Clodhopper Farm

Bursting

2011-04-18T07:30:00.002-04:00

I guess Spring must be here judging by the way things are starting to pop. We got our first batch of 200 broiler chicks almost two weeks ago, and there should be another batch of 200 here on Wednesday of this week. Then another 200 every other week until the beginning of September. This first batch should be heading out on pasture next week as long as the weather looks half decent.

The goats actually have been kidding off and on since February. I've lost count of how many kids there are at this point, but I'd guess it's somewhere near a dozen.

Bubbles the bull went back in with the cows on the 4th of July, which according to the gestation chart would make the due date of any cow bred on that date the 12th of April. By the 15th of April we had 9 calves on the ground. I guess Bubbles didn't waste any time. Unfortunately for him I'll be keeping him sequestered for an extra 2 weeks this year because it works out much better for me (and the cows) to have the calves born out on pasture. This year, and most years really, we just aren't quite into grass season by the middle of April.

Dog Days of Winter

2011-03-30T10:35:00.008-04:00

Our dog population is generally pretty stable. Up until last fall we hadn't had any additions or subtractions for about 4 years.

Tibby
Then last September we decided that we needed to put down Tibby, our 14 1/2 year old Lab/Dalmation. She had gotten to the point that she wasn't able to get up on her own a lot of the time.

Banjo
In November our Australian Shepherd Banjo got hit and killed right in front of the house. Whoever hit him left him laying in the middle of the road. He was the best dog we ever had, great with kids and guests, and just starting to hit his stride with herding livestock.

Sheila
That left us with only one dog, Sheila. She is a good dog too, but has no real herding instincts, so we decided we should try to find another Aussie pup.

Piper
After seeing an add in one of the local farming papers, we went down to look at a litter of "Aussie" pups, and ended up picking out this one, who we named Piper. The next day we realized that it didn't matter what we called her, because she was completely deaf. We decided that it was too dangerous (for her) to have a dog that couldn't hear livestock or machinery coming up behind her, so we returned her and brought home one of her litter mates. She ended up with an older couple with a fenced in yard.

Finn
Finn, who is a brother to Piper is kind of a strange little dog. He was supposed to be a pure bred Australian Shepherd, but he never quite looked the part, so we decided it might be fun to have him DNA tested. His father appears to be all Aussie, but the mother's side seemed to be so mixed up that the only thing the test could isolate was that one of her grandparents might have been a Sheltie. Then the other day Sap House Bill pointed out an article in a magazine that had a breed of dog called a McNab Sheepdog. These McNabs look an awful lot like Finn, and even more so like his mother.
Finn is a pretty aloof dog, preferring the company of Sheila over people. He does have pretty good herding instincts (a bit of a Napoleon Complex though), but he may not be willing to leave Sheila long enough to use them. I think we'll be able to work with him though.

Rosie
At this point, I am sure that some people would argue that 2 dogs is probably enough, but when someone let me know that there was an Australian Shepherd up at the pound I figured I'd better go have a look. Rosie seemed like she would be a good third dog until she lunged at a couple of the kids without provocation. She was probably a salvageable dog, but we weren't willing to risk someone getting bit, so ended up returning her to the pound. I watched their website for a few weeks after and she went out and was returned a couple of times after that, so I guess we weren't the only ones that thought she wasn't trustworthy.

Melvin
Then, last Sunday we went down to see Mel, an Aussie who had been returned to his breeder because of a divorce. It looks like he is going to work out to be a good fit. As far as we can tell he's pretty much bombproof around kids, and anyone else for that matter. He is a bit of a counter surfer, but we are hoping to be able to break him of that. He has some interest in livestock but I haven't had a good chance to see what he is going to do.

Melvin, Finn, and Sheila
So, barring any bad luck, this looks like it should be the lineup for awhile.

Friends in High Places

2010-06-24T16:18:00.003-04:00

Our friend, Michael Poster has been taking photographs for his Backroads Project.
Recently he has started going up in a helicopter to document the natural gas drilling that is going on around here.
These are some pictures of Clodhopper Farm that he took while flying over last week. Everything looks so much flatter from above.

Diplomatic Immunity

2010-05-06T08:54:00.003-04:00

Hello, hello, is this thing on?

A couple of days ago something something started picking off my new batch of laying pullets at night. I was having a hard time figuring out what kind of predator I was looking for, so my neighbor Dick lent me his motion activated camera and I set it up last night. Looks like the suspect is a Great Horned Owl. I can't do anything about him, so I will just have to tighten up the chicken pens. They are pretty tight around the bottoms, but there is a spot over the door where something (like an owl) could fly in. Especially if it could see well at night.

Calving 2010

2010-05-04T08:10:00.004-04:00

Here is the first calf of 2010, from back on April 11th. We are now up to 10 calves (I think, I haven't checked yet today) with about 9 or 10 more to go. So far there have been no calving problems.

Half Lazy

2010-03-05T19:04:00.002-05:00

I had a tri-axle load of firewood logs delivered today, which should be enough wood to heat the house for probably one and a half or two winters. This buying firewood is kind of a new thing for me, but we have very little wooded land and we were starting to get to the point where it was a real struggle to find enough without depleting the woods. Of course this is just half lazy because I still need to cut, split and stack the stuff.

Contractor for a Winter

2010-02-23T06:44:00.005-05:00

This last fall we decided that we'd like to put an addition onto the house in the form of a great room connected to the kitchen. We broke ground in the middle of November, and have been working on it even since. Luckily the weather has been pretty cooperative here. We have had some cold days but not much snow. But now the we are headed toward spring I need to put a push on to get finished up before the farming season gets here.

The Second Annual Sausage Fest

2009-12-09T17:45:00.006-05:00

The Guest of Honor (Photo by Michael Poster)

Splitting the carcass

Hooligan's ribs

Festivites

Standing around wondering what needs to be done

Grinding

Stuffing

The final product

This last weekend we had the second annual sausage fest (I'd call it Sausage Fest 2009 but I think the first one was January 2009). In attendance were Sap House Bill, Matt the Vegetarian Butcher, Farmer Todd, Budgie Joe, and the Tile Hooligans.

We started about noon on Saturday with the dispatching of the hog, and by 3:30 it was hanging to chill over night. The weather turned out to be just about perfect (25 degrees) to chill the carcass.

Sunday morning we started at 8 with boning out all the meat, and got the grill going to cook the ribs. We made the three kinds of sausage again this time, a Mexican chorizo, a sweet Italian, and a breakfast. It ended up to be about 100 lbs of sausage all together.

I've Got Nothing

2009-09-10T07:46:00.007-04:00

I don't have anything to say, but here's some photos.

Drunken Sailor

2009-07-31T11:10:00.008-04:00

I have been on a bit of a spree this last week. We have been in pretty desperate need of a better hay mower for some time now, so I had been on the lookout for one, but hadn't found anything very good in my price range. I was also lamenting the fact that one tractor isn't really enough to run this type of farm. In addition to the Oliver loader tractor we have all I've got is a 1947 John Deere A that runs fine, but just doesn't have the weight or horsepower to really do the job.

Frank's dog Oscar

So when my buddy Frank, who deals in used farm machinery called me to tell me he had a 1975 David Brown 1210 available at a pretty good price I just couldn't resist. Who knows, maybe it's a midlife crisis that made me buy a little English sports tractor. But anyway, we put it on the dynometer and it tested at 68 horsepower (the Oliver came in 20 HP short of the 66 HP it is supposed to have), and everything seems to work on it other than some minor rewiring that is needed for the lights. Heck, the brakes even work (unlike the Oliver).

Then of course, as soon as I had pulled the trigger on that deal I found a really good hay mower that was in my price range so I ended up getting that as well.
Now if it ever stops raining we will be ready to go.

Added 8/2/09- I must have done something to anger the Haybine Gods in a former life. I got around the field 1 and a half times before this machine broke down yesterday. New parts are on their way for a mere $220.

Roll' em

2009-07-18T16:16:00.006-04:00

The combination of lousy haymaking weather, my geriatric farm machinery and the fact that I am starting to feel old after a long day of stacking hay bales has inspired me to give round bales a try. Our neighbors Randy and Jamie Loch have a flock of sheep in addition to their Maple syrup and fiber mill businesses, so they have a round baler like almost every one around here but me. We are basically stuck in the sixties machinery wise. Anyway, we do a fair amount of barter with the Lochs, generally meat for machine and operator hire. Since I needed to get some of our first cutting done quickly I thought that having Randy round bale it would be the quickest option. And then our hay mower fell and broke her hip, so Randy ended up mowing it with the discbine that he uses as well.

I picked up a round bale spear to mount on the tractor front end loader so I should be ready to start hauling the 75 bales or so out of the field by this afternoon.

Muck Boot Endorsement

2009-06-19T20:51:00.014-04:00

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

2009-06-09T20:37:00.008-04:00

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

2009-05-06T21:18:00.008-04:00

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

2009-04-06T17:24:00.002-04:00

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"

2009-04-06T16:20:00.006-04:00

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

2009-03-25T06:43:00.004-04:00

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

2009-03-15T15:09:00.006-04:00

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

2009-03-12T12:04:00.006-04:00

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.

They Were Just Kidding

2009-02-17T19:07:00.006-05:00

It's been a big 24 hours in the goat department. For the most part I just ignore them and let them steal whatever it is that they want to eat. About a week ago though I decided that I thought they might be getting close to having their kids so I penned them up down in the lower barn. Yesterday afternoon while I was doing chores I noticed one of them standing by herself over in the corner of the pen, which is usually a sign that something is up. When I went in to check it out this is what I saw.

Then while we were down oohing and ahhing my wife noticed that one of the other does was looking kind of close. That one didn't do as well. When I went down to check her later that night she was in trouble. She had one head and four legs sticking out of the back of her. Both kids were trying to get out at the same time and were stuck. I was able to get one of them pushed back in far enough to deliver the other, and then there was no problem with getting the second one out. I think if I had checked a few hours earlier the kids would have been fine, but both of them ended up dying. They never were able to get to their feet. I offered the loan of the mother to Farmer Todd and family for a milk goat, so that's where she is now, until they come to their senses at least.

Then the third doe we have looked like she was thinking about it this afternoon while all the neighborhood kids (human) were down looking at the first set of baby goats. When I checked again an hour later her twins were out and up nursing. We have one more doe (a yearling) who I think is a little way off yet.

Recapitated

2009-02-04T14:46:00.003-05:00

*****WARNING-THIS IS GOING TO BE VERY BORING ********

Last fall while I was clipping one of the pastures the motor on our one good tractor started to hammer in a way that made it pretty obvious that something had gone terribly wrong. I shut the tractor down as fast as I could, but not before the damage was done. It turned out that the head broke off of one of the valves

Early this winter I got the tractor pulled into the garage and pulled the cylinder head off to see what the story was going to be. It could of been worse, but it could have been better too. When the valve broke it cracked the piston that it belonged to, but pieces of the broken valve traveled into other cylinders through the intake manifold, and ended up getting melted into several of the other pistons. After consulting with several people who know about these things, I decided that the thing to do would be to have an automotive machine shop do a minimal head rebuild, and replace the cracked piston and the worst one of the others that was damaged. About a month or so ago I got the new pistons in, and the head back on. I've got maybe ten hours of running time on the tractor since then, and so far so good. Altogether the repair cost about $1400, excluding my time, which as always is free.

Sausage Fest

2009-01-09T08:04:00.004-05:00

During the week between Christmas and New Years I held the first annual(?) Clodhopper Sausage Fest. Our friend Matt, who helps me with chicken butchering was interested in getting a half of a pig from me and making a few different kinds of sausage out of the whole thing. I thought it sounded like an event, so we went whole hog. Also participating were Sap House Bill and Budgie Joe (who caught my daughters escaped parakeet with a butterfly net, while standing in the front end loader bucket 10 feet off the ground a few years back).

Sausage Fest is a two day event. The first day involves getting the hog to the point where it can hang overnight to cool. On the second day we started early boning the whole thing out, cutting the meat and some of the lard into small enough pieces to go through the old Hobart meat grinder I found in a barn I was tearing down. I don't know how old it is, but it is painted red with nice pin striping, so I am guessing probably 100 years. Might be the first electric one they made. It weighs 250lbs.

After we had all the meat and lard ground we weighed out the right amount of each, measured the spices, garlic, etc, and got it all mixed together. Then the sausage meat got pressed through the Enterprise lard press (same pin striping as the grinder) into sausage casings and twisted into links.
We ended up making Mexican Chorizo, Irish Breakfast, and Sweet Italian sausages. 115 lbs altogether.

Infomercial

2008-12-12T06:19:00.004-05:00

If you're like me, you are tired of all the hassles and drudgery that go along with watering cattle in the wintertime. There is the leaking float valve and accompanying mud bog, the endless knocking of ice out of the barrel. Or worse, the old cast iron bathtub that grows thicker and thicker with ice until it only hold a few gallons of water. There's the frozen pipes and the frozen hoses that have to be taken up to the house to thaw.

But now there is a better way. Thanks to Miraco and their revolutionary Mirafount water system, you can say goodbye to all those heartbreaks forever. Gone for good are the whole days wasted, with wet cold hands, fighting to get the water running to your cows, as they bawl and knock you around in the slop.

Miraco's patented design works without an added heat source, so it won't run up your electric bill or add to global warming. It relies on a well insulated polymer tank mounted over a heat well, which uses the heat of the earth below the frost line to keep the pipe thawed. Add to that the exchange of water in the tank as the cows drink and you have a winning combination, which will give years of trouble free service. The blue floating balls help to keep the warmth in the tank, and are easily pushed out of the way by the cows as they drink clean, refeshing water.

I am so confident that you'll love the Mirafount as much as I do that I'll tell you to buy one youself. If you're not completely satisfied there must be something wrong with you and I don't want to hear about it. Act now and you will have your Mirafount a day sooner than if you act tomorrow.

(Miraco; Please make checks payable to Clodhopper Farm)

Turks

2008-11-27T21:40:00.005-05:00

We had a really good turkey year this year. Other than the poults being lost in the mail for a few days, there was very little drama involved at all. The last week they were out was a bit of a hassle because the weather got cold enough to freeze the above ground water lines that work so well about 7 months out of the year, but I kind of assumed that having turkeys out on pasture into the end of November was going to pose some frozen water problems sooner or later. Surprisingly this is the first year out of the past five that we had to haul the turkeys water for more than a day or so. According to my calculations, 118 sixteen week old turkeys drink about 60 gallons of water per day in sub freezing temperatures.

Other than that the whole endevor was a cake walk. On Tuesday we butchered all 118 birds starting at about 8:30am and finishing up at 4:30pm, with about an hour out for lunch. We had a great crew of 5 plus me. It looks like the turkeys averaged about 16 or 17 pounds.

By 8pm just about all the birds had been picked up by our customers and we were in watching the Peanuts Thanksgiving special with the kids.

Month in a Minute

2008-08-25T06:17:00.003-04:00

Here's a quick list of what has happened around here in the month since I last posted.

1) Took the family to the beach for 3 days. Stayed with our friends Kristin, Saphouse Bill, and Isaac. Had a great time and great weather. Tore a rotator cuff body surfing.

2) Traded the Tile Hooligans a roasting pig and 8 chickens for a golf cart. It is the ideal form of on the farm transportation.

3) Made about 3900 bales of first cutting hay during a pretty wet summer. Some of it isn't the best, but it's in the barn.

4) Waged war with the old haybine mower we used to use and wanted to use again because it cuts closer to the ground and is more fuel efficient (wider cut, uses less horse power than the Cutditioner) but was in rough shape. We currently have a cease fire agreement.

5) Baled 500 bales of pretty nice second cutting hay (so far).

6) Thought I had blown up the motor in our 1650 Oliver tractor, which is really the only "good" tractor we have. Turns out it has a broken valve which may cost a few hundred dollars to fix, but shouldn't be the death of the tractor.

7) Had a nervous few days waiting for the Postal Service to figure out what they did with my 140 turkey poults. They were shipped on a Monday afternoon. They showed up Thursday morning. None were dead and they had grown quite a bit during their time in the box.

8) Had it brought to my attention that there is still plenty to learn about raising pastured poultry when one of the batches suffered a high mortality rate due to Coccidiosis. The hatchery is now innoculating our chicks by spraying a small dose of Cocci over the chicks when they hatch, which should increase their resistence to this protozoan organism.

9) Built the dock for the Natural Swimming pool. The water quality has been unbelievably good. My oldest daughter spotted an earring back at the bottom of the deep end (7 feet) from the dock and dove down and got it.

10) In 45 minutes all 3 kids will be getting on the schoolbus. I'll be getting back to being a full time farmer. It might get a little lonely though. I am hoping that I still remember how to work.

Meet the Farmer

2008-07-22T06:21:00.005-04:00

Last Thursday was the night for our "Meet the Farmer Dinner" at the Summerhouse Grill in Montrose (www.summerhousegrill.com). We shared the night with Sue Abbott who runs a CSA garden over in New Milford. It is always interesting to see what someone who can really cook can do with the ingredients we supply, and Thom and Justin made an incredible meal.

Our friend Marilyn Anthony started up the Summerhouse in refurbished carriage house up in Montrose about three years ago with the main goal of serving great food made as much from locally produced ingredients as possible. Having them in the area has been really good for a lot of the small farms in the area who are producing meat, vegetables, maple syrup, etc. In addition to selling our products to the restaurant, we also end up with new customers who first learned about us at the Summerhouse Grill.

But in addition to having a great meal, it is also kind of fun to be a "celebrity" for a night. We got a chance to shake a lot of hands and talk to a lot of people about Clodhopper Farm. I think there were about 60 people at the dinner. Afterward we ended up having a little jam session.

Aquatic Life

2008-06-19T07:13:00.002-04:00

Gone Around the Bend

2008-05-13T08:06:00.005-04:00

Well, I've been threatening to do it for some time, but on Sunday I finally pulled the trigger. I got some goats. Someone should probably think about assigning Power of Attorney for me.

Back in the 50's some governmental genius imported a bush called Multiflora Rose from Asia, with the notion that it would be the living fence to end all living fences. This bush is so mean that a starving cow wouldn't even go through it to get to grass on the other side. I'm sure it sounded like a great idea at the time, but what they failed to realize it that it produces lots of little berries that the birds eat. The seeds pass through the birds unharmed, then everywhere the birds crap becomes a potential seed bed for a new MFR bush. We have a couple of spots that are too steep to mow, and when we bought the farm they were covered 100% in these bushes. Back when we used to make hay on all of our fields we were able to keep the brush from spreading fairly well. But now we mostly pasture this side of the road and make hay on the farm we rent across the road. Unfortunately the cows just eat around the rose bushes, which leaves them to flourish. You can actually see the MFR working its way up the hill from the infested areas. We have tried to mow them several times a year, but it takes as many as 6 mowings a year to kill it, and we just don't have the time or money for that. Of course you could just spray it with Roundup, or some other herbicide, but we won't do that.

So the latest half baked scheme was to get some goats to take care of the problem. On Sunday I bought a little starter herd of a buck, 3 does and 4 kids. It won't be enough goats to wipe out the rose bushes, but enough to see if it is going to work. Apparently goats are browsers more so than grazers, which means that they would prefer to eat the leaves off of bushes and small trees instead of eating grass. The demand for meat goats has been steadily climbing in this country, so I am hopefull that instead of controlling the roses costing us money, that it might end up making a little.

I'd like to try it as well. Our friend Nicola is Jamaican, and I am hoping that she can come up and teach us how to cook a goat once we have one ready to go.

Of course the down side to this is that goats are troublemakers. They are hard to fence, and when they do get out they cause all kinds of havoc, including eating all of you neighbors flowers, etc. I also have concerns about keeping them safe from the coyote population.

Here is an interesting study on this very subject. http://www.kerrcenter.com/publications/brushcontrol_goats.html

Goats at Work

At First I Thought It Was a Trash Bag

2008-05-07T07:59:00.003-04:00

When I went out to move the cows to a fresh paddock on Sunday morning I spotted what I thought was a trash bag laying on the ground. When I got closer it turned out not to be a trash bag at all but a mostly white heifer calf. We have a few cows with a fair amount of white on them, like the one in the back of the photo, but they were all sired by a bull who had an entirely white back. The parents of this calf look like your typical white face Hereford. Genetics sure can be fun.

Hanibal the Animal

2008-04-30T07:54:00.003-04:00

Our Australian Shepherd came in on three legs about a three weeks ago, and when I took a look at the unused foot there was something sticking out of it. My guess is that it was a porcupine quill. I tried pulling it out but wasn't able to. I made a vet appointment for him for later that day, but by that time he seemed to have it out and was going on all four again. Then a few days later it got infected, so I ended up taking him to the vet anyway. Doc was pretty certain that there was something in there causing the infection and ended up cutting the foot pretty much in half to get it out. Two days later we took the bandage off and Banjo had the stitches out 10 minutes later, so he went back to get re sutured. Then again 5 days after that.

Now we are just hoping the third time is a charm. He is on 10 days of crate and muzzle confinement. I am hoping he doesn't explode before them. Hearing me move the cows without him is just about killing him.

Head'em Up, Move'm Out

2008-04-17T08:13:00.005-04:00

This week I moved the cows out to pasture. The pasture isn't quite where it needs to be for them to really start grazing, but we had an incident that kind of forced my hand. We were up to 9 calves on the ground, and they were all doing well. One evening last week while I was doing chores I noticed one of the most robust of the calves laying there dead. The only likely explanation was that she must have gotten trampled by the bigger cows. Cows are generally pretty mindful of the calves but there were just too many calves in too close quarters. Moving them out to the pasture will give them enough room that it shouldn't be an issue again. Because there isn't much grass yet we are still feeding hay.

I also decided to keep it from being a problem again next year by keeping Bubbles the bull in until July. That way we shouldn't start calving until May when the cows will certainly already be out on pasture. I don't like keeping one cow in by itself so I kept a lady friend in with him. Brockle Face calved in September last year so she was a good candidate because she is likely to be bred back already, but shouldn't calve until arter their release. Also, once the other cows get out on their rotation I plan to fence them in around the buildings to clean up the grass there that would otherwise have to get mowed.

Farmer Todd

2008-04-14T08:13:00.002-04:00

Our neighbor Todd brought his Ford 2N up yesterday with a Rotovator attached to the 3 point hitch arms, but the PTO (power take off) shaft was too long to hook onto the PTO stubb on the back of the tractor, so we had to shorten it by about 4 inches. I figured that we better make sure it was going to work properly so we set it loose on our garden. Forty five minutes later the whole garden was tilled about 3 times, and the 5 spreader loads of manure I had put on it last fall were pretty well mixed in. It would have taken me about 6 hours to do the same thing with my little Troybilt tiller.

Big Steamy Forkfull

2008-04-08T08:59:00.002-04:00

Having a front end loader on a tractor makes a lot of jobs a lot easier. But cleaning the manure pack out of the cow sheds was still pretty difficult if it wasn't composted first. The main problem is that since they get bedded every day with junk hay I end up with a matted together pack which acts just like a stack of carpets when I try to dig into it with the loaders shovel like bucket. So I started to think about the old manure fork buckets that most of the early front end loaders used.

As it would happen, a few days later one of my favorite customers stopped by to get some chickens. Frank deals in used farm equipment. He claims that he "buys junk and sells farm machinery". He's also the kind of guy thats going to tell you a pretty good story while you are with him. The last one I heard was about back when he was a bachelor farmer. He had a big German Shepherd that got a face full of porcupine quills one night. Frank said the only way he was able to get them out was to back the dog into a corner of the barn, hold onto him with both arms and pull the quills out with his teeth. It was going along pretty well. After a while he looked up and the vet was standing there watching him. The vet said "Frank, we got to get you a girlfriend"

Anyway, I asked Frank if he might have any old fork buckets at his place. It turns out he had two identical ones, so I welded them together to make one big fork bucket. I think it is going to work pretty well. Here we are putting a couple forkfulls of manure on the rhubarb.

Spring Beard Melt

2008-04-08T08:49:00.003-04:00

Sweet New Ride Revisited

2008-04-03T07:51:00.003-04:00

Saturday I went down to look at a new(er) truck. It turned out to be such a peach that I couldn't resist buying it on the spot. Had to give $1200 bucks for it though. She's a baby blue 1990 Dodge 3/4 ton with 4 wheel drive and a quarter of a million miles on her. Now I know this sounds an awful lot like an "out of the frying pan and into the fire" situation, but I think it's going to work out all right. Unlike my old truck, I think someone actually did some maintenance work on this one. It sits square, runs good, the tailgate can be opened and closed by one person. It is geared really low, which gives it loads of power and a top speed of about 60 mph. Although there is something wonky with the speedometer, so I ended up having to call my wife who was following me home with it to find out how fast I was going. I thought it seemed slower than 83.

But the real clincher on the deal was the monster truck tires with the cobra valve caps that came extra, and the chrome skull gearshift knobs. Never before has a farmer felt this cool.

All Tapped Out

2008-03-31T11:00:00.004-04:00

Sap House Bill pulled his 20 taps over the weekend. It seems that 2008 is going to go down in legend as one of the best maple syrup seasons that anyone living can remember. This comes on the heels of the worst season anyone can remember. The rule of thumb seems to be a quart of finished syrup per tap. Bill ended up with 10 gallons from his 20 taps. And the season isn't officially over yet. I thought he should ride the wave as far as it would take him so when he's a crotchety old man he could thrill his grandchildren, and everyone else who makes eye contact with him, with an even more impressive syrup total in the miraculous year of ought-eight. But he has burned every scrap of wood that wasn't well nailed down, and has people scouring the countryside for old shipping pallets, so maybe it is time to quit.

Automotive Obituary

2008-03-30T07:42:00.003-04:00

Dodge (Sally) Power Ram died at home on February 23, after a long illness. She was born in 1987 in Detroit, Michigan. Early in her life she worked as a highway driving truck for a Pennsylvania machine shop. In 1993 she changed careers and worked mainly in the agricultural field. Although her miles were low at the time of her death (only 156,000), many of them were pasture miles. She suffered from few health problems through most of her life, and worked tirelessly without complaint.

She was preceded in death by two sisters, Carolla Station Wagon and Dodge Caravan. She is survived sisters Camry Station Wagon and Sienna Minivan.

In lieu of flowers, donations can be made to the Clodhopper Home for Aging Vehicles.

Revolving Door

2008-03-27T15:13:00.003-04:00

Two weeks ago my neighbor Dick and I loaded 13 hogs into a borrowed trailer (thanks, Stan), and took them over to a local butcher shop so that they could fulfill their role in the food chain. We sell our pork (as well as beef, chicken, and turkey) directly to the people who are going to eat it. After this pork is cut, wrapped, and frozen our customers pick it up at the slaughterhouse, take it home and put it in their freezers.

But now that last years pork has reached its final destination it is time to start the cycle over again. So on Wednesday I borrowed a truck (thanks Don), loaded the Greater Springville Community Calf Box in the back of it and headed to Brooklyn (PA, not NY) to pick up a dozen feeder pigs. Perhaps you have noticed a sub-theme here involving mostly borrowed equipment. A lot of the stuff I own seems to have organized a strike for better working conditions.

But anyway, the little pigs are settling in pretty well, and the barn is a little less lonely again.

Mooove in Ready (kind of)

2008-03-06T10:10:00.004-05:00

Sap House Bill and I finished up the roof on the Cow Shed East a couple of weeks back. I wanted to get it done so that I could separate last years calves from their mothers so that the cows could get a little down time before they started calving again this spring. There is still quite a bit of work to finish it, but with the Cluck Truck strategically placed to block the wind it will work for this winter.

Our neighbor Todd came up to help me sort the cows from the calves. Then he came back again the next day to do it again after I realized that highly motivated calves will jump a 4 foot gate, especially if they are starting out on the uphill side.
Anyhow, the goal was for the Cows to have a couple of months as dry cows before calving, but 3 days after the weaning one of them calved. She had a nice little heifer calf.

Gas Lease Crap Shoot Final Exam

2008-02-05T09:02:00.000-05:00

Multiple Choice. Select your answer from the options below.

(1) If we sign a natural gas lease for drilling on our land we will all be ________.
(a) rich
(b) sorry
(c) really rich
(d) really sorry
(e) not nearly as rich as we thought we would be

(2) The best way to assess the financial and environmental impact of drilling for gas on your land is by ________.
(a) reading between the lines in your lease agreement
(b) second guessing the motivations of the gas company in question
(c) asking your neighbor what he overheard down at the restaurant
(d) making something up yourself

I will let you know what your score is in 20 years after we see how this all shakes out.

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The county that I live in seems to be at the epicenter of a mad natural gas rush. Apparently just about all but the southeast quarter of Pennsylvania has a layer of Marcellus Shale underneath it which contains a large quantity of natural gas. The geologists have known all about it for a long time, but up intil very recently nobody had the technology to capture this gas economically. The problem seems to be that unlike other gas bearing formations which are more permeable, this formation does not release its gas unless it goes through a fracturing process. In the past few years the technology was devoloped in a simular shale deposit in Texas (Barnett Shale) where water and sand and sometimes nitrogen are pumped into the shale under extremely high pressures. The hydraulic pressure fractures the shale, and the sand holds the cracks open after the water is pumped back out so that the gas has an evacuation route.

Last year all of a sudden we started to get all these land men knocking on the door wanting us to sign a gas lease. Back then they were offering 25 dollars an acre as a signing bonus, then 1/8th of the value of the gas in royalties. Now, a few months later, after several sucessful wells have been drilled, 3 or 4 within 5 miles of us, we have heard that the offers have increased to $700 an acre. Initially we decided that we were not at all interested in being involved in this process and had largely dismissed it. But in light of the higher stakes we decided that we had better take a good hard look at the whole thing in order to make the best decission we can. The hardest part of balancing the risks and rewards in this game is that there is no reliable information that I have found regarding what kind of financial gain is likely. I was at an informational seminar put on by the Penn State Ag Extension last night, and one of the speakers had worked up some figures. I thought "Now we are getting some good information" until someone asked if that was the average gas production from one of these wells. The speaker then told us that it was a wild guess. So I think I could have made up my own number and been just as close. The only ones who have this production information are the gas companies, and they aren't saying because it would be the equivilent of shouting out "GOLD!"

I was able to get some better information about the environmental risks involved with the drilling process. It sounds to me like these drilling outfits are pretty well regulated by DEP, and it does not sound like the risk of environmental damage is very high. One down side however is that drilling a well does involve quite a bit of surface space during the drilling and fracing process, maybe as much as 5 acres. After the process most of that land is restored to an arable condition, but there would bo some loss of land to roadways and wellheads, etc.

So anyway, we have yet to sign a lease and are continuing to try to gather enough information to make a good decision about this. If the process will run counter to our attempts to be good land stewards in significant ways then that would be a deal breaker. If any of you have experience with natural gas drilling I would love to hear what you think of it.

Massachusetts Weekend

2008-01-17T11:52:00.000-05:00

Inside the Common House

Kathy and Randy's House (right side)

The Common House

The Village

This last weekend we went up to (actually more like over to) Massachusetts for our old friend (she is 40) Kathy's birthday. She and her husband Randy and their blended family of 5 children live in an Intentional Community there. This community consists of 28 homes built on seven acres. Altogether the community owns quite a bit more acreage than that.

The layout of the houses as well as the architecture kind of feels like an old village. All the cars are parked in a lot outside of the community, so there is only foot traffic on the path. In the center of this village is a common house, which has a kitchen, fireplace, spare bedroom, and enough space for a pretty big gathering.

I am sure there are challenges that go along with this sort of community, but it sounds like the good aspects really outweigh the bad. Kathy said that there were lots of opportunities for the community to work together and help each other out when it was needed. It kind of sounded to me like the kind of co-operation that you hear about from old sources on rural life and still exists to a certain degree now.

Cow Shed East (another damn construction project)

2007-12-07T15:04:00.000-05:00

Over Thanksgiving weekend I began construction on another cow shed. This one comes off of the east side of the barn. My brother Steve helped on the first day. We ended up getting all four or the posts set and the rafter plates set on top of them. I had dug the post holes during the summer when I had the machine here for digging the pond/pool. As you can see from the photo's this is going to be a pretty wonky looking shed. For the sake of economy I am using locust poles for the posts, rafter plates and rafters. Given that these trees don't grow perfectly straight the roof is going to have some undulation to it.

Anyway, the second weekend Saphouse Bill came and helped me set the first half of the rafters. I am hoping to get the rest of them up this weekend. Adding to the strangeness of this shed is the notion that I need to be able to access the dormer window in the photos. I put that window in a couple of years ago so that we could fill the barn all the way to the peak with hay. So this shed roof is going to end up with a 4'x10' removeable panel in the center of the roof so that I can get the elevator up to the dormer.

The overall size of the shed is going to be 18'x40'

The Home Stretch (pool update)

2007-10-11T12:00:00.001-04:00

About 18 inches to go

We are within sight of the end of the natural swimming pool project. We ended up washing and wheeling 60 tons of gravel, plus quite a bit of field stone to fill up the area outside of the wooden wall. This gravel gives the plants something to get their roots into as well as acting as a filter and giving the beneficial bacteria a place to colonize. We did have a little setback with the pool when we noticed that the rubber liner was begining to float. It didn't take too long to figure out that water was getting underneath the liner, probably from the gravel washing operation and off of the shed roof. I ended up having to cut a whole in the liner so that I could pump the water out from under it. I bet there was between 500 and 1000 gallons under there. I put a drain pipe set in gravel around the uphill side of the pool to catch any surface runoff headed in that direction. Then we patched the whole in the liner and quickly got the pool filled so that the weight of the water above the liner would keep much water from getting underneath.

Waterfall in the larval stage

I think all that we have left to do is put the plants in, build the fence around it (this weekend), finish hauling gravel, finish the waterfall and hook up the pump, waterfall and skimmer.

Finished Water Level

Cold Turkey

2007-10-11T11:47:00.001-04:00

We got a pretty good thunder storm on Tuesday. I think we got about 2 inches of rain. Unfortunately the turkeys ended up getting caught out in it because their pen door slammed shut in the wind. They are not very big yet, so once they get wet they get hypothermia pretty quickly. After the storm I went to check on them and about 8 of them were hunkered down looking like they were fixing to die. Normally in such a situation I would get them under a heat lamp and they would be fine, but our power was out so I ended up taking the truck down there and putting the cold ones in the cab with the heater running. So anyway, after about a half hour they were warm and dry and ready to return to their pen.

Meanwhile, Back at the Farm

2007-10-09T09:24:00.000-04:00

It has been a while since I posted anything period, let alone anything about the farm. Things are just kind of perking along. We still have 4 pens of chickens out on pasture. I have started letting the turkeys out of their field pen into their poultry netting cell during the daytime. I have 13 little pigs down in the greenhouse barn. And the cows are across the road grazing the little bit of grass that grew back after the first cutting of hay back in June. It has been a less than stellar year as far as grass production goes, but we should make it through to Thanksgiving or so without having fed any hay. So I guess a miss is as good as a mile. It sounds like lots of places have been a lot drier than here. We have been aquiring freezers for the store like crazy. I am going this morning to pick up 2 more. That will bring the total up to 4 chest freezers, 4 uprights, 1 two door commercial upright and a 6 by 7 walk in that we still need to set up. Plus the two that we have for our own use in the cellar. The store is starting to look like a used appliance warehouse.

Sluice Monkeys

2007-08-30T14:56:00.000-04:00

The princible is that someone shovels gravel into the top end of the sluice, where a sump pump hose discharges its water. The first 8 feet or so of the sluice have a roofing tin bottom. The last 3 feet are wire mesh, which allows the water and dirt to dump into a barrel which holds the pump. All in all it workes fairly well. Still, the rainwater that has finished rinsing the gravel in the pool has emerged in the deep end looking like a big cup of coffee with cream.

Pond/Pool Update

2007-08-10T08:52:00.000-04:00

We have continued to make some progress on our natural swimming pool. Last week we fininshed the shaping of the hole. Then we covered the entire thing with old carpets. The carpets act as an underlayment and should keep any rocks from poking through the liner.

On Monday we assembled a crew of Drake, my dad, Saphouse Bill, Seamus, Eliza and myself to roll out the liner. The liner weighs 900 lbs, which is why we needed so many people. It did go very smoothly and only took about a half hour to install.

Now we are in the process of building the wooden retaining wall which will keep the gravel and plants out of the swim zone. This wall will be completely submerged, with the top being about 3inches under the water level.

Yesterday we had the pea gravel delivered. This gravel will go on top of the liner in the plant zone. The pump also came yesterday.

The Big Dig

2007-07-24T07:44:00.000-04:00

It is sometimes funny how we arrive at an idea. Last year Walter from Sugar Mountain Farm had a post with a picture of one of his boys in a pool of green water with a frog on his head. The thrust of the post was that they had a small swimming pool that they allowed to go wild instead of treating it with conventional pool chemicals. That played into our long held desire to have somewhere on the farm that we could swim. Unfortunately, we do not have a suitable spring anywhere on the farm that would allow us to build a pond that wouldn't get stagnant in the summer. After a little time noodling around on the internet we came across a couple of sites related to "natural swimming pools". These pools, which seem to be fairly popular in Europe basically consist of a body of water held in place by a pond liner. Instead of pool chemicals the water is cleaned by cycling it through a biofilter which consists of a plant zone filled with wetland plants that grow in the shallow perimeter of the pool/pond. There is a submerged wall inside of that plant zone which creates the swim area and keeps the plants as well as the rocks and gravel they grow in where they belong.

A little further along our research trail we came across a downloadable book by a company called Total Habitat (www.totalhabitat.com) which is based in Kansas. The book is basically a step by step how to build a natural swimming pool. So anyway, we spent a lot of last winter planning out our pool and figuring out where we wanted it. Over the 4th of July we rented an excavator and roughed out the hole for the pool. We have been woking on refining the shape since then. We are now ready to install the underlayment for the liner (old carpets) and to order the liner, pump, etc.

Roller Bin

2007-07-12T06:38:00.000-04:00

This year we finally got to the point where it made sense for us to start getting our poultry feed delivered in bulk 3 tons at a time. For the past five years we have been getting our feed made up a ton at a time. There were problem with that method. I had to go pick it up which takes time and gas. There were lots of plastic feed sacks involved (100 per month last year) that could not be returned or recyled. Having a pallet full of chicken feed in bags was beginning to draw in vermin, And expense. I had been looking around for a while for a used feed bin, but they always seem a little expensive, or in bad shape, and hard to move. Plus they need to be installed on some sort of concrete foundation. Then I remembered seeing a gravity wagon that someone had built a roof on and realized that this was probably the best solution to the problem.

So I went to a farm sale about 2 weeks ago that had 2 gravity wagons in it. I got beat at the sale, but after the bidding a man came up to me and told me he had one that he would take $700 bucks for. Now it has a roof on it. The roof just props up for filling. It is a flat roof, but since we don't have a level spot on the farm no matter where you park it it always has a pitch. Yesterday the first batch of feed was delivered. The best part about it is that after is is filled I can pull it out to the pasture where most of the chickens and turkeys are. This way I don't have to haul bags of feed out there every day

And They're Off

2007-07-05T21:55:00.000-04:00

About three weeks ago we had our first processing day in the new Evisceration Station. I got talked into doing all 200 chickens that were ready in one day by the elder Tile Hooligan, and despite the fact that it is about twice what we would normally do it turned out great. All together we had 6 people working for at least part of the day, and three of them had never butchered chickens before. One of them is a vegetarian.

Anyhow, the new processing digs worked out great. Everything inside of it is completely washable and cleaning up afterwards was a breeze. The flow was good too, although we used to move through the process clockwise, and now the chickens move counter clockwise. I think we will all be able to adapt. Since it is in the back room of the on farm store we had a great place to set up the scale and cash register out in the store

Whizbang

2007-05-30T08:12:00.000-04:00

Mark from Jericho Settlers Farm asked in the comments of my last post if the piece of red furniture in the background of one of the photo's was a Whizbang chicken plucker. It surely is, a 30 incher no less. When we decided to go into Pastured Poultry about 5 years ago we a had an old drum style chicken plucker. It had a drum that spun with a bunch of plucker fingers on the outside of it. You had to scald a chicken for about a minute, then hold it against the drum to remove the feathers, turning the chicken until it was bare. My wife and I started butchering our first batch of 72 at 9am, and we didn't finish until about 3 the next morning. Part of the trouble was lack of experience, but a big part was a lack of good equipment.

It didn't take too long to realize that if we were going to do this commercially that we would need more efficient equipment. I was all set to spend $1500 on a 27 inch tub style chicken plucker which would be able to handle 4 chickens at a time when I stumbled across a Yahoo group dedicated to the discussion of a book written by Herrick Kimball called "You Can Build a Tub Style Chicken Plucker".

I bought the book and a few weeks later I had a finished plucker. I decided to build a bigger one than the plans called for because I figured that the time may come when we were doing enough chickens to want to have the capacity to pluck 6 or so chickens at a time.

The Gear Reduction

One of the problems we had with scaling the size up was that the outside edges of the feather plate (the aluminum disk in the bottom of the tub, which is studded with rubber plucker fingers) spins at a lot more feet per second than a smaller plate would which was causing too many broken wings and legs on the chickens. This also caused the 1.5 horsepower motor to barely have enough power to handle the job. I ended up putting a gear reduction into the machine in the form of a second shaft and pulley setup. This brought the featherplate RPM from 275 to 175, and reduced the power requirements substancially.

Since I made this modification I couldn't be happier with the plucker. It cost me about $400 to build and plucks the birds nice and clean. It can even handle a 42 pound (dressed weight) turkey.

Do-R-Die

2007-05-25T08:12:00.000-04:00

With a mere three weeks until we butcher the first batch of chickens of the year, it has suddenly become pretty crucial that I finish up construction of the store / processing room. I am fairly certain that I can at least get the butchering room finished up. I have a little bit of the ceiling to install and another wall of tile plus the grouting and caulking. I also need to hook up the water supply in the house cellar and hook up a few outlets, but then we should be good to go. Perhaps you may have noticed that the tiles I am using appear to be totally mismatched. When the Tile Hooligans put down the tile floor there were still enough of these left over tiles from several years of tile jobs to cover the walls in the processing room. The price was right (free) and they are so mixed up that I think it actually looks kind of good. Sort of like an abstract mosaic

It is good to have this early deadline because it is getting to the time of year when there is too much farm work to get done to have time or energy for construction projects.

Cluck Truck

2007-05-10T10:10:00.000-04:00

The Cluck Truck is home to our laying flock for about 8 months of the year. We like to have the chickens out on pasture because the grass and insects they eat out there greatly improve the quality of the eggs, as well as reducing their feed consumption considerably. In the past we have tried using these chickens to reduce the face fly population that the cows have to deal with. Chickens will scratch through the cow pies where the fly eggs hatch and spend their larval stage. I have heard that this is where the euphamism "that's for the birds" originated. Another benefit of this activity is that it spreads out the manure so that it decomposes faster and doesn't kill the grass underneath the pie, This eliminates the "repugnancy zones" around cow pies that the cows won't eat the next time through the pasture.
The trouble that we have had is with keeping the chickens with the cluck truck. Being a fairly small farm, the barn is always in sight, and eventually a lot of the chickens jump ship and move into the barn. We have eliminated that problem by putting electrified poultry netting around the whole affair, but unfortunately we cannot fence the whole area that the cows have been in because it is too large.

This year I decided to add a poultry species to see if they would take care of the fly larva eating/ manure spreading chore. When I worked at Quiet Valley Living Historical Farm they had Guinea Fowl. These birds are just barely domesticated. They would travel many miles a day in search of insects to eat (they are deadly on the tick population). I am thinking that they might be just the ticket. On Tuesday we got our first batch of turkeys, so I went ahead and had 40 guineas sent as well. They are the little striped keets in the photo.

This is What I Herd

2007-04-24T08:00:00.000-04:00

Yesterday my herd of cows became the biggest it has ever been. We have been having calves all along this spring and now we are up to nine. Yesterday morning my neighbor Dick came over and hooked on to my cattle trailer (my truck can barely pull itself up a hill) and we went about 25 miles to the east to pick up 9 Angus feeder steers I had bought. That brings us up to 38 head including calves. We probably still have about 4 or 5 calves to go.

The guy I bought them from had quite a few head of cattle, about 120 I think, but he didn't have any kind of loading chute or anything. I guess what he normally does is lead them with a rope while someone behind them pokes and prods them until they hop into the trailer. We did this with the first two until I decided that I wasn't going into a cattle trailer with a bunch of nervous, agitated 800 lb steers to take the neck chains off of them. We ended up setting up some gates to try and run them into the trailer but it was a pretty poor set up and that didn't go real well either. Finally we had them loaded and took them to the sale barn in Nicholson to weigh them.
Because sale barns are designed to handle hundreds of cattle at a time they are generally layed out pretty well with alleys, gates, and chutes. It can be little difficult to find your way around that maze, but once you have figured out which gates to open the cows pretty well take themselves where you want them to go. We got them in and weighed and back onto the trailer without any effort at all.

We have always worked with a cobbled together corral system which works a lot better than the system the guy who sold me the cows has, but it has a lot of room for improvement to get to the efficiency of the sale barn. The thing is finding the ballancing point to have a corral that makes handling cattle fairly easy yet has a price tag appropriate for the small number of cattle that we have.

The cattle are all out on pasture now but the grass is just starting to green up and really hasn't grown much so I am hauling them out quite a bit of hay. I ended up putting them out on pasture because the cow shed isn't big enough to handle that many cows. We are still trying to find out what the carrying capacity is for the land that we use as far as cows it can support is concerned. Unfortunately the carrying capacity is going to vary depending on the kind of growing season that we have. In a drought year we could be in trouble with the number that we have now. In a cool wet year where the grass just keeps growing we can probably handle even more cattle. But you never know what you have til you have it.

Banjo in a Guitar Case

2007-04-17T09:44:00.000-04:00

Early last week it had been brought to my attention that there were 4 Australian Shepherd puppies up at the SPCA in Montrose. I resisted the temptation to go up and see them for 4 days, but then on Thursday I finally came up with a half baked reason to go to Montrose on other business, and while I was there I thought I might just take a gander at these pups. When I got to the SPCA there were still two left, both males, and one of them told me I should take him home (he speaks fluent Pupese). Unfortunately the SPCA only takes cash for adoptions and I didn't have any. Luckily I had invited our friend Kristin to go along as a voice of reason and she happened to have a debit card, so we were in business.

We named him Banjo and so far he seems like a great dog. He is gentle and tolerant with the kids, pretty close to house
broken, and so far has been sticking close by when I am down at the barn doing chores with him. He's also been working pretty hard on his chicken herding skills.

What a Sap

2007-04-08T09:58:00.000-04:00

Bill and Isaac in the Sugar Bush

The Evaporator

The Finished Product

Our friends Bill and Kristin and their son Isaac have a great old farm a few miles north of us. Bill decided he wanted to make some maple syrup with the big stainless steel evaporator pan he got somewhere. He ended up building a 9x12 sugar shack on the concrete pad of an old garage. I talked him into using an old horizontal fuel oil tank that I wanted to get rid of, for the arch. The arch is the structure that holds the fire and the evaporator pan sits on top of. We ended up cutting part of the top off of the tank that the pan could sit over. Then we cut out a door and welded it back on with some hinges. For the smoke stack we cut a 6 inch round hole in the back end of the tow and welded a piece of silo filling pipe onto it.
It was pretty impressive how well the thing worked. It didn't take nearly as much wood as Bill figured it would to boil down the sap. He put out about 15 or 16 taps and they ended up with more than 3 gallons of syrup. It takes about 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup. The difference in the colors of syrup has to do with the time of season. Earlier in the season makes lighter and later it gets darker.

So now Bill is thinking that maybe full time sugar maker might be a good career change for him. He'd have a real busy month or so every spring, but then he'd have the rest of the year off for hunting. I think it's a good idea. The salary and benefits package don't look that great, but you can't have everything. It would also dovetail nicely with Kristin's future full-time goat farmer career. Isaac is pretty smart and shouldn't have any trouble supporting them in their old age.

Bill Skims the Foam Off While Pete Contemplates The Finer Points of Boiling Sap

Wee'an

2007-03-27T08:58:00.000-04:00

Our first 2007 calf was born sometime between last night's and this morning's chores. For any non farmers out there chores are what we call jobs that get done morning and night every day like feeding, watering, moving livestock (milking for dairy farmers) and are usually like bookends for the rest of the days' work.
When I fed the cows their hay last night I checked to see if any of them were thinking about having their calves soon and didn't see anything. Part of our philosophy on raising cattle is that they should be able to have their calves without any help from us. I have heard some people say that they go on vacation when their cows are calving and when they get back what they have left is the cows and calves who are the fittest. I think that is a little extreme, and I certainly try to keep a close eye on them during calving time, but I probably wouldn't re-breed a cow that had a really hard delivery. But anyhow, this heifer had her calf without incident and the calf (a heifer) is up and eating and frisking around. I hope the other 15 do as well.

The Streak

2007-03-20T08:58:00.000-04:00

No, its not that kind of streak. But it is about as attractive as an overweight frat boy running through the mall in the buff. A couple of weeks ago we began a pretty interesting streak of bad luck.
Here's the scorecard so far.

93 Dodge Caravan Transmission- Terminal. Anybody want to buy a minivan with a bad transmission?

96 Toyota Camry-Radiator blew, overheated, and blew the head gasket. Had to be towed twice.$2000 and 3 weeks to repair

Blaze, 14 year old horse we board here- Got a bad cut on right hock. Had vet in. Was making progress. 3 days later colicked. Had vet in, who determined there was nothing that could be done to help her short of a 2 hour trailer ride to Cornell and a very expensive, doubtfully successful surgery. The owner, vet, and I all agreed she should be put down.

Well- Our well is in a pit that is like a shallow well with a roof over it. Because it is below ground level there is a constant trickle of water into it which drains through a pipe into the pasture down the hill from the well. The cows got to stomping around the end of the pipe and ended up burying it with mud. I didn't notice it until our water quality took a nose dive. All of a sudden our water was kind of green and smelled like mold. When I went and looked into the well pit there was 2 feet of water in there, which then flowed right into the drilled well. It took a half day in a snowstorm to get the pipe opened up, the pit drained, and to shock the well with bleach.

Adams Parents Car- Our friend Adam came to visit for the weekend from Manhattan. He borrowed his parents Lexus to get here. It is rear wheel drive and has no snow tires, so it got stuck in the snow in our driveway as he was trying to start for home. Since I didn't have the plow on the truck I opted to clear the snow with the front end loader tractor. As I took my first pass with the tractor, I caught the bucket on a high spot in the driveway, which burst a hydraulic hose. Adams' parents' car was sitting right there with the window open, and virtually every drop of hydraulic oil landed on and in the car.

My Parents Car- We borrowed a car from my parents because the two cars that we own are inoperable. Last night the Mrs called from Tunkhannock. The car wouldn't start. She ended up calling AAA, who sent out the guy who towed our Camry twice. He got the car started, which seems to have an electrical problem. She got it 3/4 of the way home before the battery drained completely, the lights dimmed, and it stalled. Luckily she was able to get it off of the road, since she had no lights and it was snowing pretty hard and visibility wasn't great. Also she had just enough cell phone service that I was able to hear where she was, and that the car was dead. So that car got towed.

So that's where we are at this point. The whole thing is starting to be pretty funny really, and gives us plenty of opportunity to guess what the next major malfunction will be. Since this is largely an automotive manurestorm, coupled with the fact that my wife had to take our 20 year old farm truck to work today, my money is on the truck not making it back home under its own power. The real fortunate part of this streak is that no people have been hurt other than financially.

I'll be sure to let you know what the crisis du jour is once I know what it is. A hose did burst in the pig nite lite last night flooding part of their pen, but that's not really of the scale it needs to be to count.

The Cow Shed

2007-03-06T08:52:00.000-05:00

The Cow Shed during the summer (left end of barn). The board across the entrance are to keep the pigs and compost inside while the work or composting is going on

During the winter we feed the cows in the cow shed. This is a shed we built on to the west side of our old bank barn about 5 or 6 years ago. It is 40'x16' and is completely open on the south side. This is a sort of freestall barn setup, where they can go inside or outside as they want to. On mornings like this, when it is 0 degrees and windy, but bright and sunny the attributes of this setup really shine. The cows sit in out of the wind, in the full sun, on a warm composting 3 foot dry bedding pack. They almost smile while they chew their cud. Their are feeder gates the length of the shed, about 2 feet from the old barn wall. Because the shed is built onto the barn where the hay is stored it is very easy to throw the hay down behind the feeder gates. These gates are welded together out of old dairy barn stantions and channel iron, and are easy to raise up as the bedding pack gets higher during the course of the winter. We also keep adding bedding material to keep the cows clean and dry, as well as to maintain the right carbon to nitrogen ratio of about 20 to 1. When this ratio is right the carbon acts like a sponge to absorb the nitrogen from the cow manure and urine. This stabilizes the nitrogen which keeps it available for fertilizing the fields during the growing season. It also reduces odors and the possibility of ground water and stream contamination. After we move the cows onto pasture we like to move pigs onto the bedding pack to aerate it, which speeds up the composting process. After it is composted we move the pigs back out and clean out the shed with the front end loader, loading it into the manure spreader, which spreads it evenly across the pasture and hay fields.

Kudos to Us

2007-03-03T08:08:00.000-05:00

We got a couple of indications that Clodhopper Farm is starting to show up on some radar screens this week. The first was being asked to be a panelist at the 3rd annual NEPA Grazing Conference which will focus on direct marketing. This should be pretty interesting because I think we are really only into mile 2 of the marketing marathon, so I guess I'll be able to carry all my wisdom in on one trip.

A couple of days later we got a letter informing us that we had won a stewardship award from a local group called the Countryside Conservancy. Last fall a car pulled into the driveway with three women in it. At first I thought it was an egg customer but it turned out to be the Stewardship Award Committee from this organization. They said they like to make surprise visit to the nominated places so they can see what is really going on there. Anyway, my girls and I took them on a little farm tour and I guess that our farming methods met with their approval.

We are feeling pretty honored to have been selected for both

Better Late than Never

2007-02-21T08:05:00.000-05:00

We finally got some snow last week. Up until then we hadn't really had enough to be worth mentioning. It is a little hard to tell up here on the hill exactly how much we had because it blows around so much, but I guess it was about 20 inches. My biggest trouble when we have snow like that is keeping the lane down to the barn open. After I plow it for the first time the snow banks create a great place for the wind to dump more snow into. After the snow banks are 3 or 4 feet high the plow on thé truck can't throw the snow up over the bank. The obvious solution is to push the snow banks back with the front end loader tractor, but I had a little trouble there too. I don't often use the tractor in the winter so I never thought about putting anything in the fuel that would keep it from gelling, which is what diesel fuel wants to do when it gets cold enough. Anyway, I was able to get the thing started without much trouble, put the tire chains on (tractors are supprisingly helpless on snow ontop of frozen ground without chains), then promptly got it stuck. While I was digging it back out the wind was able to hit the fuel lines at just the right angle to gell the fuel and the thing quit running. After a day with a heat lamp on the fuel tank and a jug of magic jelled fuel rescue potion I was able to get the tractor started and open up the lane again.

Yesterday and today feel like Spring. Sunny and 40's.

Baby , Its Cold Inside

2007-02-08T08:25:00.000-05:00

Cooksove to the rescue

So I am sitting here in my coat. We heat our old farmhouse with a forced hot air oil fired furnace, supplemented by the Bengal Blue Jet cookstove that we have in the kitchen. Well the furnace started blowing fuses the day before yesterday, but it was infrequent enough to allow me to figure out what the problem was very quickly. It was only killing about 2 or 3 fuses a day, and the furnace comes on pretty frequently in the 10 degree high weather we have been having. Finally, yesterday afternoon at about 2:30 I determined that the motor that runs the blower was burning out. The replacement motor is about 45 minutes from here in Scranton. I had to wait for a kid to get off the bus at 3:30, but I figured if all the stars aligned that we could make it by 4:30 when the motor shop shuts its door for the night, but the stars didn't align. We got into the minivan, I turned the key and nothing happened. After a little investigation and a lot of help from Davey at NAPA I was able determine that the problem was that the key cylinder had given up the fight.

So today we will be borrowing a car, going to Tunkhannock for a replacement key cylinder, then on to Scranton for a replacement blower motor, constellations willing.

It is about 45 degrees in here, which is really pretty impressive when you think about it being 0 degrees over night and the only heat is the Bengal, which is in the kitchen, which is not central to the house.

Mis-Spent Afternoon

2007-02-04T11:50:00.000-05:00

I was supposed to be cleaning up my workshop yesterday afternoon when I came across an old fan that I had with a burned out motor. This was a three bladed barn fan that my neighbor had given me, and it really moved a lot of air, but when it burned up I figured it wasn't worth the expense of fixing. Anyhow, when you are self employed and your boss is a pushover it is easy to get away with spending an afternoon in pursuit of a kakamame scheme. I have been wanting to build a little windmill for some time. I ended up welding an overhead garage door roller on the bottom of the motor and welding a stem on the back of the motor that could get a fin or rudder welded onto it. Then I bent a piece of pipe to the right shape and welded a plate to that so I could attach it to one of the rafters in the old Gut Hut (now the woodshed). Then I just mounted the windmill on the pipe by putting the spindle from the door roller into the end of the pipe. The roller turns to allow the windmill to always face the wind.

Ultimately this thing is just a fancy weathervane, but it is fun to watch. I would like to have a windmill that would generate some electricity, but I guess this is a good start. It is a little hard to tell from this picture but the blades are spinning so fast that they look like a solid wheel. It also makes a whirling sound, which our dog Sheila barked at for quite some time last night. I like the sound it makes. It sounds like harnessed natural non polluting energy.

Old Smokey

2007-01-22T09:10:00.000-05:00

Seamus and I butchered a hog last weekend. It has been a few years since I butchered one on the farm. We used to do 2 or 3 here every year, but lately I have just sent the ones that we have eaten with all the others to the slaughterhouse we use for our customers' pigs. But we were out of pork, and Seamus, who lives pretty close to self sufficiency, was starting to get hungry.

We like to smoke the bacons, hams, and shoulders. After we got the pig all cut up we soaked those cuts in brine for a week. Unfortunately I neglected to write down how long we used to soak and smoke everything, so there is a little bit of guess work going on here. Since we aren't going for a full cure, which means the meat would keep outside of refrigeration, I have opted to err on the side of not long enough. This meat will go into the freezer when it is done. I plan to smoke for a week as well.

The smokehouse is nothing fancy. Kind of like an outhouse without a seat. There are a number of poles across the top of the house for hanging the meat from, and the fire is built right on the ground inside the smokehouse. We generally use cherry or apple wood to smoke with. The smokehouse needs to be cool for this type of application. We are not trying to cook the meat, although we have cooked chickens in there by building a hotter fire. I keep this fire smoldering along by using ashes to restrict the amount of air the fire gets, and by using damp wood. It hasn't gotten hot enough inside there to melt the snow on the roof yet.

The Pig Night-Lite

2007-01-04T07:55:00.000-05:00

The Pig Night-Lite in use
The inner workings

Keeping pigs through the winter is a drag. Primarily because they need water, and cheap automatic watering that works so swell in warm weather freezes and breaks in the winter time. Watering pigs in troughs is a nightmare because unlike cows, they like to flip them over, or fill them up with bedding. Plus they still freeze and need to have the ice knocked out of them, and the ice has to be hauled outside. I have always dreamed of having a well placed spring that we could use to keep thawed water available for the livestock, but that is one thing we don't have. I have done some research on freeze proof livestock waterers, and they do have them available for pigs, but they are pretty expensive, and require a lot of labor and some concrete to install.

This is my poor-boy alternative. I got myself a complimentary plastic 55 gallon barrel from one of our customers who owns a carwash. Then I cut a whole in the bottom and top. It has two hog nipples plumbed through the side at appropriate heights, and a light bulb porcelain for heat. I set the barrel over the top of a water hydrant and connected the hoses from the nipples to the hydrant. I ended up using blue maple sap tubing because its smaller diameter makes it easier to work with inside a small space like a barrel, and it doesn't require any tools to connect it. I put a 150 watt outdoor floodlight in the socket for heat. By and large it does a nice job keeping the water from freezing and it costs about 15 cents a day to run. Less then that most days because I usually shut it off during the day if its not going to be too cold because the constant pig use keeps it from freezing. After really cold nights sometimes the part of the nipple that sticks out of the barrel freezes up, but that is easy to thaw with a little warm water.

Store Update-Doors and Windows and Beams, Oh My

2006-12-29T16:44:00.000-05:00

The on farm store that we are building is coming along, although not as quickly as I would like. I did manage to get the rest of the 1st floor windows and the front door installed though. I have always loved the idea of salvaged materials. Partly because I like the idea of new construction bringing along some pieces of more distant history, and partly because I am cheap (what with the Scottish heritage and all). Most of the materials for the recent store progress were salvaged. The windows are out of my parents house and the door is from my grandma-in-laws kitchen. The beams that I put in were salvaged out of my cow barn hay mow, and the center post that supports the beams is from a barn I tore down about 7 or 8 years ago after a tornado went through about 2 miles from here.

The next steps will be wiring, interior walls, and putting down the plywood on the second floor.

Springville Township

2006-12-15T07:56:00.000-05:00

I came across this photocopy of a map of Springville Township from 1872. I am sure that this is completely uninteresting to anybody who doesn't live here, but I spent hours looking at it. The map mostly shows which family lived on each farm. Our farm, which is just to the west of the town of Springville, was owned by a J Koonts. I saw an earlier map once from 1858, when it was owned by a family named Meacham. The Meachams didn't disappear off the face of the map, they just moved a few miles to the south west. A lot of the family names on these farms are still in the area, if not on the same farms. The map also shows the location of all the supporting industries at the time, like blacksmith shops, sawmills, feed mills, etc. It is impressive how quickly this information can be forgotten. I always suspected that there was another farm just to the south of ours on what used to be the Wilkes-Barre Owego turnpike. Now the turnpike is the lane from my house to barn, and after that an abandoned road through the woods. The map supports that there was. The map is full of roads that existed in the horse drawn days but have since been abandoned.

Belated Thanksgiving Post

2006-12-05T07:52:00.000-05:00

Me and Seamus (left) herding turkeys in the dark the night before. Photo courtesy of Adam Kopman (The Butcher of Manhattan)

Two weeks ago today we processed all of the turkeys for Thanksgiving. We had 105 altogether.

It was a much different scene this year than last. Last year it was just Adam, Seamus, and Me to do 84 birds. This year we did 21 more, but we had tile hooligans Don and Justin Lee on board as well. The extra help made the operation run like a well oiled machine. Nobody ended the day feeling like a galley slave. We also had nicer weather this year. We were done and cleaned up in time and got all the turkeys bagged up and out on a big table with the weights marked on them so that everyone had the best chance of getting a turkey close to the size they wanted.

Incedentally, the one useful piece of information I got from the media sponsored bird flu panic was a tip on herding turkeys. They kept showing footage of someone in China herding turkeys with a stick with a flag tied on it, which actually works very well. Herding turkeys in the dark however is very tedious, as they won't move voluntarily if they can't see where they are going.

Seamus Mansion

2006-12-01T13:11:00.000-05:00

Seamus Mansion

Temporary Camper Barn

Drake and I finished up the roof on Seamus' Mansion about two weeks ago. I have to admit that it was about the scarriest roof I had ever been on. The uphill side of the house is about 20 feet to the ground, but the downhill side is all of 30 feet. Drake and I decided it was worth borrowing a bucket truck from a guy he knows so we didn't have to be so close to the edge of the roof. The other scary part was that the old roof seemed to be made of compost held in place with moss. Seamus fell through it up to his waist at one point.

Anyhow, this house was really nice at one point in history. It was built in 2 stages, the first being a pretty modest sized house with 2 rooms down and 2 up (which is the back part of the house in the picture. Later a much larger section was built on with 9 foot ceilings and a second stair case. It almost seems like it was a stagecoach stop or post office at one point. In any case, the last few decades were pretty cruel to this house. It had a steady stream of tenants who neglected and abused the place. It also had a barn that burned about 10 years ago. When the offer was made for Seamus to live there the other option was to burn the house down before it fell down. It is going to be a long road back from dilapidation but it is coming along. John and Marilyn, the people who own the house (they bought it after the ruination) have invested a fair amount of money into bringing it back into a habitable state, primarily because they were interested in preserving rural Susquehanna County, and to help an aspiring agrarian get onto some land on a long term basis.

Seamus will be running a market garden on this little farm, which will provide vegetables to some local restaurants and is planning to also make vegetables available at the on farm store we are working on at Clodhopper Farm. One of the restaurants is the Summerhouse Grill which Marilyn is the owner of. It is seasonal and is centered around using locally grown meat and vegetables.

Seamus calls this place Three Crows Farm.

Midnight Rampage (Cursing in the Rain)

2006-11-12T08:46:00.000-05:00

I got the cows moved to the farm across the road on Friday afternoon, and everything was going great for about a day and a half. But last night at about midnight the lady who owns that farm called to let me know that all of the cows were in her yard. Sure enough, when I got over there I saw 30 sets of eyes looking back at me. In times like these you always hope that it is going to turn out to be someone elses cows. But they were mine alright. Cows like to wait until there is a hard rain before they get onto peoples lawns so that they can make the greatest impact for their efforts. Last night it started pouring at about 10.

Cows are a little hard to move at night but I was able to get them back in pretty quickly. Unfortunately, Sheila, my cow dog in training wasn't able to see one of the hooves aimed at her and got kicked. She didn't really get hurt, but she did decide to go back home right after that. I'm afraid that might set her confidence back a little.

I went over to do an initial damage assessment first thing this morning, and it certainly could have been worse. They left plenty of cow flops, but they didn't cut the lawn up very much or damage any other property as far as I could tell.

While You Were Out

2006-11-07T07:26:00.000-05:00

I notice it has been more than a month since I last posted. My only excuse is that I've been busy. I have been building fence on the farm across the road so that I can get the cows over there to clean up the rest of the grass we have available. I wanted the perimeter of the fence to be pretty solid so I don't have to spend a lot of time chasing cows and repairing neighbors lawns. At the same time I need to consider the needs of the Springville Township snow plow truck drivers. The road that runs to the house on that farm drifts terribly in the winter and the township often needs to plow the snow back into the fields quite a way. I also had to get the telephone company to mark their underground cable so that I didn't cut it in two with a fence post.

Drake and I began putting a new metal roof on Seamus' Mansion. More about that later.

In between all of that I have been trying to get some work done on the store. The big dream is to have it far enough along to be able to process the turkeys in there two weeks from today. Extremely cold weather last turkey butchering day was the inspiration for this store

Hill Side Leveling

2006-10-04T07:59:00.000-04:00

Walter Jeffries from Sugar Mountain Farm recently had a post about level and hill sides. We are in the same boat. The only level spot we have on the farm is where we stop going up one side of the hill and start going down the other. As a matter of fact we can roll about a mile to the east, a mile to the west, and about a quarter mile to the south.

When we began building the farm store I lost most of my machinery storage area, so I decided to put a shed roof off the back of the big old chicken house the store is going to be in. The trouble was that the hill away from the back of this building is pretty steep, which would make backing machinery under this roof and keeping it from rolling away a little tricky. After I decided on building this shed I started looking out for free/cheap fill. The state brought me about 10 loads this summer, then last week a neighbor at the bottom of the hill began work on the opposite problem. He wants to build a garage but there is a hill in his way. So he has to dig out a tremendous amount of rock and dirt to make a level spot. I hired another neighbor to haul this material up to make level spot at the top of the same hill. Ironically some of this dirt probably started out up here.

Store Update- Tile Hooligans

2006-10-03T08:20:00.000-04:00

Don Lee owns a third of the businesses in downtown Springville, which means that he owns one. Unless you count Lee and Son Flooring and Americana Roads Antiques as two separate entities, in which case he owns half. Anyway, Don has always been helping us out, at first by finding good horse drawn farm machinery for us and giving me some blacksmithing work to do. Later when we began raising and butchering poultry he started helping us with the processing. Not a lot of people out there who want to volunteer to spend a day killing, scalding, and plucking chickens.

When we started planning the farm store and new and improved processing room he said that he and his son Justin would tile it for us using the left over tile from years of tiling jobs. The end result is the picture above. And the added bonus is that there are still enough tile left over for me to do the walls of the "Evisceration Station" in tile which will make wash downs very easy.

There's A Hole in the Clouds

2006-09-25T21:52:00.000-04:00

Mud and Concrete

2006-09-14T08:15:00.000-04:00

Trying to pull the mixer out of the mud.

Pouring the floor

Drake, Seamus, and I poured the concrete for the farm store and new evisceration station yesterday. We had the truck coming for 3:30 but it didn't get here until about 4:15. In order to avoid hauling the back third of the floor in wheelbarrows we decided to try and pull the truck across the front yard. As soon as the truck had all its wheels off the road it started to spin, and was soon dug in almost to the axles. The eternal optimists that we are, we thought that we ought to be able to tug it back out with my 1650 Oliver tractor. After all, we were only talking about 80,000 lbs of truck and concrete. The upshot is that I ended up taking about 3 years off the life of my tires and breaking the drawbar off of the tractor. We finally got the truck out with some strategically placed gravel. It turned out that the chutes on this truck could all but reach the back of the pour anyway. The only other mishap was having the back wall form blow out a little bit. It was a cool and misty evening and it took the concrete until about midnight to stiffen up enough to get out on and finish, but it turned out pretty well.

Soft Weather

2006-08-25T08:28:00.000-04:00

We have kind of dry weather lately but we are starting to get the rain, heavy dews, and morning valley fog that we normally get at this time of year. After the middle of September it gets very hard to make dry hay in our area because the morning dew doesn't burn off until after noon and it starts getting damp again by the middle of the afternoon, which doesn't leave much time for drying. We generally just make the first cutting of hay and graze everything else.

Turkey Horror Flick

2006-08-22T08:06:00.000-04:00

Farm Store Construction Update

2006-08-13T22:05:00.000-04:00

Knocking out the footers
Digging post holes

Drake and I began work on the store this weekend. I began getting things ready for Saturday a couple of days earlier by breaking holes through the cinder block walls and jackhammering out the "footers" (they actually only went a foot into the ground) where the posts were to go. It felt a little like a high stakes game of "Don't Break the Ice" but Drake assured me that it wasn't as perilous as it seemed. Then I ended up renting a little mini excavator to dig out the post holes, and ended up having enough time to dig the water line for the new poultry processing room (the doom room). Unfortunately the best route to a water source ran under the porch, so I ended up tearing up a porch floor I didn't feel like replacing just yet. These jobs seem to give birth to other jobs.

We worked on replacing the crumbling cinder block wall with 6x6 posts on Saturday and Sunday. Saturday we were lucky to have friend Bill to help out (he was avoiding more mundane jobs at home), and by Sunday afternoon we had replaced one wall with 4 posts.

See next post for more pictures.

Farm Store Construction Update Continued

2006-08-13T21:44:00.000-04:00

Waterline to the house
Drake working in OSHA approved front end loader bucket
Sunday evening

Clodhoppers in Paradise

2006-08-12T17:39:00.000-04:00

Goose Bay at Sunrise
The Clodhoppers
The Skippers Krill

Our good friends Dave and Luke Krill (both eligible bachelors by the way) recently bought a property in Goose Bay, NY, which is right in the Thousand Islands. Then they figured they might as well have a motor boat to go along with it. Last weekend we went up with them and had a great time. Of course it is not that easy to just leave farm with livestock, but we are lucky because we have a guy like Seamus who can do chores, and good neighbors who can check to make sure I plugged a freezer back in when I realized halfway up there that I might not have, and chase pigs and turn electric fences on for me when I leave home without doing it.

So when we got up to Goose Bay Dave took us out in the boat, we dropped achor and went for a swim. I got a chance to try to perfect my back flip off of the boat. The next day we went over to Mary Island. The kids went fishing and then we swam for a while. On this island there is a couple of good places to jump into the water from. One of them is about 6 feet above the water and the other is about 20. Jumping off of a 20 foot cliff is pretty thrilling. Luke, Dave and I did it twice. That night we went into Alexandria Bay for pizza and ice cream, and to gawk at the $100,000+ boats. Then on Sunday we did some fishing off of the boat, and I got to drive the boat and see what she would do. I managed not to run it aground like Dave had the week before. It is a really nice spot up there, and I hope we can get up there at least once a year. Not in January though.

Featherhead is dead. Long live Featherhead

2006-08-01T12:55:00.000-04:00

Featherhead arrived here last summer on his way to the killing cone. Seamus got him as his free (throw away) chick from Murray McMurray. Our oldest daughter Isabel took a liking to him so Seamus gave him to her. That's when his name changed from Wayne Newton to Featherhead. Featherhead had a hard time adjusting to his new surroundings and eventually took comfort in the company of turkeys. After Thanksgiving he managed to make friends with a few hens, and everything was going great for him.

Then this summer he started falling off of stuff, and having these little fits. A couple of weeks ago I found him laying on his back with his feet in the air, all but dead. So I helped him out with the transition and buried him in the compost pile. About an hour later I found a hen on a newly hatched clutch of eggs, which almost never happens around here because we collect the eggs religiously. A couple of these chicks are unmistakably Featherheads' progeny.

All Things Reconsidered

2006-07-29T17:10:00.000-04:00

We were all set to begin construction on our on farm store when I noticed how roughly Old Man Winter had treated our old cinder block chicken house. This chicken house was built probably starting in the 1950's and was built in two sections. The first section (the left hand side) was built by someone who apparently thought that footers that extended deeper than the frost line (4 feet for us) were optional, and opted not to. Last winter we didn't have much snow so the frost picked up and put back down this section of the building repeatedly. That third of the building was in pretty rough shape before, but now there is a split that runs from the ground to the rafter plate right in the left corner of the big doorway in the picture. As a matter of fact that whole wall is starting to buckle.

So anyway, I figured we had better do something about that building before it collapses. What I decided to do was to prop up the roof on that third of the building, knock the walls out from underneath it and replace them with a pole barn like structure. I thought that was a golden opportunity to change our store plans and build the farm store into the front half of that bay and a new poultry processing facility in the back half. Both rooms would measure 15 x 20 feet. This should end up being a better space for the store and it will be very convenient to get the chickens from the processing room into the store. When I undertake projects like this that are beyond my mental capacity to figure out, I always call on my friend and honorary brother in law Drake. He is the kind of guy who can figure out how to replace the bottom section of a chimney while leaving the top intact. Of course, guys like that tend to be a little busy, but I have him nailed down to begin this project the weekend after next. Stay tuned for more updates

Seamusville

2006-07-15T17:48:00.000-04:00

Our friend and sometimes hired man has had an eventfull summer. Seamus is one of the last homesteaders. For the past few years he had been living in the milkhouse of his old family farm, with cold running water and a cookstove which he used for cooking and which kept the milkhouse from freezing up. He has an old jersey milk cow which, in conjunction with his chickens and garden provide him with almost all of his sustainance. He has been able to sustain himself this way with only occasional outside work. This spring the word came down from his aunt and uncle who own the land that his milk house, garden and pasture are on, that they would be selling this property, so Seamus had to find other arrangements. Since we depend on Seamus for some part time help like butchering chickens and stacking hay, as well as doing chores so that we can go away once in a while, we decided that he could set up down by the barn until a better opportunity presented itself. He traded a neighbor a few pounds of butter for the camper in the picture. The shed that says "produce" on it was a building I built on skids to use as a scale shack back when we used to raise strawberries. Seamus has that set up as a kitchen.

Seamusville was settled June 8th, 2006.

Since then he has been offered a great opportunity at the other end of our road. A couple we have known for a few years bought a parcel of land that adjoins their other land. It happens to have a rundown house on it that would be considered uninhabitable by most people, but Seamus has lived in some rough conditions, so for him the place is loaded with potential. In exchange for his ridiculously low rent he is going to be making some improvements to the house. He also has access to a fair amount of land that goes with this property, so his cow will be able to graze and he should have enough land to be able to begin a market garden. He also got a full time job which is only a half mile from his new house, which is pretty amazing when you consider how remote of a location we are talking about.

He is moving in over there today.

Can't Get There From Here

2006-06-29T07:57:00.000-04:00

Yesterday Mother Nature slapped us again for being disrespectful. We had been getting a fair amount of rain for the better part of the week, so the ground had soaked up about as much as it cared to. Then Tuesday night about 8 pm the skies opened up and we ended up getting something close to 8 inches in a few hours. We live in what is called the Endless Mountains region of North East Pennsylvania, which is best described as mostly a ridge and hollow type landscape. We are up on top of a huge hill, and most of the houses around here are up out of the flood plains, so when we get rain events like this we don't worry much about our houses standing in flood water like the valley cities (Wilkes-Barre, Scranton) do. Where we run into trouble is that all the water gets funneled into very narrow and often steep places which makes it run fast and deep. The Whites Creek which runs a mile to the west of the farm is usually about 15 feet wide and a foot or so deep. When I checked it yesterday morning it had spilled over it's banks and had covered most of the creek flats that are down there. Three of the roads that cross that creek, each within about a mile of each other had their bridges destroyed. One of the problems we are having in this part of the state is that there are a lot of bridges closed for repair and not a lot of money to fix them. Bridges that are closed often stay that way for 5 years until the state gets around to repair them. I hope they will be able to repair some of these bridges faster than that.
Our Springville Township road crew is pretty impressive though. The township road that runs along the creek was largely covered up with debris and stone that had washed down our hill and dumped onto the road. By the middle of the afternoon they had managed to make that road passable, and the bridge that they built last year was the only one that I know of that survived.

The Jury is Back

2006-06-26T18:00:00.000-04:00

A while back I had a post about frost seeding clover into some of our pastures. Today while I was moving the cows to a fresh paddock I began looking for signs that some of the seed found a home. Just about every bare spot between clumps of grass was inhabited by young clover plants. This clover will increase the protein content of the pastures as well as fixing a good amount of nitrogen in the soil, which will benefit the growth of the rest of the plants in the pasture. We are not able to get quite enough nitrogen into out fields otherwise. This becomes obvious when I see how much greener and more quickly the grass grows after the chicken pens pass over a section of the field. It ends up looking like a green racing stripe.

H(ay) Day Invasion

2006-06-19T08:37:00.000-04:00

We rent the farm across the road primarily to make hay on. With all of the machinery involved making hay over there has always seemed like a military invasion. I usually establish a beach head in the field right across the road, and from there we push further and further into the fields until we have conquered the whole farm. This afternoon I plan to take the hill. By the time we are done with hay the fields are all bare and the machines occupy the top of the hill. I am not sure why I tend to think of these things in militaristic terms, because ultimately I am pretty much a pacifist.

The Maiden Voyage

2006-06-01T15:39:00.000-04:00

The New Pen

Salatin Type Pen

I have been trying to come up with a broiler chicken field pen design that would work better for me than the Salatin type pen (Joel Salatin is the Guru of modern pastured poultry). His style of pens (bottom picture) are 10x12 and 2 feet high. We have been using this design for the past 5 years or so. The nice thing about them is that they are quick to build and have a low profile, which helps them blend into the landscape and keeps them from blowing away in wind storms. What I dislike about them is that they are hard to get the chickens back out of when their time comes. Also there are times when we have too much rain for the ground to absorb and water starts to run into the pens. If these chickens can't get dry because they are sitting in a puddle they get hypothermia, and that's it for them. More than once I have been out in a torrential downpour at some wee hour of the morning trying to spread hay out under the covered part of these pens. The hay lets the chickens get up out of the water and they soon dry off. Another trouble is that it is hard to see if the chickens are out of the way of the trailing edge of the pen or the dolly it rolls on, which makes moving the pens a little nerve wracking.

I built at similar shelter to the new pen last year for the turkeys. The fatal flaw on the turkey tunnel was that I didn't enclose the ends at all, which apparently made it close enough in design to a hang glider, and it took off in an October thunder storm (see archives). The turkey tunnel hoops were made out of steel rebar which made them remember every way they had ever been mistreated. The final insult was about 8 inches of wet snow which flattened it beyond repair.

The newly built field pen is almost identical to the turkey tunnel except that it is half of the length, the ends are closed in, and the hoops are made out of 1 1/2 inch PVC pipe. We will need a couple of 60 mph windstorms to decide if the new design works better for us, but we generally get a few of those a year, so we should know in a few months

The Four Little Pigs

2006-05-24T11:12:00.000-04:00

The first litter of pigs was born the night before last. When I did the evening chores I figured she would have them that night. She was building a nest, had milk, and was a little grumpy. She didn't have a great litter. Only four survived birth, four were dead. But for a first time mother she is doing a great job with the ones she has. So far she has been very careful and attentive with them. All together we have 3 gilts, but I don't think one of them is bred. The other one (in the picture) is probably about a week off of farrowing. I let the boar and gilts live together as one big family, so I don't actually know the breeding date for any of them. We are beginning to feel the less meddling we do in our livestocks affairs the better. If we give them the things they need to be successful at what they want to do naturally, they will generally rise to the occasion. I spent a few hours watching the new momma pig farrow and she didn't have any live ones while I was there. The four that made it were born after I went to bed, so obviously she was able to handle that without any help from me either. We try to intervene only when there is a problem.

The Great Green Sea

2006-05-18T07:28:00.000-04:00

Around here we spend all winter longing for Spring grass. It always starts in slow, kind of like the tide coming in, and then all of a sudden there is a tidal wave of grass. We manage our pastures/hayfields using rotational grazing. What that means is that we subdivide the pastures and only give the livestock access to enough for 1 day. We have 4 or 5 sets of portable temporary fence which we keep moving to form the next paddock, leapfrog style. This time of year it is impossible to keep up with the grass so we end up reducing the amount of ground that we pasture and let some of the farm go for hay. After the first cutting of hay the grass is generally starting to slow down and the cows can keep up with it. It isn't a flawless system but most years it works very well to keep the grass eating livestock well fed all year.

Getting a Better Fence

2006-04-27T08:10:00.000-04:00

My neighbors Randy and Jamie Loch have finished up with the maple syrup season and though they are still lambing they had some time to come over and start driving posts for me. If you want to see what their operation is all about look at their website at www.lochsmaple.com. Seamus and I spent a lot of last winter cutting, hauling, and splitting locust fence posts and last week began laying them out where they would go. We started on this fence on the run that goes along the road, as I figure that is the most important place to have a good fence. The rest of the farm at least has a rusty 43 strand barbed wire fence. The old tradition is to just keep adding barbed wire and fence posts as needed, so after 100 years you end up lots of strands of barbed wire in varying states of decay as well as the old posts which rotted off at the ground levitating next to their replacement posts.
Anyhow, this picture is of Randy driving the first post for this fence. His wife Jamie is driving the tractor. The post pounder is a heavy I beam that is hydraulically lifted, then free falls onto the top of the post. The ground is a little dry right now but the pounder still drives the posts all of 2 feet into the ground. They really go in solidly too. I wouldn't want to hit one on my sled.

Valley Fog

2006-04-18T08:39:00.000-04:00

First Chicks of 2006

2006-04-14T05:45:00.000-04:00

The first batch of chicks arrived on Wednesday evening. We got a call at about 6pm that they had come into the post office in Montrose, which is about 10 miles north of here. The postmaster said he'd leave them out on the dock and I ran up and got them. Just before chicks hatch they absorb the rest of the yolk, which makes it possible for them to go the first 3 days without any food or water. That makes it pretty convenient for them to get sent in the mail. Most of our chicks come from Quakertown, Pa and always arrive the day after they are sent. So far they have always arrived in great shape. These chicks go into a brooder for about 3 weeks before they are ready to go out on pasture in the field pens. Once they are out on pasture they get moved to fresh grass every day. They get about 70% of their nutrients from the grain ration we have made up for them. The other 30% comes from the grass and insects on the pasture. They are ready to process at about 8 weeks and dress out at about 5 pounds each.

The Junk A (Clodhopper Popper)

2006-04-05T08:04:00.000-04:00

One of the tractors we have is a 1947 John Deere Model A. I bought it at an auction about 8 or 9 years ago for $400. It wasn't running when I bought it but I figured I could get it going for a few hundred bucks and have something that was half decent. So I started fixing it. Basically it turned out to be a tractor that someone had built from broken parts. After I invest enough time and money into something I get pretty reluctant to quit. I always think that maybe the next hundred dollars will be it and we will finally have something. By the time I was done I had a $1500 $700 tractor. In the meantime I ended up buying another Model A figuring I could always use the Junk A for parts, plus I knew how to work on them. That was the Good A. I did finally get the Junk A going and it was a pretty good tractor for jockeying hay wagons and pulling the manure spreader. Until last winter. I started it on a really cold day and got distracted before I checked the oil pressure guage. As it turned out there was water in the crank case which had frozen, keeping the oil pump from doing its thing. It sheared a coupler which runs the oil pump. The tractor ran for about 15 minutes without any oil. The final result was that the connecting rod journals got worn out of round and the connecting rod bearings got destroyed. So now $400 later I have all the parts repaired or replaced and I'm ready to spend a day putting it back together. So I guess I still don't know when to quit. The next time something breaks I'm parting it out.

Spring Plowing

2006-03-27T08:03:00.000-05:00

I finally got the pigs out into the garden on Saturday. We decided to expand the garden a little bit this year because it always seemed like we didn't quite have enough room for all the squash and sweet corn we wanted to grow. The pigs do a great job in killing off the sod that we need to get rid of. Besides, they didn't have anything constructive to do until the cows go out on pasture and they can get into the cowshed to start turning the bedding pack into compost. I have a junky old horse trailer parked in the garden for the pigs to spend the night in, but so far they have opted not to. I'm certainly not going to try and force them. These pigs are my breeders. There are gilts (young sows), and the black and white one is the boar. The white ribbons in the foreground is electric fence polytape. Pigs are very respecting of electric fence, but they have to be able to see where it is.

The Farm Store

2006-03-24T08:53:00.000-05:00

Last year a Nor'Easter blew through on turkey processing day (November 22nd). It was plenty cold during the day while we were processing, but it turned especially nasty in the evening when people were due to come pick up their Thanksgiving turkeys. It was about 20 degrees with 40 mph winds. In the past our customers have picked up their birds at our processing building that we call the Gut Hut. The birds have always been in the chill tank until people arrive to pick them up. Unfortunately we always seemed to have a bottleneck because of the time it took to pull the chickens out of the tank, drain the water out of them, bag them, weigh them and figure up the bill. Sometimes we had five people waiting for their birds. Anyhow, this problem, combined with bad weather and a desire to be able to sell our products year round gave us the urge to build an on farm store. Last week I had 22 tons of gravel (modified) delivered and began to level up a spot to put the store. It is going to be connected to the existing Gut Hut. As you can see from the (bad) drawing it will have a shed roof that will extend towards the processing building. We are trying to get ahold of a walk in freezer that we could put under that shed as well as a fridge for eggs and possibly a table to sell some produce off of when we have a surplus from the garden. A walk in freezer would make it possible for us to get chicken out of the chill tanks and bagged up before people arive to help take care of the bottleneck. The store itself will have a bunch of chest and upright freezers in it so that we can sell frozen chickens and turkeys, as well as beef and pork by the individual cut. Currently we only sell beef and pork by the half and whole. I plan to post the progress on this building as we get it built.

Besides, Colleen Kane, who owns Sea Hag Soaps in Brackney gave us a really great cash register that she wasn't using anymore, so we have to build a spot to use it.

Frost Seeding, It's fun for the whole family

2006-03-15T10:36:00.000-05:00

I was a little afraid we had missed the boat to frost seed some clover into our pastures this spring. It was 60 degrees here over the weekend, and got nowhere close to freezing over night. In order to frost seed we need the night time temperatures to go low enough to freeze a crust on the soil, which causes it to honeycomb. That opens up cracks for the seed to land in. We got it last night and I had borrowed the broadcast seeder that the Susquehanna County Conservation District owns. I knew I would have 3 kids with me so I ended up mounting the seeder on the snow plow lift arm on the front of the pickup truck. We got going on the seeding at about 7 this morning and by 8:30 we had covered the 13 acres I had planned to do. This is the first time we have tried frost seeding so I will be interested to see what happens. There is no clover in those fields now so any we see this summer we can take credit for.

This Slid Off of My Kitchen Roof

2006-02-28T08:01:00.000-05:00

Sahara

2006-02-20T10:42:00.000-05:00

Last Saturday night all the horses came into the barn like they usually do, everybody seemed to be just fine. When I got to the barn on Sunday morning I discovered that Sahara had slipped her halter, went outside and died. We had the vet in to float her teeth a few years back and he told me she hadn't been twenty for more than ten years. She was old enough that her teeth were in pretty rough shape. Still, for an old horse she had plenty of spunk. I was glad to see her die suddenly and unexpectedly. Usually old animals get to the point where they are suffering and a decision has to be made about putting them down. I guess if you've got to go, that's the way to do it.

The Cookstove dilemma

2006-02-15T07:52:00.000-05:00

The Bengal
The Kalamazoo

Don Lee, our local antique and flooring shop owner stopped by the other day for some eggs. I happened to be leaning against the Bengal Blue Jet cookstove we have in the kitchen, warming my back. I do that a lot in the winter while I am looking out the window at all the work that needs to be done. Don asked me if I wanted a smaller cookstove to go there. He owned one that needed to be moved that I could have for the price of a few meat chickens. So I went and picked it up on Saturday. It is a 6 burner Kalamazoo. The dilemma is this (get ready for the most irrelevant question you have ever contemplated). The Bengal is in better condition and has a good spot to lean on without getting burned. The Kalamazoo is smaller and would fit in our kitchen better, and it has more character. The Kalamazoo, though smaller, has six burners, while the Bengal has only 4, plus 4 gas burners which we don't use. I'd just swap them out for a while to see which I like better except they are really heavy, so they aren't much fun to move. We are planning on building an on farm sales building and which ever one doesn't end up in the kitchen will end up out there.

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised

2006-02-10T07:52:00.000-05:00

I went to the field day at Polyface Farm (Joel Salatin's place) this summer. I had a great time and certainly got more than $75 worth of ideas out of it, not to mention a good lunch. It's one thing to read about something but sometimes you just have to see how elements all come together to form a working prototype. I thought I took a lot of pictures, but I don't think I took enough now. One thing I have noticed about pictures is that the main subject of the picture often isn't as interesting as something in the background later on. I am beginning the process of building a coral and handling chute for cattle and I wish I had taken more pictures of his setup for ideas. I was able to get some info from the background of a few pictures. Anyhow, what amazed me most about this day was the turnout. The estimate was between 1200 and 1400 people. When I got there they had 10 hay wagons for hauling people out to the fields. Joel got on a bull horn as the thing was starting and said how many people were here and that a vast majority of us would need to walk. He also said that they had to cut off registration 3 weeks early because it was starting to get out of hand, and they were afraid there might be 2000 people attending if they didn't close it out. I don't know what it really means, but it sure felt like a small farm revolution to me.