[Stable-Man]

Yeah, the land prices here appear to run about $100,000 an acre. Most of the sizable farms are many generations old. One interesting thing is we have a farmland preserve here since the county saw the ravages of development over the past 40 years, and I’m wondering what will happen if the farmers’ children don’t want to farm and they can’t develop more than 1 house per 40 acres. It’d be great if they had some kind of incentives program to get new people on the land, but I doubt that will happen. I have known several people that are interested in horses for riding but not in farming. It’s unfortunate to see land price kills the dream when nobody ever used to own land. Speculation and woefully sprawled towns are driving out existing farmers and preventing new ones from getting in.

Sanhestar–it sounds like a cool place you live in. For many years I’ve wanted to live in a village and work on a farm outside of it. I hope you can drive through the forests. One time I wanted to climb the highest mountain in MD but it was on private property.

I learned some of those skills hoping I could make or save some money off of them. Course what I learned was spinning takes a long time. I have some flax that I should spin for linen and leave the wool for felting (much quicker than spinning), but I think the wool I have is superwash, so it won’t felt. Leatherworking has produced a pair of ok-for-a-first-try boots and a leather hat too heavy for my neck.:rolleyes:

[Stable-Man]

@sanhestar 17082 wrote:

and I have to chime in again, because the time issue will be important for me when/if I should finally make another step towards draftanimalpower.

I’ve been thinking about the use of animals for traction during this whole winter. When the snow got so high that our Subaru wasn’t able to navigate the snowblows any longer and I had to use an old sled and snowshoes and MY power to get water and food out to the goats on winter pasture I strongly wished for a trained team of horses or oxen. When we weren’t able to get to the hay storage with the car for two weeks and again yesterday when we had to rely on our neighbor’s help to get the old horse trailer we use as shelter for the bucks out of the winter pasture to the new pasture. When I look at gas prices and heard that the German government plans to raise taxes on gas another 0.30 EUR over the next years.

But with our animals 8-12 kms away in summer on pastures I simply don’t know how to make a change work:

I either put the draft animals out on the same pastures and still have to use the car to get out there, using the drafts only to do “local” work – almost no saving in fuel costs

or

I stable/pasture the drafts near the house, using them to drive out to the pastures with considerable time efforts. I don’t want to go on the roads (speeding cars) and I can’t cut through the forest (privately owned, no carriages, etc. permitted) so I have to drive a large detour around the forest and the next town. And who will earn my money when I’m away half a day?

This year we had two storms with about 2 feet of snow for each and nobody could drive so they abandoned their cars on the roads. It’s interesting what one can do by slapping on snowshoes and walking.
It sounds like you live in town and have land out a ways? I saw a video in Britain of people driving carriages on the roads and the backup was a long one, same here with the Amish.

[Stable-Man]

@jac 17081 wrote:

Hey Stableman…. This is the kind of discussion i relish..I know how you feel regards the speed and time issue using draft animals.. My young nephew has started a new job 400 miles away from home on a 3000 acre farm in Oxfordshire. 3 men handle the whole operation with the largest equipment New Holland make, the combine broke the harvesting record last year I believe, and the tractors start at 300hp:eek:… then I look at my own implement shed and think …”is this all just a pipe dream ??? “. In answer to your page title WHAT CAN WE DO… I dont think we can do much more than we do already, keep the skills live in our own families so they are passed on to there children and so on. My own personal experience is you can tell folks over dinner that horses can do the job but you get the usual arguments against.. What i do now is shut up and just plug away and get the horses out,do the work I need to do. The neighbours all come to see what Im up to and are all quietly impressed with what horses can actualy achieve… However… As long as the world has cheap goods and steel from Asia I dont see the populace changing much. Like it or not the percieved wealth of the western world is built on other countries working for a lot less money than we do or in extreme cases outright theft. British Empire being a prime example.Change isnt going to happen overnight and im sad to say no one on this form might see the big change but if I have passed the skills and mindset over to my daughter then Im a happy man… In many ways this latest recession has slowed the change down. I have a friend who has a butchers shop that sells organic. He reports sales down because people can get a chicken that has spent its whole life standing in a shed with 50000 other birds to end up on the shelf for £2 {$3.00}.”Feeds” a family for a meal.. The organic bird can do that to and also make a great pan of soup as well… the other birds bones turn to plastic.. Enough ramblings…
John

Passing down knowledge is great but it only works if there’s a passer. Your daughter’s fortunate to have a dad that can fabricate implements and work with horses. My dad grew up in an old house and knows how to cut and hang doors, drywall, that kind of thing, but it’s not the same. I was surprised to figure out some people don’t even paint their own houses; they hire professionals. Old skills are dying which is why I do unusual stuff for a 20 year old guy like spinning and occasional leather work and attempt farm jobs instead of working at Best Buy. (I’m not the best with people anyhow).

Surprisingly enough, organics are doing best in cities–like downtown D.C.–because the people like being conscious of where their food comes from, although I believe most of their wine and cheese is outsourced. They also make more money than the surburban people so paying more for vegies and meat isn’t as much a problem.

I don’t have much of an answer for getting draft animals on the farm; an old book I have from 1927, used to educate farmers, asks that they measure the economics of having a tractor vs horses, and you won’t see that in any farming textbook now. It was, however, mentioned as an option in The Contrary Farmer ca. 1993. Having never worked with animals I don’t know how easy they are to train and their frustration factor compared to an affordable, and probably old, tractor, but it should be an option for the aspiring farmer; a team of trained oxen you can pick up for like 1200, maybe? A new big tractor will cost many times that much, a new, small tractor at least the same price. One puts out exhaust, the other manure. But I don’t need to go on.

[Stable-Man]

The H1 and 2 will become scrap. Even if we have alternative fuel, I doubt it will be cheap enough for the amount of driving most people do. The guy took a gamble on it but turned out an interesting product.

[Stable-Man]

I got a message from Stephanie, searched the url online, and it came up on a bunch of different forums. Too bad cuz it’s nice getting PMs sometimes….

[Stable-Man]

Geoff–Cordwood masonry is wood stacked like it’s in a pile with mortar between the logs like bricks. They also use sawdust between two lines of mortar for insulation, at least that’s what I remember from The Natural House. Straw bales can be structural and also used as infill. Straw bale might be a good option for JAC, or perhaps cob (Cob’s been used there supposedly).

[Stable-Man]

Very cool. I have some interest in the Vikings, mostly in their soddies. Up until sometime in the nineteen hundreds I believe, some of the farm houses were built from multiple structures and surrounded by sod and rocks for the thermal mass. Amazing how long some old “technologies” can persist.

[Stable-Man]

I read an article about a couple of people in NYC farming on the rooftop of a building. Engineer has to check for structural capability, but this kind of stuff is quite viable, I think. Those people sold mainly to restaurants, which I don’t think is the best route, but it’s a start. This link is even better b/c the dirt’s already there. For an even more weird future type thing check out sky farms. They’re only drawings now, but the idea’s the same: have food close to where the people are. Personally I think ground or rooftop is better since the investment is lower and surface crops would break up the man-made glass and concrete cities.

[Stable-Man]

I read somewhere a horse could put out 27 horsepower, but I don’t know how a horse compares with an ox. If that’s true 15hp per ox seems low.

[Stable-Man]

20, and no experience yet, but I’m trying to get work this spring at a farm, then want to use that experience to get another job working with draft animals if the career suits me. Thinking that oxen would be more interesting to work with, so that’s what I’ll look for.

[Stable-Man]

At some point oil fuel will be replaced with the “clean” hydrogen or something. The thing that I’m tied up in is this food needs to be shipped, either from America or Europe or someplace, to the countries that need food. These places are starving because they have too many people for their environments to support, so we import food to them which takes fuel. Yes, countries like the US produce enough food to feed many countries, but I think it’s important for these countries to sustain themselves. Influential sources are telling these people not to accept contraceptives so the starving is not going to decrease. For most of history population and food were in balance, but now it’s completely out of wack.

Anyway, smaller farms could produce the feed the world, also. There just need to be more farmers. America could attain the same amount of food without big ag but the fact is 2 million people are producing the food for over 300 million. A smaller farm leads to more intensive management so the need for roundup resistant crops etc. I have read old agriculture books that say over 200 bushels could be obtained with the old, opened pollinated corn if done a certain way…

[Stable-Man]

Yeah, I meant to say disk harrow. Like you said near horse, soil building’s going to be slow, even with a concentrated farming effort. Part of the problem may be that we want to get things done too quickly. Of course we kind of have to because of the immense world population and we depend on soil quality for survival.

[Stable-Man]

@near horse 15140 wrote:

Again, lots of food for thought here so I’ll try and add something. First – since soil microbial activity seems to be pretty important, do we know which groups or species predominate in “healthy” soils w/ good tilth? And, if so, how easy would it be to do an estimate of soil microbe presence or populations – instead of having an N P K soil test (probably better in conjunction with NPK)? Kind of like thinking of your soil like your compost pile – is it active? why or why not? what needs to change? ….

This kind of speaks to the dilemma of farming and harvesting in general. These actions aren’t natural. For example, the nutrients in a hayfield or a tree would never leave the site en masse as when we harvest those materials and it is also highly unlikely that fields would naturally be plowed and turned over in such short order (like a few days when we plow). So, what to do? We can try, as Carl says, to mimic natural processes as best we can and I think some of the forestry practices discussed on this site are great examples. But it us truly THE challenge before us to .

In “The Plowman’s Folly” (mentioned here at DAP by others), the effect of inverting the topsoil with a moldboard plow is unnatural, even if it doesn’t bring up subsoil. Instead, they encourage using a disc plow or now, a chisel plow. But they require increased HP in their use. The same can be said of the “No-till” drilling systems being pushed out here in the west. I think the engineering has come from the top down – in other words, “here’s this problem with moldboard plowing AND we have a 350 HP tractor at our disposal, so what can we do?” WE need to think, as Carl mentioned he does, “here’s this problem and I have draft animal power at my disposal, what can I do?”

I have to add that “if that’s the case, why are they trying to keep all that nature off of them in their A/C cab with digital surround-sound stereo and plush bucket seats, riding 8 feet off the ground at 8 mph?”:(

I guess my point in this is we are changing an ecosystem by doing what we do. We are continually resetting “natural succession” to a stage more desirable for our needs. For example, the 60 yr old forest plantation Carl mentions wouldn’t become a pasture or cropland on its own. It would likely become a climax woodland of whatever species fit in that area. But that’s not what he needs it to be and that’s fine and I’m sure he recognizes this.

Unfortunately, as bad a rap as moldboard plowing gets, it’s still something I really enjoy doing with my team. Perhaps I can keep it to skimplowing in green manure crops or something?:o

Can’t two horses disc plow? I don’t really know, but just from looking at pictures 2 seems like enough. Carl mentioned leaving the tree roots and stumps. The decay and roots near the surface probably keep compaction to a minimum. Looser soil could mean using regular equipment instead of heavy, expensive no till drills. Plowing, however, breaks the soil and makes it easier to compact. I think it’s likely we can create the forest/root system conditions by mulching crops and growing new crops in the mulch, and over time the soil becomes less compact and the organic matter extends deeper into the soil, and you don’t need 300hp to do it.

There aren’t many modern ag implements for the draft animal, but apparently one can hook up the cover crop roller to a team, and crop rollers have existed since the early 1900s.

So my point is it may take longer but crop/grass roots are probably all the keyline tillage that is necessary. These tractors that weigh I don’t even know how much are probably significant contributors. Since they weigh more than almost anything that would naturally tread on the soil, you need to take unnatural steps to fix problems to which they contribute.

[Stable-Man]

@mitchmaine 14949 wrote:

at the risk of preachin’ to the choir here i have to add that over the years i’ve seen alot of hopes and dreams shattered because of health insurance. young farmers moving up, living in a tent, growing food, in love with their lives. then the house and the kids and something to lose. then they got ya. few can buy health insurance with tomatos so they go back and get a real job. by the time anyone gets to a position of power in government, you’ve sold your soul to the highest bidder and they own you. sad but true

This whole debate hits home with me. In a couple years I’ll be kicked off my parents’ plan and probably won’t have a govt. job, meaning a private company is more likely to refuse me because of this pre-existing glaucoma(!) I have. I forgot who, and can’t get to it easily, but the poster who mentioned costs is right. The cost of care is just rediculous. Just about everything without insurance coverage must be well over a hundred bucks. Medicine is expensive with all the advertising. Advertising for medicine, to me, seems like a dumb idea anyway; I tell a doctor about a problem; they prescribe the medicine. You don’t go in and say, “I saw a commercial for Zoloft and think I need it.” Anyway, I quoted mitch because my career future is uncertain, and if I do like farming and persue it private insurance could take a chunk of my money if I can even get it.

As far as most people being lazy on welfare that’s a really broad generalization. It doesn’t pay great. People living in government housing or on welfare are far from coasting. I bet many of them work multiple jobs just to buy food or pay the rent. I’ve met people who are totally insensitive to the fact that we have a lot of people with generations of destitution behind them, and it’s not easy to just overcome and make a good life for yourself.

But back to the topic. One argument going around is that government is inefficient at running anything. Really? There are a ton of government jobs around here(D.C. duh), and while the private sector jobs went totally dead the government kept on going. It has provided my dad a job for 30 years and provided for several other members of my family. I highly doubt it’s any more corrupt than a private business. The point is part of healthcare could effectively be run by government.

[Stable-Man]

I’m in agreement with sanhestar there. Waterproof materials are usually made out of oil-based fibers very finely woven. You can oil leather to make it water resistant. The fao site talked about in one thread or another here shows a pretty uncomplex pad for the collar and suggests packing it with animal hair. In the countries that article is made for, jute and sisal bags are common and cheap.

Just did an eBay search for waterproof fabric (36″x59″) and it ranges from 1-7dollars.

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