horse or some special situation, but isn’t really necessary. Horses are better off outside whenever possible.
I don’t have a setup anything like the one I just described. I carry manure much too far and feed the hay and grain from the horse side of the feeders, but if I were starting from scratch to build something I would do it different. Bob

[Rivendell Farm]

I’ve lost track of the OP corn we grew back in the nineties, but we did get some from the seed savers exchange. One of our neighbor’s grew a white corn called Minnesota 13 and got high yields of beautiful big ears. Reid’s yellow dent was a popular silage corn that we grew once, but it got 10 feet tall and had problems with lodging.
Livestock really prefer the OP corn to hybrids, and so do children. When we hand husked ours our boys loved to chew the slightly sweet kernels as we worked. Bob

[Rivendell Farm]

We used to grow OP corn in our part of Michigan, but gave it up because the deer much preferred it to the hybrids. The combination of hungry deer and coons left very little for us. Where are you located? Bob

[Rivendell Farm]

I’m not sure what you mean by a curler, but I have seen a device for windrowing clover that pulls behind a sickle bar mower. It’s used on second cutting clover to make small windrows. These are then run through a combine to harvest the seed. It’s made of a series of springy, flat, bent metal strips that look something like the fingers of a hand lying on its back. Kind of hard to describe. I doubt it could handle a crop of any significant height. Bob

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