[sickle hocks]

Thanks for that link on the roller crimper set up..

Andy are you still getting into chickens? What about terminating your cover crop and breaking up residue by ‘mob-stocking’ with a moving chicken tractor set up? For small acreage of course…you’d have to knock it all down fast enough to get in and plant before the weeds flushed? Maybe they wouldn’t hit it hard enough, compared to cattle or pigs or such…

[sickle hocks]

I would be interested to hear how you are planning to value-add to your field crops and create your snack foods…i am imagining something seasoned and ready to eat??

There seems to be a real groundswell of horror and distaste towards industrial livestock production amongst many consumers. I wouldn’t try to compete with walmart mcmeat prices, those aren’t our customers anyway…a natural, humane product priced fairly will attract people who care about their food..

The downside with high maintenance livestock that I’m grappling with is that it gets so hard to get away from the farm for even a couple of days….ultimately i’m not sure i can make that lifestyle change…

[sickle hocks]

if you can get a hold of miller’s ‘haying with horses’, he has what looks like a good set of plans for something similar…there is a central wagon bed that can be used on its own, and two removable upswept side wings or racks…it looks like a fairly simple build, i’m thinking about it…

he mentions that it is also handy to have it in three lighter pieces as one person can get it on and off the wagon

[sickle hocks]

just an opinion, but..

it might be ok if you had to roughly buzz through a few hundred head of cattle tipped over on a table but i wouldn’t take it anywhere near one of my horses…

much better to get a good rasp, nippers, hoof knife, some basic anatomy knowledge, an eye for horses, and a good mentor you can watch and who can look over your shoulder while you are learning

it’s not a black art but there is a lot more to it than meets the eye at first

g’luck

[sickle hocks]

From what I’ve read the oats, and especially the rye are pretty competitive. Red Fife is the heritage wheat that people are excited about around here, the artisan bakers love it…not sure if it’s more aggressive than a modern wheat.

What about intercropping? Would red clover sown into wheat help smother some weed competition? Maybe clover sown after a really light pre-emergent (of the wheat) tillage with a light harrow to hit the annual weeds. Bonus nitrogen and stand diversity. Oats and peas are supposed to work well. I would like to experiment in this direction.

I bet wheat would follow well after your bean row crops in the rotation as you would have established some good weed control right at the start…i bet that’s half the battle…

[sickle hocks]

Not to minimize the weed problem in any way, but I don’t think a few weeds are a problem, as long as they don’t impact yield significantly or make harvest difficult…if the integrated management techniques get the crop ahead so it is the dominant species in the community then a few escapees can be lived with and may even have a role to play. This is a shift from the clean fields conventional farmer mindset that i am trying to get my head around…And it might not go so well with the neighbours…

This thread got me wondering if there was such a thing as a horse-drawn rod weeder…..guess it was a silly question, of course there is, it was first conceived as a horse implement in 1929, george morris….

http://www.waymarking.com/waymarks/WM6YPX_Morris_Rod_Weeder_Yorkton_SK

Now if only I could find one. Apparently he made the first ones in his garage, so maybe we need to buck up and do the same….has anyone out there used one?

[sickle hocks]

@bivol 24889 wrote:

Fukuoka suceeded.

…that’s the guy who wrote the ‘One Straw Revolution’ for those who haven’t ran into him yet…

Intensive grazing might be an option to terminate cover crops and reduce residues while retaining nutrients on the land.

I’ve wondered about the ATV sized ground drive food plot seeders…maybe they would work for zero till? But they are expensive. There are a bunch of them out there, it seems like quite a scene..like the ‘firminator’ from this company….

http://www.modernhabitatsolutions.com

I’m thinking that if I build up organic matter and aggregate stability, I’ll have a soil that will be more tolerant of some moderate tillage

http://www.producer.com/Crops/Article.aspx?aid=30908

…I will try to stay away from plowing though.

[sickle hocks]

Jac that sounds like a sensible trim, i didn’t get that you were doing it yourself, thought you were comparing barefoot trimmers to farriers. Interesting that the flat-footedness is improving.

It’s nice to see someone keeping up on hoofcare. I was looking for a team here and everything in my price range had badly neglected feet, it was depressing. Just got a pair home and their feet are mini disasters but they are going to have to wait a few more days while they learn to pick up a foot…no one bothered to teach them.

I’ve never heard of trims affecting CPL, but if it really is something structural or ‘mechanical’ that influences the drainage then I can definitely imagine a trim affecting it, you might be on to something. It would be interesting to look in to.

[sickle hocks]

That was a bit of flame wasn’t it? Sorry. I also agree with earlier posters about the contrived trims and double pads and such that are common in some horse show environments…it’s a shame how humans have to take everything to excess

[sickle hocks]

I think the farriers have spoken well…a good farrier will trim for a balanced foot in three dimensions, taking into account the horse’s individual conformation. On the other hand, a poor or lazy farrier can produce a bad trim.

If your horse’s job will allow it to go barefoot then that is always best…At the same time, shoes can be a necessary evil in many situations, and can be very beneficial. ‘Natural’ horses don’t live in the variety of climates and conditions that ours do, nor do they do the same jobs or live the same lifestyles.

I think it’s important to know that a good farrier is perfectly capable of trimming a horse to go barefoot in a correct way. There is a certain amount of fad thinking that seems to go along with the ‘natural’ and ‘barefoot’ hype…some of those trim styles have some anatomical basis and some merit, others not so much….some force hoofs to meet an arbitrary, idealized standard regardless of the individual horse’s conformation or job and can cause real damage. Check out how much training and knowledge ‘barefoot trim’ people have, and IMHO I would be cautious about trendy personalities advocating one-size-fits-all dogmatic trimming principles.

Sorry if that’s inflammatory, it’s a button for me. Traditional farriers come in good and bad too. Your horse deserves the good…

[sickle hocks]

Looking through old threads and enjoyed the discussion here on the economic and sustainability issues of feed for workhorses. Growing my own feed on the farm is an important goal for me. I anticipate having to supplement hay with some grain while working….the point has been made that it’s easy to sow but equipment intensive to harvest.

in gene logsden’s small scale grain raising book he mentions an old way:

– cut oats when grain just hardening, a bit of green in stalks
– tie stalks in bundles, set in shocks to dry
– then rank the bundles in a barn, or outside like a double stack of wood with butts out and heads in to protect from rain (maybe on pallets with tarps??)
– feed the oats (unthreshed) by the bundle as needed

so i wondered if the two of us with good quality scythes with grain cradles couldn’t find a few days to knock down two acres of oats and try this out…low tech, not much equipment (broadcast seeder, roller/harrows, scythes, wagon), the horses get some roughage too and if they pick through the straw and leave some it could be recovered for bedding

crazy idea????????????????????

you’d sure have to fence off the stacks securely in case something got out..

[sickle hocks]

With the wind chill it was 45 below a few days ago. Last night minus 30C and still. Twelve by twelve A-frame cabin. Don’t get up at night to stoke the stove, but getting sick of chipping out frozen peanut butter for breakfast and having to thaw out the coffee press. Boots frozen to the floor some mornings which is really annoying.

Almost have my sixty foot round pen shoveled out so I can start putting a handle on a new team. Next year they’ll really be broke and hopefully I’ll have a snow scoop for them.

Now that i’m done grousing, I have to say that there is some warmth to the sun again and it feels like we are through the worst of it.

[sickle hocks]

Maybe we should start up a small grains equipment thread over in the sustainable farming section? I’ll need some kind of stationary thresher, maybe homebuilt, maybe modified wood chipper….Probably the least expensive option for me would be to pick up the smallest pull-type combine i can find rusting away around here and convert it to a stationary thresher…but it would be overkill for capacity and would take more power than i would prefer.

Fossil free would be nice, but i’m not sure a treadle thresher would be adequate for capacity.

Will you be using the ‘horse traction only’ as part of your marketing?

[sickle hocks]

Friendly thoughts and reality checks always most welcome! I’ve got a lot to learn and don’t need to bite off more than i can chew…:)

Tillage may well be the rate limiting factor. I was hoping I wouldn’t need to plow anything. I have a seven foot horse disc and I was going to take the outside discs off to make it a six footer and a more reasonable draft for a team. I suppose I’ll find it needs three abreast.

I want to eventually convert most of the acreage from annual forage into permanent pasture for just the scale reasons you are mentioning. I still have a bunch more rented out but there is some possibility that I could start to switch it over in bite-sized chunks over the years. I hoped to keep up with a lot of the initial weeds by grazing or mowing before they go to seed. Maybe I’ll need a tractor after all..

Keeping about five acres in intensive cultivation sounds about right…I was thinking about heirloom variety dry beans, exotic grains, garlic, maybe heirloom vegetables for seeds…???? need to find a unique niche, like you say…

curious what sort of crops you grow on your one acre plots? are they row crops? do you use a one horse walking cultivator? Thanks for your thoughts..

[sickle hocks]

I have some hills and I think I would need shafts. It probably makes sense to build a forecart and perhaps get a slightly bigger spreader.

This will be spring seeding. Broadcasting isn’t unheard of here, though more risky if it gets dry. I am curious about ‘frost seeding’ to get better contact…it doesn’t seem to be a common term here, but the big farmers use no-till air seeders or seed drills, so maybe it just isn’t thought about anymore.

Right now I have all native grassland or agronomic hayfield. Next spring I need to add 23 acres of tilled land. I want to seed some grass, but am not expecting much from it in year one. The rest goes into green manures to build up nitrogen and organics for cropping in 2012. I want to run the nutrients through my cattle and perhaps use intensive grazing to terminate some of the crops. I’m trying to research different mixes so I will have some fields for summer and some for late fall grazing, as well as some winter swath grazing. I also need to put up some greenfeed just in case.

I hope that the different crops will allow me to spread out the seeding over time so i can work more slowly and hit the rainy days better. I guess it’s all an experiment, really….oh, i found your thread on the roller, thanks..

With your two acres a day did that include multiple passes with your seeder?

murray

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