I enjoy looking at the depiction of livestock in old artwork, particularly the pigs. The bustling “Netherlandish Proverbs” painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder is delightful. It can be studied on many levels and it invites minute examination with its blending of highbrow irony and lowbrow bawdiness. But I’m neither historically nor artistically trained, so I’ll leave those […]
Pigs in Art: Bruegel and Unachievable Farming Ideals Read More »
Visitors to the farm cringe at the slovenly pile of scraps next to the garage. I like to think of my piles of offcut wood and steel as a carefully curated collection of resources available for later reuse. Rachel doesn’t agree with my assessment. She suspects I’m just building a monument to Tetanus. But this
Self Justifying Recycling Story Read More »
This isn’t a world record, but we dropped below -20 degrees this weekend. That’s the coldest temperature we’ve seen in the five winters we’ve been here. If nothing else, the cold sure has a way of expediting trips to the outhouse. The cattle, pigs, and chickens take it all in stride. We’re the ones who
I always enjoy the opportunity to put on my engineering hat and delve into a new project. This evening I did the work to figure out how to size the refrigeration unit for our walk-in freezer. I wouldn’t be interested in sizing refrigeration systems as a full-time job, but I enjoy digging into the details of
This is our first season bale grazing with poly pipe bale rings. We are completely impressed with them. We originally bale grazed without rings, following the advice of various conference speakers who scoffed at the idea of wasted hay. “Wasted hay is just added fertility!” But when we looked at our hay feeding costs, we realized
Poly Pipe Hay Bale Rings Read More »
While we’ve felt chilly recently, this winter has been a real pushover. But even though we haven’t been brutally tested like last year, looking back over pictures of summer fields still manages to bring a pang. I miss summer, but I’m not aching for warmth like I was last year. It is a nice feeling to
Overheard today a group of farmers talking about how they had visited the USDA FSA office to get their paperwork in order for 2016 funding. They have bigger plans for this year than last year, so they wanted to get more money for those projects. Then they started complaining about the EPA having unwarranted authority to
Our previous tire trough blog post has always been the most popular post on the site. But the old trough was just a tank. We had to truck the water to it or rig up the gasoline pump and a lot of hoses and pipes. Trucking water is bad, bad, bad, but it was our
Cattle-Proof Water Trough, Improved Read More »
Everyone who knew me from my prefarming days knew me as a inveterate builder. So their questions directed toward me are often, “What’s new with the house?” And my answers for the last five years have been, “Nothing.” After we moved in, we patched holes in the roof, fixed a few broken windows, and replumbed the
We had our first dose of winter today, windy and cold. Cold weather means frequent trips out to the hens to gather the eggs. Most of our chickens behave themselves and lay eggs in the nests, or at least in the cove next to the nest box, but there are four or five hens that
