[sickle hocks]

Funny, that’s the second time I’ve heard about the calf skin trick in as many days. Folks seemed to use hairspray out here quite a bit. Don’t know if you can even buy hairspray anymore. Anyway, I’ll file the calf skin method away in my head for when it’s needed.

It’s easier for me not having as many, I can baby them some. Had one in the cabin with me by the woodstove one night a few weeks ago. Didn’t bother me much, but the dog was a bit put out about it.

[sickle hocks]

Knowing when to quit…i can struggle with this one too. My teacher called it a ‘good boy moment’ and when things were going bad it could be a fleeting, vanishingly small instant of compliance. If I missed it I’d get yelled at with a ‘get off him!’. It wasn’t the time to ask for perfection, the animal just had to try a little bit and give me something. Anything. The rest could wait until tomorrow.
Of course that’s horse talk, the bovine brain might not work that way?

[sickle hocks]

That’s a handful! I hear you, and I have only a fraction of that to worry about. Do you ever think of calving on grass? I think this year I’m going to try and keep the bull in until mid-august. I’m already sick of fighting winter.

[sickle hocks]

Not sure if it’s true, but there is a post making the rounds that monsanto has closed it’s european operations because of public resistance to GMO.
http://www.zimbio.com/Genetically+Modified+Crops/articles/jlUOXGagj92/Monsanto+Closing+Operations+Britain+Due+Opposition

The dog analogy isn’t strong enough…more like your neighbour let loose a huge self-sustaining population of feral dogs ready to breed everything in site. That’s the problem with screwing around with the basic building blocks of life..once the genie’s out of that bottle you can’t stuff it back in.

[sickle hocks]

The proportions aren’t that critical…people sometimes change it up according to the application. You might want to start with something like a quart of linseed oil, a quart of terps, and a pint of pine tar. If it was something you were going to be handling a lot you might want to throw in some japanese drier, but for runners i don’t think I’d bother…it will be sticky and stainy though.

When you heat up the mixture the blob of pine tar will start to flow and will mix up nicely. Be Careful! It’s not quite as bad as trying to heat up gasoline, but it is definitely flammable, vapours included. Outside. Not too hot. I never used a double boiler, but I might have been stupid. Maybe read a patrick o’brian novel the night before to get into the spirit of things. Shantys help. Have fun! Gloves. The state of california would frown on the whole business.

ps it’s going to turn black in the sunlight over the years, just so you know.

[sickle hocks]

Jim’s raw linseed oil, terps and pine tar recipe is classic ‘boat soup’. You can play around with the proportions until you get the consistency you like. I sometimes add just a splash of japan drier so it cures a bit faster. It will blacken the wood over the years, and it can be a bit sticky for quite a while, especially on a hot day…but it smells like Heaven. I lived for years on a trad. sailboat, and just the thought of that smell almost brings tears. I’m not saying it’s good for you or non-toxic, but it smells like heaven, and if i’m going to poison myself i might as well enjoy it.
I’m with Kevin about the used motor oil…filthy toxic stuff that will leach into your soil and leave sheens and slicks on your water and i can’t imagine spreading it around my farm. Maybe in the 40’s when people just didn’t know..
If you keep your stuff shedded bare wood might be quite practical? Where I’m at it’s pretty dry, but bare wood weathers a nice grey and lasts a looong time.

[sickle hocks]

nice and simple, thanks for sharing..

[sickle hocks]

thanks all, i am going to have a look at them, hopefully this weekend….i’m definitely interested in the idea, I liked the photos of the three abreast fjules and fjord, makes me think of how much flexibility you would have if you could find a third to add for heavy work, or to rotate in the team..

I’m wondering if i will get in difficulties trying to get an appropriate pole height on a mower…and whether my draft sized yokes and singletrees etc will cause trouble or if they will just be spaced a bit further apart.

[sickle hocks]

Glue ons are often used for therapeutic work where there just isn’t a lot of wall left to nail into…as an example, when a vet does a really extreme resection of the wall where there is separation and necrosis of the laminae. Staying on for longer than eight weeks would be a bad reason to choose glue-ons…a horse that’s working in shoes is going to need a re-set by then.

George there are lots of kinds of rim pads. As mentioned above, there are snowball rim bads…I think these work great front and back and they aren’t that much trouble to put on. There are also wedge rim pads, or rim pads to absorb concussion, etc…sometime’s they are used to just lengthen the hoof…the main thing is that the pad does not cover the entire sole, it’s mainly under the web of the horseshoe.

The advantage of the rim pad is that with the sole left exposed it is less likely to get soft, and there is less of an anaerobic environment for thrush and other things to get started in. The full pad provides more protection for the sole…but paradoxically it can also make the sole weaker (kind of like your bare feet in the spring after you’ve been wearing boots all winter). So it depends on the situation and the horse and the job whether a full pad is desirable, or how long they should stay on. A packing material is placed under a full pad to inhibit anaerobic bacteria and to keep things clean…usually something antiseptic…forshners or pine tar and oakum.
There is some good to be said for modern chemistry..there are now two-part packings that can be applied with or without a pad and can be really valuable at absorbing concussion on some sensitive soled horses…Equipack is one brand name. They can include an antibacterial agent. Sticky stuff to work with but effective sometimes. There are lots of different approaches to using it and a few tricks to applying it without adhering yourself to your barn 🙂

I think once you’re dealing with an unsoundness and making decisions about pads it’s probably worth having a farrier out for at least few shoeing cycles to sort out something that works that you can follow…

ps … plus one for getting a simple forge going. Even if you don’t fit hot, you’ll have a much better time shaping. Cold banging draft size shoes is going to be super hard on your elbows and wrists and not a lot of fun. If you can find an anvil with a round topped horn you will find it better suited to working hot than a cold-shoer style horn with the flattened top

just my two cents…

[sickle hocks]

@Rivendell Farm 32758 wrote:

I hope you have an energy efficient computer so you don’t have to sit in the dark all evening to save up enough power to read and post on this forum.

🙂 it might be a bit like that in december!
Where I’m at 210 watts gets you one CFL light bulb for most of the evening, several hours of laptop and internet connection, some stereo, an electric fence energizer, and the odd boost charge on the old 6 volt tractor. Oh, and it grinds the coffee every morning.
This year we get a water well and a neat little washing machine, so the electricity usage will go through the roof…

[sickle hocks]

I’m off-grid, but at a pretty low level…a fairly inexpensive system and a lifestyle that’s a bit 1880’s. If you are serious about expanding your system in the future and you are willing to invest a bit more, it makes sense to oversize your charge controller. Then you can expand just by plugging in more solar modules and batteries, and an inverter someday. I’m living off a single 210 watt panel but have tons of extra capacity in a 45 amp charge controller…this year I’m going to treat myself and add another panel or two.

You also might want to look into an MPPT style charge controller. With these, you run 24v panels and it steps it down to 12 for your batteries…this allows the controller to ‘float’ the panel voltage all over the place depending on light conditions, and it adds a lot of efficiency by optimizing the solar panel’s operation. Tristar makes a good one.

If you’re thinking of living off grid with an on grid lifestyle, that’s probably different as then you get into a whole different world of equipment to support it, and it’s harder to build that kind of set up incrementally. Day to day I don’t miss power very much…but it is limiting or perhaps directing what the farm is going to look like and produce. I can’t run commercial freezers to store meat long term or walk in coolers for market garden harvests, so it will affect what I choose to produce and how I market and sell it. I think we’re finding our way around most of these issues. Just found a terrific low energy washing machine set up. I’m willing to run a small generator for occasional power tool use. My current challenge is figuring out if I can get some heritage turkeys off to a good start in the spring with some kind of masonry wood heater. Anyway, good luck (a solar powered post!)

[sickle hocks]

Right, I guess I knew that but hoped to hear otherwise. I like the removable divider between box stalls, I’ll do that. And I’ll pick up a few stock panels so I can be flexible about how i configure the areas under the run-ins. I’ll see if I can raise that ceiling a foot, but it will be a nuisance.
Thanks.

[sickle hocks]

Well, That brings back some bad memories from last summer… (strained smiley here). And we had just worked up the courage to really commit to the place and give it a really good try here.

Just to update, I had someone spray the whole works with roundup, hopefully before too much of the toadflax developed viable seed. Then suddenly I ended up with a half decent volunteer crop of round-up ready canola. The neighbour and I seriously considering combining it, it looked like it would have ran pretty good. But there was a concurrent explosion of wild buckwheat, which would have made combining a tangly nightmare. I disced it to take out the buckwheat before IT went to seed. Then we got dry, but at least some (hopefully most) of the toadflax recovered enough to be big enough to hit with fall Roundup.

As an ecologist it was fascinating watching the field go through these convulsions once I had released it from the previous herbicide / zero till regime. As a wannabe farmer it was pretty disheartening.

So we’ll see. I’m hoping I’ve knocked it back to some reasonable level. I”m resigned to living with a low level infestation forever, I just hope it doesn’t overwhelm me again. My plan is to try to not let it go to seed (mow or graze), and to try and starve the rhizomes with smother crops or really shallow cutting tillage that doesn’t drag it everywhere. But it is everywhere anyway. Lots of crop rotation and green manuring and grazing. Sweet clover and rye? Spray the bad spots for a while if i have to. Or heavy straw mulch and plant pumpkins or fence in the bad spots with pigs or turkeys or something.

PS my cows eat it pretty good especially when it’s young, so that’s something…
pps i really wonder if last summer did anything to exhaust the seedbank out there, or if it’s just scratched the surface??

[sickle hocks]

Roscoe made a great point above, about avoiding shanked bits that are jointed. Scott, it sounds like you’ve had good luck with liverpool snaffles, I just thought we should mention that you can get all of the advantages you mentioned (easily adjusting from no leverage to slight leverage to lots of leverage) by using a liverpool bar bit. What is avoided is the confusion you can cause a horse with a levered jointed bit…these put pressure on odd and unexpected areas of the mouth and can be very confusing, especially for a horse that is just learning, and especially when direct reining as we do when driving.

Like Roscoe said, it’s a difficult thing to explain or visualize, but this article does a pretty good job…(a ‘tom thumb’ is another type of shanked, leverage jointed bit, sometimes used to transition western horses from snaffle to curb…it’s function in the mouth is essentially the same as a jointed liverpool / liverpool snaffle)

http://www.markrashid.com/trouble_with_tom_thumb.htm

If you just google liverpool bit you will see what a plain unjointed liverpool bar bit is, which gives you different leverage options without the confusion If I really have to use a jointed, shanked bit then I go for one with a french link, or two joints, as this seems to resolve a lot of the problems with confusing signals.

[sickle hocks]

Some pics would be really helpful. Hard to say much without seeing. Keratex is an effective hoof hardening product, but might not address the root cause of what’s going on. With the chip-outs i’m wondering about your nail placement and size? Is the cracking superficial and stable or moving under load? Does it extend to the coronary band?

[Author]

Posts