fencing

Winter is coming

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Well Winter is definitely coming, we had our first freeze this fall. It dropped down into the low 20’s F and there is snow visible on the mountains and low foothills. We got rain instead of snow but Winter is coming. This spurred the decision to finally go and pickup the big bales of alfalfa that I had purchased this spring. My supplier holds them for me as I almost always pick them up late! I am a reliable customer so it works for both of us. I had been selling off the old small round bales from the machine shed and I managed to get the last of them unloaded and sold the day I went and picked up the large bales. I could store most of the years alfalfa in the machine shed if I had a tractor that could lift 1400# bales 14 feet into the air. But since I do not, I put 15 bales in the machine shed and they are the very last bales that I feed in the late winter/early spring. The rest go out onto the hillside in field 4b. The animals all get locked out of that field and I usually buy a big tarp and toss a lot of pallets on it to hold it in place. After buying the vinyl sign to use as a tarp and seeing how thick it is I bought two 12’x40’ signs/tarps and will lay those across the top of the large bales. I think they may even survive the winter. They should be here by the end of the week. Mr Rainman/me bent the loader support on the Kubota. It is for removing the loader and helping it be freestanding. The pull pin got displaced and the arm popped down while a big bale was getting jostled in place and it bent. The main pin had to be cut in three places to get it to let go! A 2# hammer and punch could not drive it out. The pin has spring clips so it will have to be a special order item. We were able to keep moving hay and that was the important part.

One of the things observed when we got the machine shed cleaned out was that there is a pretty damp back corner of the hay storage side. I had put down pallets last time and that worked really well to keep the hay from rotting. Years ago I had dug a trench on the backside of the machine shed and filled it with gravel to increase the drainage removal from the roof runoff. This did help quite a bit but it looks like it needs more help. Next year the gravel needs to be dug out and some French drain hose installed and then replace the gravel. I will also run the end of the drain farther away from the building. This should help quite a bit. The front ditch works wonders but I made a big sink hole for all of the water to go into and I did not do that with the back section.

Sunday we went out first thing to sort the cows. It was cold again so I put on a long sleeve shirt, knit hat, knit neck warmer, insulated carharts, large bulky quilted long sleeve over shirt and insulated gloves. I had a heavy vest ready to go but decided that I was dressing for -20F instead of 22F. I put the puppy, Chance, on a lead rope and we opened up gates to get the cows to the corral so that the bull could be sorted off. Once the bull is in Alcatraz we can put all of the cows into one herd. We can run one herd of cows until January when this years calves need to be weaned off. We will sort off the market cows and the calves and put those 11 cows down by the houses and keep the other above the house, there will be three fences and 100 yards minimum between the two herds. In reality there are a bunch of buildings and earthworks that prevent a line of sight from happening. They can still talk to each other and will especially right after we separate them. It is about 3-5 days of lots of hollering and voiced displeasure from both parties.

Chance did great once she got settled down. She wanted to sniff the hillside and find coyotes. She does not like other dogs as they are interlopers on her property. She does fine with our other border collie but not any other dog. We have not discouraged this as our coyote problem is immense and we want her to alert us if she spots one. Mr Rainman and I merely walked to the schoolhouse, had to run halfway up the hill once and then casually walk the cows to the hen house pasture. Once there we were able to separate the bull from the rest of the herd, opened the back door to Alcatraz and he went in as directed. We did not even have to use the corral to sort! I took Chance into the front barn lot and we worked the cows in an enclosed space. I let her run around with the lead rope trailing (there is nothing for the rope to catch on) and giving her commands to move the cows. She did great! I can now get her to lay down while she is mid chase on one of the cows. She will stop and drop to the ground. We need more work on her directions, left, right and circle around. The true key though is to be able to turn off the dog no matter what the circumstances, once you can do that training the other commands is easy. Once we let the cows out there were about 18 sheep that had come in still in the area, so I had Mr Rainman call Chance and work the sheep. We want her to respond to multiple people. A one person dog is great when you are the only one working the dog but having one that will listen to other people is handy. She is a true people pleaser so this fits right in with her personality.

I had shed the gloves, hat and neck warmer by the time we got off the hillside and by the time we got to the hen house I had taken off the outer jacket and was just wearing my Carharts and a light long sleeve shirt! I should have known, the rule is to leave the house with enough clothes that you are just a little uncomfortable and want more to stay warm. Work and exercise will give you the needed heat to stay warm and you won’t sweat.

We put in another gate into the alleyway from the hen house pasture. This way the animals can always get to water. The main spring on the farm originates in that pasture. We have had the gate leaning up against the fence since last year when we finished the alleyway. Now the cows will always be able to get to water. I even chained the gate open so it cannot accidentally get closed. There is one more gate still to be installed there and one small section of fence to install so that the cows can get to most of field four but not the area where we store the cow hay.

Some things continue to amaze me. We had a volunteer pumpkin grow at the main burn pile. The alpaca did not eat the plant, flower or pumpkin but the most amazing part was the plant got zero water. This summer we went over two months with no rain at one point. Annmarie made pumpkin purée and froze it today. We will be eating the rest for dinner tonight. I am going to plant several seeds around the pile in the spring! Who knows maybe this is the trick to growing pumpkins. The quail are everywhere, we have very large coveys all over the farm and we have started to keep a quail feed block out front by the old farm equipment pile. We hear quail all of the time now whenever we are outside. Heck, we even have a new pair of barn owls on the place. They have decided to roost in the large trees out front just before sunrise. They talk back and forth and are quite noisy. The coyote hunters have tried two more times without any success. They did see more coyotes but could not safely shoot them. Pretty quick we will be locking the sheep up at night and only letting them go out into the ram pasture as they will have lambs.

Field #1 ready for animals, still not completed

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Monday was spent fencing some more in field #1. A new fence around seven acres is no small feat. Not to mention the new section is curved like a C so it makes it painful to stretch. I really wanted to get the fence up so we could let the animals in to eat grass. The road side and wheat field side have an old fence that needs repaired. Unfortunately, sometimes the repair is more painful than just stringing up new wire.

The Apprentice and I got the last 500’ of fence up and even got it all clipped onto the T posts with a single strand of smooth wire on top. I used a four foot piece of pipe as a cheater bar to really crank down on the fence tighteners until the fence started to sing when I ratcheted up the tightener a notch. I opted to not install the wooden stays yet. I wanted to get all of the fence up and without the stays the fence will hold the livestock. Mr Rainman and the Apprentice can get all of the wooden stays on three sides of the field installed on Wednesday while I am at the paying job.

So we went to the far end and worked on the ditch crossing and did battle with the downed black walnut tree. It landed right where we needed to install a railroad tie and put the ditch crossing in place. We managed to get it installed and the paneling cut and in place. The last thing was to install the gate and we had it done enough. Which was a good thing as both of us needed a day off and no fencing. The Apprentice has collected an astounding amount of bruises and scratches in the last two weeks.

Annmarie is inspecting our hives and deciding whether we are going to get any honey this year. The bees split and they have not managed to make as much honey as last year so far. So I don’t know if we are going to get to harvest any.

The quail are everywhere! It is amazing to see how many we have this year. They are really calm and just run around everywhere.

We did have one of the brown alpaca just keel over dead Sunday night. The nephews found it on Monday. It was one of the old ones and was mighty skinny. I had been giving it the side eye every time I saw it when I was headed down the driveway. We now have 10 alpaca. It’s plenty and at least five of them will just come right over to the cars for a treat. If you open the trunk on the wife’s car they will just push up to the hatch opening and expect something. They are so insistent at that point that they will even let you touch on them until they get said treat.

Predators 11/ Farm 1

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Sunday morning we went out to do more fencing. The Apprentice just keeps coming back for more, which is a good thing. On the way out to field #1 we passed two dead lambs! Both kills occurred in field #4 near the barn lot, one near the old well and one near the dry creek bed. The one near the well was about 2/3 eaten and the other one was barely touched. After some righteous anger outbursts, now there are only 50 lambs to sell, we continued on to field #1 to fence. I did text the person who was supposed to come buy lambs on Monday. They eventually texted back and had some issues of their own and will not be able to come get lambs until Saturday. So we need to keep all 50 alive for one more week.

When we were installing the H braces we used a rolling measuring wheel to mark out 315’ approximately as each roll of woven wire is 330’. The plan was to be able to tighten one roll of wire at a time. A single roll weighs 185# so tying more than one together and trying to get it tight is brutal. It’s hard enough trying to get 185# of wire to stand upright using a hand tightener. I made sure and brought along a four foot section of pipe to use as a cheater bar when the tightener got too hard for me to tighten by hand. This allowed me to get another 6-12 inches of tightening.

On Saturday the black walnut tree was fine (see pictures from previous post) and then this morning the thing had split in half! It looks like there was a natural wishbone and the amount of walnuts caused the tree to just split in half. We are going to let it see if it can live by spending half its time on the ground. Who knows, maybe it will survive and do well. The turkeys roost in the tree also so maybe we should blame them instead of the huge number of walnuts.

We fixed the H brace and then tightened the fence to it. Once that was done then all of the T post clips had to be installed. I showed the Apprentice how to do this but it takes quite a bit of practice to be fast at it. I am doing about 2/3 of the fence. But I have had a lot of practice! We then did the wooden stays. This really makes the fence look good and it keeps the animals from pressing down on the smooth wire. We then rolled out another roll of fencing and got it up! Due to to curved nature of this fence we had to go on the outside of the railroad tie H braces in two spots. We clipped and stayed that section and then rolled out another 330’ of fence and called it a day. We are both getting very tired and sore.

I opted to do coyote patrol that evening and night. We don’t own a spotlight yet (it’s on order 300k candle power). But the moon was supposed to be out and I lined the pickup headlights to cover the area and used a powerful flashlight. I stayed out there from 1800-0000, 6 hours and never saw a single predator. Honestly, this is the most stupid problem ever. I am looking into a thermal scope and a flat shooting rifle. What we really need is a drone with a thermal camera on it that can be auto launched, flown over the farm then allow it to auto land back at it’s starting point. This way I would know whether to go out and deal with the predators. I am also looking into some thermal binoculars. The thermal binoculars and the spotlight with a good scope might just be enough. I have done the math, a protection dog costs about $1600 a year by the time you count for food and vet costs. This is a cost that continues year to year. A rifle and binocular cost is a one time event.

Fencing field #1 again

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Saturday was dedicated to more fencing. The goal is to get enough fence up around field #1 to let the animals into it. So the Apprentice and I loaded up the pickup and Kubota and headed out to get some actual fence installed. We rolled out the first 55 feet of fence, stretched it, put the T post clips on and then needed to install the wooden stays. I let the Apprentice use the DeWalt fence stapler and after she pulled the trigger a couple of times she said “that has some kick” and did not really want to staple anything with it. So when she held the first wooden stay and I ran the stapler she complained of pain and stinging from the stapler (it hurts). So she found a large old wooden fence post and she leaned that against the wooden stay then put her body weight onto the wooden buffer and had no more problems. She rolled out 330’ of woven wire along side the T posts and when we got to the next H brace we realized that it had not been completed. There was no X of tightened smooth wire in place. We left the smooth wire at the house because we thought we had done all of the X’s.

This necessitated a change in tasks so we went to installing T posts with the tractor. We did pretty good until we got near the end and then we started to bend the posts into a U shape. We fixed this by clearing the grass debris away from the post insertion site and I used a pounding technique with the bucket instead of a steady downward pressure. This got all of the T posts into the ground.

I decided to call it a day and we headed out of field #1, but when we got to the gate I realized that not having a direct gate into the field from the wheat field side is just horrible. It makes for this long convoluted route to get into field #1. So I stopped, had the Apprentice go grab one of the unused gates and three railroad ties to bring back, it took a couple of trips and some finagling on her part but she got all of the stuff to the needed spot. I took the John Deere tractor and tried to drill three large 12” holes into the gate opening I had fenced off. I managed it eventually but each hole took 10-15 minutes to drill out. I also realized that the hydraulic fluid leak is worse than I had guessed as the auger got stuck down into the hole with the 150# weight I had on the auger. I added three old tractor weights to the top arch and it makes the auger work even when the ground is hard. So I had to remove said weights to get the auger to come out of the hole. On a plus note, at least we dug out the main batch of holes with the six inch auger first. This saved us a bunch of time. So now the holes are dug and we just need to clean them out, set some posts, put in some wire X supports and then hang a gate. I was so glad to be done for the day.

Predators 9/Farm 1

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It has been one of those weeks, The Apprentice wanted to keep working all week. The fence building did not deter her. We have two leaky frost free faucets that need to be replaced. Unfortunately, to do that they have to be dug out. This is due to the reducers that had to be added to match the 2” pipe that is original to the farm. I placed some tools on the ground to outline a space and asked her to dig. She knocked out the first hole on day 1. Her only real obstacles were the dogs kept dropping the throw balls onto her head when the hole started to get deep. I imagine she threw the ball all day for both dogs. I am sure they loved it. I saw her on her way out and told her there was another faucet in the back yard that needed dug out but it was near a tree stump and would probably not be as easy. This did not seem to deter her and The Apprentice stated she would be back the next day.

Thursday morning, she texted me around 0930, a late start for sure. I am sure that first hole was causing some physical discomfort. I had messaged her first thing to check on a sheep carcass in the orchard. My mother-in-law had called me at work stating she thought there was a dead sheep in the orchard. The Apprentice confirmed there was indeed a dead ewe, #325, in the orchard with no intestines. I told her to just leave it. She tore into the back faucet with less enthusiasm and more problems. There were tree roots everywhere and she had to keep cutting through them. I knew this was going to be a problem. She had to leave around 1330 and said there was more to dig.

When Annmarie came home she called me at work to tell me there was a dead sheep in the orchard. I had forgotten to tell her. She had spotted it because there was a Golden Eagle feasting on the carcass! I asked if she had gotten a picture of the eagle, nope. We discussed my failure to keep her informed and that the sheep had to now be brought into the barn lot. This means running them through the front yard every night and letting them back out every morning. I opted to leave the carcass in the orchard as I was going to be around the farm all weekend and wanted a crack at the coyote doing this.

Friday morning when Mr Rainman and I went out to fix the gate into the tree orchard area, he hit it with the tractor earlier in the summer. We noticed that the carcass only had the head intact and three legs. One leg was missing and one was off in the pasture about 40 feet from the carcass. It had been stripped down. We found a dig out spot under the fence. This is where the predators have been crawling under the fence to get to the sheep. It was a fresh crawl spot and the dirt was still moist. We ended up planting a wooden post in the field and mounting the electronic eyes on all four sides of the post. They are solar powered with a battery that lasts all night. So they charge all day and then light up and flash at night. It is supposed to look like light reflecting off of eyes. This is supposed to scare the predators off. We got everything mounted but did not turn them on. I went back up to the machine shed and created a snare to place over the hole. We are going to leave the carcass in the orchard for one more night to see if something returns tonight. This meant that the four vultures that showed up today got to fill their bellies all day long. They were pretty satiated. I will move the carcass tomorrow if we don’t catch anything. If we do I will try the snare a second night. Who knows what will happen.

We carried a rifle all day while working on the fence and faucets and did not see a single coyote. It is so painful to have the thing on you most of the day. We finally just put it in the pickup so it was out of the way. We did get the frost free faucets changed out and they work and do not leak. The Apprentice can fill in the holes at a later date. We went up and pounded T posts in on two sides of field #1. The stupid flood buried the woven wire alongside the road in two different places. We will have to cut the wire and splice in new to sit above the dirt. Their is a large drop off so we had to pound the T-posts in by hand alongside the road.

We measured the fence line distance alongside the creek. Each roll of woven wire is 330’. So I decided that instead of trying to wire all the woven wire into one long contiguous piece of wire I would just install them in 312-320’ increments. We marked out a H brace every 312-320 feet. We can install one entire section of fence, tighten it up and then attach the new one and do it again. Their needs to be some H braces interspersed along a long fence anyways and this made perfect sense to me. We marked out all of the H braces and drilled the first holes with the 6” auger. The rain we had earlier in the week and the storm we had today made drilling into the soil very easy. We got 5/100” of rain today. I missed out on measuring the earlier rain storm due to a dead battery in our rain gauge, I fixed it on Wednesday.

I did try and call the animal auction yard today but no one answered and their voicemail was full. I will try an email this weekend. We have 55 lambs that need a new home with only five sold at this time.