A well insulated concrete tank has been in use on a Boone county farm for a full year with no trace of ice on the water even in temperature 5 degrees below zero. It is equipped with automatic float valve and trickle overflow pipe, the latter to be used only in freezing weather. The tank gets its water supply by gravity from a large pond. With such a tank any one of the thousands of good farm ponds in Missouri may be made a dependable year-around means of having water before livestock at all times. The cost per year of service is low.

For over 40 years I’ve had very little trouble with horses spilling and wasting grain by tipping over containers or letting it fall from their mouth as they chew. Nor have I had a horse destroy a feeder or become injured on one. This is because I feed grain and/or concentrates in nose bags. I first started using traditional canvas nose bags on saddle and pack horses. Later I made draft horse size nose bags out of army surplus canvas buckets. When synthetic mesh bags became available I gave them a try, and later received a cavalry style nose bag as a gift from a friend.

WARNING: You need to read this article alone. I ask you to say some stuff aloud that might be embarrassing to you or aggravating to others upon first utterance. With that caveat stated, now a question. Do you love the chant of the auctioneer? Maybe you remember attending livestock sales as a kid. Maybe you enjoy going to estate sales. Whatever the case, much of the show and intrigue is listening to the fast talking auctioneer. Their ”cry“ just builds enthusiasm and excitement. Do you ever wish you could chant like an auctioneer? If so, I’m going to teach you the basics in this article. In about 5 minutes you’re going to hopefully impress even yourself by becoming a bid caller.

While I can appreciate the fact that as communities we are lacking the slaughtering and processing facilities that we need to have functional local food systems, I also have reservations about systems such as mobile slaughterhouses. For some, these units will allow new opportunities, but for others, those of us hard-scrabble, back-woods practitioners, it also represents the USDA finding another way to edit our food production stories.

The prospect of clipping pastures and cutting hay with the mower was satisfying, but I wondered how I might take advantage of a sickle mower in my primary crop of grapes. The problem is, my grape rows are about 9 feet apart, and the haymower is well over 10 feet wide. I decided to reexamine the past, as many of us do in our unconventional agricultural pursuits. I set off with the task of reversing the bar and guards to lay across the front path of the machine’s wheels.

Our current problems stem from our failure to understand and accept that we are biological organisms on a finite planet. We experienced a brief moment in history when we were able to step outside those constraints and that has coloured our assumptions of what is real and what is normal. In a century we have burned through millions of years worth of accumulated biomass in the form of fossil fuels. Our beliefs in economic growth and mechanical progress rest on this conflagration. It seems intuitively obvious to me that we cannot sustain these levels of energy use with annually renewable sources. But what seems obvious to me seems to be missed in most of the discussions of how to address climate change, peak oil, and environmental degradation. Our society has a passion for technofix fantasies that are held out as allowing us to continue on our present trajectory. Don’t believe them.

To be an effective trimmer of horse hooves one needs to spend a lot of time simply looking at horses. It is important not only to study their feet but to understand how the grounding action of the feet is affecting everything in the mass of body above. The adept trimmer needs to observe the horses from all angles both when they are standing at rest and while in they are in movement.

Putting hay into the barn is preferable to stacking. When hay is stacked for any considerable time more or less loss occurs through exposure to sun and rain unless the stack is covered. In many sections hay barns would soon pay for themselves. Yet many farmers will continue to stack part or all of their hay until they become convinced that hay barns or sheds are a good investment. This bulletin, therefore, describes the different types of stackers in use, states the conditions favorable for each type, and points out the saving of man labor made possible by the use of the stacker.

The scoop has two steel sides about 5 feet apart sitting on steel runners made out of heavy 2 X 2 angle iron, there is a blade that is lowered and raised by use of a foot release which allows the weight of the blade to lower it and then lock in the down position and the forward motion of the horses to raise it and lock it in the up position. This is accomplished by a clever pivoting action where the tongue attaches to the snow scoop.

Horselogging French-Style – A Photo Essay.

A slow-grower, the hickory and does not shag its bark until it produces nuts after about 40 years of age and despite its toughness, it must have pure air to survive, so it is seldom found in large cities. But, in small towns and remaining woods in the mid-west and eastern part of the country, the tree still thrives.

Johnny and the Three Goats • Connect the Dots

My starting every column with a discussion of the weather set me to thinking about that old clichéd idea of talking about the weather; how it is all old men talk about downtown at the local coffee shop; how they sit for hours telling endless lies about how the snow was deeper, the nights colder and the hills steeper when they were young. However, clichés have basis in truth, and it is true that weather is a wonderful conversation opener.

When great grandpa’s old 1967 Ford 4000, 50hp tractor died we could no longer pull our small square baler. With a limited budget and time, rebuilding our Ford tractor’s engine wasn’t a feasible option, buying a new tractor was way beyond the pocket book and buying any used tractor in our price range would be like buying a pig in a poke! As we saw our options narrowing loose hay seemed to make more and more sense.

In order to have a planned, equitable, local purchasing program between farmers and co-ops or local grocery stores, both farmers and buyers have to make it work. One of the ways to get a local buying program going is for the co-op to host a meeting with all interested farmers in the winter. A winter meeting benefits the farmers whose market season is slowing down or finished before seed buying for the season takes place. However, winter is the busiest time of year for food retailers as many farmers markets, CSAs and farm stands close for the season and holidays approach.

Here it often works like this: Mark hopes to get everything done today. Mark finishes one good project. Mark asks Kristin what he should do next. Kristin asks Mark what the options are. Mark and Kristin and Jane walk the fields and feel like solitary ants trying to make an anthill. Mark cajoles Kristin. “Why don’t you take a couple days off of writing so we can whip this farm into shape?” Kristin reminds Mark that it is bedtime (7:30 or 8:00). Mark wakes up next day, does a few things. Repeat above.

You can ask these guys here why they chose to come, but in my experience the students that come here come mainly because of the way the day is structured. And because of the social structure as well. It’s a smaller school. For the students who come here it’s a lot more appealing than going to a school that’s one or two thousand students. And then there is an internship component to the school that appeals to a lot of students. The majority of the learning that happens here is based around hands-on projects that the students are working with their teachers to come up with, that are based around what their interests and what their passions are.

A farming friend recently declared that in the Seattle area the concept of local farmers serving local consumers seemed to have reached a saturation point. She observed that sales were the indication and to illustrate spoke of her own case; with farmer’s market sales down two consecutive years – 20% down two years ago and another 20% dip in 2010. She suggested that while they might be needed elsewhere, at least in Skagit County Washington they did NOT need more farmers. In her view more farmers would just mean less income for each. I must respectively disagree and in the loudest volume I can muster on the printed page.

Some of the most durable and productive low external input farming systems in history are designed around animals that can accelerate the growth and conversion of plants to fertilizer. Because they are highly multifunctional, ruminant mammals rank highest among these. Beyond their manure production function, they can consume fibrous perennials unusable for human food. These perennials can grow on hill land too rocky or too erodable for many types of food cropping. Used as work animals, ruminants multiply the energy input from human labor many times.