Muck Boot Endorsement

A couple of weeks ago I got an email from Muck Boots Online
offering to send me a free pair of muck boots in exchange for a review on the blog and a link to their site. Their thought was to have some farmers with blogs put the boots through their paces and report back with their findings.

Being that we have had rain something like 19 of the last 28 days I have had plenty of muck and high wet grass to try them out in. Muck Boots have my ringing endorsement. They are quite comfortable (I have had them on all day most days since it has been so wet), and the treads are aggressive enough to keep me upright on the perilous chicken manure slick that is left after I move the pasture pens. The boots I got (The 15 inch Hoser model) have the top part made out of something that is stretchy enough to fit over my burly man gams, and breathable enough that they don't get very sweaty like boots that are rubber all the way to the top do. They really are nice.

All I can hope now is that the people at John Deere and New Holland aren't asleep at the switch. I would be open to giving a review on a tractor (70 horsepower or greater please) and a new hay mower. Or a cattle trailer. Really, I'm open to all offers.

(Drilling) Mud Puppy

Tibby After a Bath

Tibby our old (13) Black Lab /Dalmatian doesn't like loud noises. Last night a thunderstorm blew through and there was one particular clap of thunder that seemed to knock everyone in the neighborhood out of bed.
Well, when I got out this morning I didn't see Tibby anywhere, but I didn't really think anything of it.
Then about 6:30 the phone rang and it was one of the guys from the gas well drilling rig about 3/4 of a mile to the east of us. He told me that they had spotted this dog cowering down in their drilling mud pit and had pulled her out, and got our number off of her collar, which I thought was pretty nice. My understanding of the drilling mud was that it was a slurry of clay and water that they use to cool the drilling bits, but I figured I had better call Cabot and make sure I didn't need I Hazmat suit on to give her a bath. They told me that's all it is, so here's hoping it's true.


The Well Site from Clodhopper Farm

Bubbles + This Cow = White Calf

This afternoon I was up planting some plants in the pool when I noticed a cow down in the pasture with a very wobbily legged white calf trying to get it's act together. Last year we had this calf born which I found kind of surprising. I wasn't quite as surprised this time, and probably won't be at all the next time. Last years calf ended up growing horns, which is also unusual for our largely polled (genetically hornless) cattle, so I will be interested to see what this one does. I can hardly wait until next year to see if I hit the white calf trifecta.



In other interesting bovine related news, a week or so ago when I got to the barn in the morning there was a dead newborn calf laying in the Cow Shed East. That is the shed where my young cattle spend there winter, so there should not have been anything that was old enough to have been bred. A year of age is really about the earliest that we would expect a heifer to start coming into heat, and if left to their own devices they generally won't calve for the first time until close to their second birthday, which would put their breeding age at about 15 months. The heifer that delivered this calf was only about 14 months old, and the calf was fully formed, so it seems that somehow she got bred at about 5 months. I hate to have lost the calf, but I am really happy to have not lost the heifer as well. She seems to have bounced right back from it. As you can see from the picture, she (number 5) is still pretty tiny compared to a mature cow.

Will Farrow

If you look carefully you will notice that the above photo is not actually a mirror image. We had four bred sows (gilts actually) that we have been expecting to farrow sometime this month. Yesterday afternoon the first one started and ended up having six pigs, five white and one black. I thought that the second one would go later that night, and when I checked on her at 3 she also had five white ones and one black one. That one ended up having two more black ones for a total of eight. So far they have both been good mothers and haven't sat on any.

"Dark Age Technology" or "Cattle Panels are Garbage"

This fall when I moved the cows into the Cow Shed East that we built last winter I opted to take the quick and easy option of buying cattle panels to use as fencing. I am sure that the cattle panel company would have offered a warning that these panels need a little more in the way of support than I was offering them, but we had abused them in the past with pretty good results. And since I was short on time and not absolutely broke I figured even at $38 dollars a piece that the panels were the way to go. Somewhere along the line though they decided to stop bothering to really weld them together, and a few short months after installing them I realized it was going to be money not well spent.





So last week I went back to using dark age technology (with a few modern twists) and cut a bunch of wooden poles out of the woods, which I attached to the shed posts with pieces of angle iron with steel loops welded to them to hold the poles.

Fire on the Mountain

Last night we went down to see Farmer Todd's newborn kid goat. After a while the kids (human) all ran off to play, and minutes later they came running back to tell us about the big fire. Sure enough there was a big billowing fire up at one of the gas drilling rigs we can see from the house. Apparently when they get done drilling a well they have to burn off some of the gas for some reason. They call it flaring.

Farmer Todd and I walked over there this morning and here is what we saw. The drilling rig in the foreground of the top photo is from a different well than the one that is being flared.

Pounding the Pavement

As I mentioned about a year ago, we are in the midst of a natural gas rush here in NE Pa. We now have two drilling rigs within sight (and earshot) and a third well pad that is only about 3/4 of a mile from us that we have an unobstructed view of(above photo).






In the past two weeks we have had a lot of seismic testing taking place which involves the running of miles and miles of cable along the road, and a convoy of four thumper trucks that lift themselves off of the ground with some sort of pad that sends seismic shock waves down through the road. I guess that they are measuring the thickness of the Marcellus shale layer that contains the natural gas. The thumper trucks went by here today. It looked like they were doing the Conga. "How thick is the Mar-cel-lus,.. how thick is the Mar-cel-lus".

Sweet

Maple syrup season started about three weeks back. I decided this year to put out about 25 taps which should in theory get us the 5 or 6 gallons of syrup that we seem to consume every year (kids eat lots of waffles). I had 5 tap and bucket sets from last year, and I added the other 20 in the form of white plastic food buckets (mostly blueberry pie filling) connected to the trees with sap tubing and tubing spiles that I got from the neighbors at Loch's Maple. This is the first time I have used sap tubing for it's intended use. I mostly use it for watering livestock. Big maple producers like the Lochs run the sap from many trees down into a central collection tank, but I opted to just drop 2 or 3 taps from one tree into a bucket.





I have my evaporator setup up at Sap House Bill's sugar shack, under the assumption that two guys hanging around feeding fires together would be better than two guy's doing the same separately. My evaporator is built out of a heating oil tank that I cut part of the top off of so that an evaporator pan that I traded a half of a pig for would sit on it. It has a door for feeding the fire and a stovepipe connected in the back. So far after 2 firings I have about two and a half gallons of syrup, and we haven't quite got into a heavy sap flow yet.