Fall Work

Every season brings a different list of tasks, and like most other farm jobs they are time sensitive.  Last week was a good one - weather was sunny, dry and warm and the field corn was down to a moisture content that was safe to crib so Andy went at it.  He was able to get the 5 acres of field corn picked and put in the crib in three days without having to deal with either mud or breakdowns.  One for the record books.  ;-)

Our machinery is antiquated but he's comfortable with how it all functions and given our scale of production it suits us just fine.  The metal gravity wagon collects the ears the picker spits into it, then to unload it the trap door at the bottom is rolled up and they flow out - hence 'gravity' box.  Occasionally you have to climb in and kick some cobs out of the upper corners but once a few loads have slid out they all flow much better.



The ears travel up the elevator and tumble into the crib where Andy has lifted out a roof section.  Kernels that come off the ears in transit fall through a grid in the floor of the elevator, collect on a big tarp and we bag them at the end of the day.  Because they are packed so solidly in the bag there is risk of molding.  The corn is dry enough to go in the crib and continue to cure, not dry enough to be contained in a bag.  
We had just ground some corn (last year's) for the sheep so we had no immediate use for this.  Rather than see it go to waste we called a neighbor who raises boa constrictors and he was happy to take it for his livestock needs - the rats he raises for the boas.  You never know who is raising what a few doors away. He showed us a pair of babies a few years ago - gorgeous ones like these.  
Anyway, the corn is picked, stashed and equipment for that put away.  Whew!
Our old apple trees have really outdone themselves this year.  The Pound Sweets are living up to the name.

Any drops with dings or bird pecks go to the rams.  Besides being very large this year the apples have no worms.  Not one.  I'm not complaining, but it's certainly remarkable.  The Wolf River is still laden with a lot of fruit.

Apples without blemishes have been collected in buckets and turned into yummy things for the winter.  I've lost track of how many containers of applesauce I've put in the freezer.  Last Sunday was a marathon of apple handling but I can't say what it was - a good bit of the work will reappear in Christmas baskets.  :-)

I've also been working in the wool shop.   I've been sold out of dyed Cotswold curls for a while and picked a fleece with good curl character and low VM and put some toward a colorway I'm working on and some I dyed solid colors for sale in my booth at the next fiber event - Christmas on the Farm in Phelps, NY.

The curls are nice for needle felting, tail spinning and general embellishment of fiber goods.  
So there was the first week of November.  Onward!

Gone But Not Forgotten

Monday and today a great big flatbed tractor trailer has ferried away the parts of the two silos that are going to live a new life on another farm.

The driver brought his skid steer as he will wear two hats and also be the person loading the trailer.  Happily the skidder is on rubber and not metal cleats.  He had to cross the road with each pallet and our road supervisor would have been Not Happy to have the road all chewed up.  Andy and I went out each time after he had left and scraped the mud and gravel out of the road with the barn scrapers so no one would suffer stone pecks on their car.

The first load comprised twenty-two pallets of staves - a bit over forty thousand tons.

The second load included about half the steel silo hoop sections bundled atop the pallets.

 

The third load included the last of the staves, the rest of the hoop parts and the skid steer.  I asked the driver if he would be done after delivering this load.  No, he had to go to Potter and pick up a load of apple boxes, do some maintenance on the truck and then head for New York City.  Eeesh.  Another hard working guy.

 

 

Speaking of hard working guys, That Andy has been picking corn.  The first few days of running was great, then we got three-tenths of an inch of rain and temps hovering around freezing so now it's a cold slog through mud.  He has about one more load from the first field then he moves to the next.

 

 

 

"I like that fella and all, but I just don't know why you're letting him take our stuff."



 

After corn picking he'll go back to cutting firewood.  Then the barns will need to be cleaned following the end of breeding season.  Then.....he can think about "tidying up" where the silos stood.  Sigh.



 





Into August

Summer is marching on and we're into the middle of August.  Every day is busy.

Andy finished putting the new wire on the new fence posts.  It should last as long as we do unless someone drives a car through it.  Don't laugh - it's happened before.

We sold a load of ear corn.  One bin about fills the trailer and was a bit light this time, weighing just over eleven tons.  Another bin will go out next week.  The driver is a nice guy and helped Andy kick and shovel the corn down to the elevator when gravity alone began to fail.

It only took a couple of hours to fill the truck.

We managed to get some second cutting alfalfa raked and baled yesterday just minutes before it rained.  After this cold front passes there is a stretch of dry clear weather predicted so I'm sure we'll be cutting as much as optimism allows.

I skirted and washed a bunch of Cotswold lamb to go with some alpaca and laid it out to dry.  I can't guarantee there won't be a few dog hairs in the roving.  Sigh.

 

The Steuben county fair started today and I always demo handspinning for a few hours in the Agriculture Building.  It's the quintessential  'rural county fair' experience - the smell of barbeque and hot sugar wafting in the door, the announcer calling the harness races from the grandstand, 4H kids walking their livestock past the door on the way to the arena and lots of people circulating around the exhibits and stopping to ask questions about my wheel and fiber.  I shared the immediate area with a man turning bowls on a lathe, Cornell Cooperative Extention,  and the honeybee association.  Most kids were pretty good but I heard "Don't spin the bees!" more than once as turning the clear bee frame to see the other side morphed into giving the bees a turn on The Scrambler.

 

 

 

If the start of the fair wasn't a certain sign, nature is beginning to whisper that Fall is coming.  Spiders are getting bigger and making webs that show up more.  This one spans the doorway with ease.

 

 

Most telling of all, the goldenrod is blooming.

 

 

It's a lovely yellow and if you look closely at it you can see each yellow finger is made up of tiny individual flowers shaped like daisies.

 

 

Busy as one is, it pays to stop and peer closely at little things.  There's always a reward.







 



Frosty Morning

We've had some nice weather lately - bright sun all day and clear nights with an amazing show of stars.  I would hate to live somewhere with so much artificial light at night that you can't see stars.  As the earth cools each night the ground is covered with a very heavy frost by morning, making a pretty fuzz of ice crystals on everything.

 

Even mundane brown apple leaves look exotic for a brief time.

 

 

The dry weather has also finally allowed Andy to get serious about picking corn.  He's been chomping at the bit and the slow speed our antiquated equipment works at adds an element of uncertainty to the task - will the weather stay dry long enough to get it all done in one stretch of days or will it end up being periodically too wet and spread the picking over weeks?  The ground is pretty wet as it is and he got good and stuck the first day as evidenced by the mud on the tires.

 

 

Besides that, things have been going pretty well, although slowly by modern standards.  The fellow who rents acreage from us combined 80 acres of corn in less than a day.  Andy can manage 4 loads a day with diligent running (including time to unload and move the elevator from bin to bin as needed) and will need 12-14 days to get our 18 acres done, barring serious break downs.  (If anyone knows where we can obtain a New Idea 323 1-row corn picker to have for parts we'd love to know!!)  Fast or slow, it's money in the bank, so to speak, once it's in the crib since you can feed it or sell it as needed.  This crib, another like it and part of a third will be full by the time we're done.

 

 

In other news, I finished dyeing a batch of gray wool (parts from various Cotswold fleeces and Mr. Lincoln's fleece) and handed it off to Acorn Works at guild yesterday.  I was trying to replace Wine Country, but I decided to put more red into the dyebath.  The previous incarnation of WC was pretty but was more plum color than wine.  I love the way the wool came out this time.  There was some lighter gray and some darker and you can really see the difference.  The pale gray came out a pinker purple.

 

 

The dark gray came out more mulberry.  Some locks were nearly black to start with and they will tone it down even more when carded into the finished roving.  Can't wait to see it back!

 

 

Thanksgiving is looming approaching quickly - I guess I'd better stop playing with wool and break out some cleaning supplies to try making the house look like it's not being lived in by a colony of badgers.

 

 



 

 

 







Of Heat, Hay and Hermaphrodites

I can hear you going, "Whaaa.....??"  Yep, you read it right, but more on that later.

We are closing in on the end of first cutting hay.  We have half of a field left to bale which should be about 800 more bales which would push us to 7200.  The oats are maturing fast in the heat so we'll be baling straw soon, possibly before second cutting alfalfa.

The heat has been wicked here for the animals, plants and DH.  I was so comfortable I actually wore shorts to town the other day.  So besides hay, what do we do in mid-summer?  Andy sent three truckloads of ear corn to a fellow in Penn Yan with beef cattle.  It flows pretty well at first but you eventually have to climb into the crib and shovel it.

The fellow doing the trucking climbed on top of the load to make sure the trailer was filling evenly and to pull the travel tarp over it.

We kept back enough corn to keep us safe if the corn we planted totally fails this year.  It sure wouldn't make sense to sell our home grown corn just to buy someone else's later at a higher price.

Holly and I participated in the Bath Humane Society's fundraising dogwalk. It was a circular route through town starting from the site of the new facility.

 

We walked through some downtown and some residential areas.

And then ended up back at the starting point where they had some pools waiting for the dogs.

Angel was thrilled to take advantage of one and Holly even stood in one for a while to cool her feet.  She's not a water dog.

We recently went though the flock and checked eye scores and weights, separated out the ram lambs and moved them to the Bachelor Barn with the big rams.  This week we have also put the ewes and ewe lambs into drylot, which means they have no access to pasture at all and are instead eating hay.  We've never had to do that before, but the drought has pushed the pasture into dormancy.  Rather than have the sheep wander in the heat looking for grass that isn't there (and damaging the plants in the process) they are eating close to 20 bales a day of that stuff we just baled. Additionally, we put the ewe lambs into the creep area so they could get a grain ration and what a commotion that caused.  For 36 hours all the moms and lambs did was yell at each other.  I know it would be worse than weaning the boys because there was no way to get the little girls out of sight and sound, but it was really awful.  Andy had to go downstairs that night and sleep on the couch because our bedroom windows face the lower barn and the noise was insufferable.  (I pulled a pillow over my head and managed OK, but I can sleep through anything).

And while we were working the flock to separate everyone we came across another 'first' - a hermaphrodite.  We weighed what I had on the charts as a ewe lamb and noted a wet butt so I grabbed the hand shears to trim the wool.  A few lambs had scoured from tapeworms so the dirty behind wasn't overly alarming, but needed cleaning up. Well the butt was wet, but turns out to be just urine. Hmmm... There's a funny bit of tissue sticking out of her vulva so maybe it's a little growth that's deflecting the pee? Well, whatever...we'll trim the wool up so she's not wet. Snip, snip, JUMP.....what did I hit? I'm no where near a teat, let's flip her over. OMG, here's 2 small but obvious testicles!! No sheath on the belly, but those. are. testicles. (one weeping blood a little. sorry. grab the BlueKote). So we stand her up and continue with the other lambs and later catch her peeing, but no squatting or lifting the tail. No wonder her tail dock was wet.  Clearly, the lamb thinks it's male. Maybe the growthy thing is an extension of the urethra like a pizzle on a ram?  (I'll spare you any sheep porno pictures, just take my word for it.)  So that's another 'new' thing this year that we've not seen before. Don't know how common that is in sheep - maybe she's worth a million dollars! 

Dexter says,

I'd give you a million dollars to turn the heat down.  Until then don't bother me.  I'm in my happy place.

Hang in there, Dexter.  It's got to cool off soon.

Another Episode of DIY

I'm getting to the age when I notice the things that are migrating away, and I'm not just talking about looking in the mirror.  A lot of infrastructure that farm folk rely on is disappearing locally which necessitates finding alternatives, sometimes too far away to be feasible.  When Agway in Bath was in business we had our animal feed ground at their mill.  When they closed their doors (taking our dividends with them, but that's another story) we were willing to try the other mill in town.  They served us pretty well for a few years and then decided that upgrading their mill equipment (translation - repair or replace so it worked better) was going to be too costly so they, too, ceased grinding. They would be more than happy to sell us all the bagged feed we wanted from Blue Seal or other companies, but that wasn't what we wanted to do for several reasons.  So we asked around and found a Mennonite business that handles agricultural needs in Penn Yan and inquired about having our feed ground.  Well, they could mix it but didn't have a grinder and did we think other people would come from the Bath area?  All we could say was 'maybe' so they acquired a (heavily) used grinder and actually have done a very good job with it for us.....until last month when they gave us notice that it wasn't cost effective for them to have a big tractor tied up sporadically to run the mill for us and a couple other customers and they were going to stop doing it in August.

Travelling farther than Penn Yan was not going to be financially sensible for us, and suppose the new place did a mediocre job besides?  Feeling more than a little put out with circumstance we decided to look for a used grinder of some type and if price and condition were favorable we'd buy it and start milling our own feed.

Ta-dah!

The Gehl Mix-All 125!  (pronounced "gale")

Empire Tractor in North Cohocton had just taken it in as a trade for something else.  They said they hadn't seen one on their lot in a few years and we were prepared for all kinds of damage from misuse (because you never know...)  but it was in quite good condition and only needed minor attention to a bearing and a good cleaning inside.  It runs off the PTO of the tractor, so no engine to worry about.  It had been stored inside and had all its parts and the price was pretty good considering a new one goes for 35-40K.  It lacks an owner's manual, but we're looking online.

So, you shovel corn into the hopper......

The cobs go through a hammermill to be crushed into pieces that will go through the proper sized screen and then it dumps into the mixer body.

At this point you would add other things and let it all mix thoroughly before augering it out for bagging or direct feeding.  However, we don't have a way to store the other components in bulk (soybean, distiller's grain, molasses) so we will still have to run to the Mennonite place and buy sufficient quantity each time for the weight of corn we've ground, put everything back in the mixer and then draw it off again as finished feed, but it's an improvement over buying somebody else's bagged feed or spending lots more money and time driving to another mill (assuming we could find one).

So, we drew off the ground corn and bagged it to take and weigh at the Mennonite's place.  I ran the hydraulics and Andy bagged it right in the truck bed.  Why lift bags from the ground if you don't have to?

It does a good job of grinding and we're happy with it....and happy that we don't have to depend on someone else's mill, skill and schedule.

If anybody wants some ground corn, just let us know ;-)