[wild millers]

Actually it would only mean switching the design of the jockey yokes not all the neck yokes…

[wild millers]

OK I located the other thread that George started recently. I apologize for such a similar post now that I see it. Good comments and feed back there from what also sounds like a surprising and scary situation.

My side facing spring clips are what came stock with this harness I had made 2 years ago. I have seen these down facing hooks before but not thought about them or their differences. I like the idea of switching over, it will mean that I would have to change all of my neck yokes…a process that will have to take some time.

In the mean time I will be unhitching and tying off properly if needed on the job from now on.

[wild millers]

Having a well trained work horse is so dependent on the ground work and foundation training laid out in the early years. I can see that having a well trained boar would come from the same approach. That’s impressive to think of you leading him around the pastures like that. That speaks to how respect is built both ways from a working relationship between man and animal.

And yes, that was fresh semen we used, that’s why it could be kept in an insulated package at 60 degrees for up to 6 days.

[wild millers]

Our Tamworth sow was easy to work with and was very obvious about her heat cycles. I think that getting your timing right is probably the hardest part of AI. Mostly, timing your semen order appropriately so that it arrives within a day or two of when she goes into heat again. (21 day cycle)
Shipping cost is extreme. We chose Berkshire semen for a cross that worked really well with our pure bred Tam. It ran about $10 for 2 straws of Berk. (You inseminate twice, once 12 hours after you see her come into heat, and again 12 hours later.) The shipping has been $80. I have only used the mushroom looking insemination rod. International calls it the golden pig rod. Getting it to “lock in” is not hard to do and it will be obvious when it has happened because with her contractions the semen will be drawn from the tube, you should not squeeze at all. This process takes from 3-5 minutes. A sow truly in heat will stand quite still that long especially if you are applying back pressure as you work. (In our case Annalisa would sit on her back while I worked)

We would get two litters per year from our sow with AI, she farrowed and raised from 8-12 piglets per litter for us. Never had trouble finding homes for the a robust healthy pig. So for $180 worth of breeding expenses per year we would usually sell around $1500-$2000 worth of piglets. Keep two of the best looking ones for ourselves, and sell their meat as part of our CSA offerings.

Jared, depending on how many sows that need to be bred, and especially if their heat cycles are all very different then the shipping would add up quickly. It is said that the semen will keep for 6 days at 60 degrees. AI is a little risky because you have to be so diligent about watching heat cycles and if you order that semen it better be worth it! Even so I have not/will not keep a boar even for a few sows primarily because of the added management of keeping such a large potentially dangerous animal around my family. I know that temperament is largely animal dependent and there are some very sweet boars out there, but a friend of ours used to keep a “sweet” boar until one day when a sow was in heat and the farmer was working in the pen, the boar came from behind and gored him through the ham string. This would also depend on the type of infrastructure you have for feeding watering and housing these animals. We have never had a proper pig barn of any kind to safely handle and move the animals around. I guess being properly set up to handle and feed a boar would make quite a difference.

Farrowing time was always a pretty exciting community even for us. Pretty magical.
Good luck.

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[wild millers]

Hi Mark,

If you are interested..

http://www.internationalboarsemen.us/

They have been very helpful to us in the past and we had a 100% AI success rate with our sows over the course of two years with these folks. (6 litters of pigs I believe) They will send you a free AI instructional video if you ask for it and the process is actually quite simple. Good luck -Joel

[wild millers]

Thanks for the note Jeroen.

Mark, That cross sounds like it will bring you a very hardy critter! Hope she carries well for you, we’ll look forward to hearing what she has.

Half a dozen maples in the dooryard will keep our woodstove boiling down sap for our family at the new farm. We sold all our sugaring equipment except 15 buckets before the move. I’m shifting my commercial sugaring energy to more firewood production, I’m excited for the new challenges and system planning that will come with that.

[wild millers]

I should say that really our design is also largely based on our topography and landscape. That and a lack of any real barn or barnyard at this farm.

[wild millers]

Jesse, our horse grazing management for our market garden is focused on simplicity, rotations to keep the pastures producing, but most of all, time saving in as many ways as possible. We have done this by building a permanent woven wire paddock on a hillside about 1/8th of an acre in size that is fairly central to our gardens and pastures. This paddock is semi sacrificial. It has shade, and a frost free hydrant nearest to the barn. There are gates on all sides of the paddock, some times more than one. They all correspond to headlands and lane ways of the adjacent gardens. A single strand of aluminum wire runs the top of the woven wire fence to carry a charge. We use alligator clips to pull off of this wire for a charge and set up our fences (single strand electric tape with step in posts) to tie into the gates of this pasture. These fences go down and up pretty quickly and when one is set up and the gate opened, the horses have access to the fresh pasture but can also walk back to the shade and water whenever they want. At a whistle, they come from any pasture they are in back to the water trough to be let in to the stable for working at a moments notice. These fences get moved once or twice a week, and we just make sure to set them up on headlands that we know won’t be cultivated or plowed during that grazing period.

We do use electric tape to section out the central paddock into smaller sections to let parts of it rest and re-grow. When we have to go away for a day (or two) it is awful nice to have that solid fenced paddock with a little reserved grazing in it to keep the horses in while we are not at the farm.

One unfortunate detail to this system is when plowing with the walking plow, it is only a matter of time before the plow handles find a pile of manure in the headlands.

Good luck, happy grazing!

[wild millers]

Erika, Thanks for bringing that down for Abner to see. I have thought about it in the past but haven’t got a laptop to bring.

When they made my harnesses, last winter, they were very helpful and didn’t mind doing a few custom adjustments to them for me. I had them make me a larger jack saddle with built in padding.

Recently I have realized, like you said, that the lazy jack straps for the jockey yoke are much too short and very over built. I would like to replace them with something longer and possibly lighter. I have been looking around old harness piles hoping to just find a light duty strap that is longer, but haven’t found one yet. I guess until I find something appropriate we could just use some bailing twine as Les suggests in his video.

Before ordering our harnesses I had spoken with Les about D-ring customizations and he had warned me of the 24″ short tugs. He suggested 22″ to fit our suffolks and that is what I ordered. They do billow a little bit when there is no load, but I wouldn’t say that it affects our ability to tighten the hitch between the yoke and evener. This is something I will be watching closely as the boys continue to grow.

Overall though I have to say that we have been very happy with our new harnesses from Peach Lane. We got the nylon version, they are holding up great, were very reasonably priced and fit very well.

Nice to think of Abner and Mose getting a chuckle and some new information out of the video.

[wild millers]

George

I enjoyed watching that, thanks for sharing.

Carl

I thought maybe you would have stirred your coffee with your thumb. 🙂

[wild millers]

Those same reasons are why we use a trailer instead of a scoot of some sort. Trees in the woods and trees on the road. At one point we did try strapping snowmobile skis to the for cart tires using the straps from a car dolly and welding down some brackets on the skis to attach the straps into. It seemed like it might work..but it was a mess. Couldn’t handle sharp turns, and had trouble backing up. In the end a semi packed trail through the woods snow was not all that bad to travel over and that is what we do now.

I was curious what every one is using for wood? What species, how and when you process, also how you store it.

This is the first year that we have wood that I’m really happy to be using. It is all Basswood and Poplar. We had a big multi-trunk Basswood blow down not far from the sugar house last year and decided to try it for sugar wood. Not really a species we would want to use in the house stove since it is fairly light and “soft” It was such a joy to work, easy to cut, easy to split. The same can be said for the Poplar that we cut and processed at the same time. (At that point we were hand splitting everything and pine can be such a bear to hand split.) We were cutting and skidding logs next to the sugar house all season last year during off days or mornings before we would collect sap. Ended up getting it all stacked and under cover by the end of April and this is the first year we used metal roofing to cover the pile instead of tarps (what a mess) We built the pile two pallets deep and stacked the wood to pitch from the south face down to the north face slightly and covered with used metal roofing. As we access wood this year it is all dry as matchsticks, best of all, when you move through the pile we can simply push back a sheet of metal roofing in sort of a telescoping roof system. Without a proper wood shed I think this is definitely the best system we have had yet. We got the idea from another sugar maker friend.

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Mark- I have been mostly very pleased with the poly tank for collecting with the horses. It is a little high to dump into though sitting up on that cart. I guess if I was re-designing, it would be nice to figure out a way to set it lower. One reason I have kept is so high though is because when we’re unloading the tank at the sugar house I just open the valve and drain into a bucket, and that bucket has to be able to fit under the valve. We then hand carry each bucket up to the bulk tank. Labor intensive I know, but it works and we haven’t had to buy a pump yet.

One nice thing about the cart we have the tank sitting on is that when were emptying the sap it is a quick job to pull the hitch pin from the for cart, chock the wheels, and tip the tank up to drain those last few gallons of sap that can be so frustrating to get out otherwise.

The slosh really doesn’t seem to bother the horses, in fact I don’t even feel it very much while standing on the for cart. Also have never had a problem with sap sloshing out because of the round sides of the tank and small opening up top. We hang a wire rimmed cone filter inside that opening which buffers the splashes too. If the tank is getting real full I may half screw the lid on before traversing rough ground or going up a bumpy hill..

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We have been going out collecting a lot recently, mostly to save what little sap did run during the middle of the day from freezing overnight. Did finish our 15th gallon of syrup last night though! Looking forward to some more warm weather to come..

[wild millers]

We do use the wheeled rig in the woods as well. Usually if there is a lot of snow I will go through with our scraper blade behind the forcart and open up a path for the team to walk through. I do collect sap in the woods first though to avoid having to pull a full tank through the snow with those narrow steel wheels!

We are boiling in a used 2X6 evaporator that we got for $2400 a few years back. Not the best but it works..

Also it should be said that our situation is unique because our operation is on family land and we trade syrup for the ability to tap the trees.

Is that a 3X8 your boiling on? Looks like a nice setup.

[wild millers]

Hi Ed, so neat to have all those historic family photographs of your homesteading traditions. Thanks for sharing.

Like you, we focus on keeping our overhead costs down and sell all of our syrup through our farm store at retail prices. This is only our 5th season as first gen. syrup makers but we have built up our production debt free by investing back a little of the syrup sales each year. (It is tempting to over invest though! There is no end to the amount of money that could be spent on a sugaring setup!) I guess we have relied more on our youth and sweat equity to make up for the lack of specialized equipment purchases. Though we are small, 215 buckets, we rely on our own labor, our own firewood and collect using the team. At the end of the day all I have to make back now is covering our labor and the price of filters/bottles etc.

Last year we made 50 gallons or so and we hope to do better this year with a few more buckets, though by this time last year we had made about 15 gallons already. All of our syrup gets bottled in pint or quart containers so that it spreads out our limited supply to all of our CSA members and we get $11 a pint, $20 a quart which is much more worth our while than larger containers.

At this scale it is still a lot of fun for us and we are able to keep up with the other things that need attending to in the spring to get ready for our vegetable growing season to come. I find that is is incredibly good training for our young team since they get harnessed almost every day for 6 weeks or so, drive the same route, stop in the same places, stand and wait for me to collect buckets and their load gets progressivly heavier.

Because about a third of our taps are handy to our driveway, we can’t use a sled to collect sap because there is no snow on the pavement. So I will attach a few pictures of the rig we came up with for collecting. It works in the woods, where I have used our scraper blade to open a trail and it works great on the roadways. All in all it takes us about one hour from harnessing to unharnessing to collect all of our buckets with the team this way.

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