|
Haha what up vermonters. I'm outside of Plainfield, so I'll def ask in the spring to figure out where to call around too. In local news, we found a couple domestic ducks wandering down the middle of the road and managed to grab them. I think they were abandoned intentionally cuz we can't find the owners and they are both drakes. So we decided to axe our current Drake cuz he was a total rear end in a top hat and beating up on his two ladies constantly and the newcomers are much more chill. We're still gonna eat one of them cuz two drakes is too many, but we smoked our old Drake yesterday in hickory with a balsamic reduction and it was decent. One of our two hen ducks is sitting on a brood of 7 or 8, they're muscovies and we're going to sell/trade them, so if either of y'all locals wants to get into ducks let me know lol
|
#
?
Aug 7, 2020 13:49
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 25, 2024 00:54 |
|
|
In my experience Jerseys on small farms will adopt absolutely anything from as many calf’s as she can count to a foal to probably a puppy if you let her. P.S. ask me about cross suckling issues 
|
|
#
?
Aug 30, 2020 14:15
|
|
|
Hi I'm Sprue's partner who was into cheese. We live on Sprue's farm, but I'm not a farmer so i have a huge complex about not knowing anything about plants. So I feed the ducks and and say "yup" when people talk about Farm Things. Here's a picture of some ducks. 
|
|
#
?
Aug 31, 2020 12:46
|
|
just postin'
|
Was into cheese? I didn't know that was a habit I could kick... Also: Lookit those awesome ducks! My three roosters are now full fledged roosters, and at least one of them has to go in the next month or so. I'm trying to figure out which one is my favorite, and which one pleases me the least.
|
|
#
?
Aug 31, 2020 16:11
|
|
|
Weltlich posted:Was into cheese? We killed our drake (the one in the middle) because we got sick of watching him beat up on the females when he got horny. They were always cowering in the corner but they're doing a lot better now. Also we found a pair of domestic drakes on the road that we brought him, they both appeared to be male but were pretty obviously a couple, they didn't mount or even notice the two females in their pen. The big white one would make advances on the other one, nibbling the back of the head but the recipient of the attention never squatted and presented (which female ducks do when they're approached by a drake like that) but would just sit there and accept the attentions. We killed the big one this weekend bc it was too crowded in their pen and now his (probably gay??) mate is waking us up at four am every morning since then, calling forlornly for his companion, to no avail. It's actually kinda heart wrenching. I doubt I would've killed the other if I knew this would happen. Unfortunately, there is only one solution to this problem... Oh boy a couple years ago when I had an ego about such things I would've scoffed and felt superior if someone posted in a farming thread about 4 ducks. Mostly cuz we all know that person who tries to relate to farmers/farmworkers by talking about their two goats they keep as a hobby. Haha, IDGAF tho cuz I love my ducks. Hey other vermonters, what do u think of the state covid relief package for farms? My boss thinks it discriminates against vegetable farmers bc of our yearly income cycle and I guess she's going to testify in front of the (house? Senate? Can't keep these things straight, I never took polisci) tomorrow or Wednesday bc they explicitly said they want it all going to dairy which leaves us high and dry. There's a huge gulf between dairy and organic veg, but we can all agree on one thing... Uh, actually I can't think of anything lol 
|
|
#
?
Aug 31, 2020 17:47
|
|
|
I do the production and tree care (and a lot of the maintenance and grounds care and sales and...) on a 130 acre nursery in New Jersey. I haven't looked into anything state specific but the federal CFAP stuff is dogshit for us. they only recently even allowed nurseries (and floriculture growers) to be eligible, but due to the eligibility reqs we wouldn't really get anything anyway, and even if our losses were eligible it's only something like 13 percent of wholesale value. It's not really that surprising - I can't imagine anyone really being shocked all of the money is going to corn, dairy, and soy. Just need to hunker down and hope next year is better.
|
|
#
?
Aug 31, 2020 19:22
|
|
|
Sprue posted:Hey other vermonters, what do u think of the state covid relief package for farms? My boss thinks it discriminates against vegetable farmers bc of our yearly income cycle and I guess she's going to testify in front of the (house? Senate? Can't keep these things straight, I never took polisci) tomorrow or Wednesday bc they explicitly said they want it all going to dairy which leaves us high and dry. There's a huge gulf between dairy and organic veg, but we can all agree on one thing... Uh, actually I can't think of anything lol Strictly selfishly I'm a big fan, cause I work in dairy. I actually thought that had gotten dropped from the governor's latest proposal? I don't remember seeing it in the last article I read, so I guess the legislature is working on something now? IDK, I haven't followed it super closely. Seems kinda dumb to limit it, we've still got at least a few hundred million from the feds to spend by the end of the year, you'd think they could throw more people a bone. I mean dairy farms need it, we're down 20 or more farms just this summer in the state, but everyone has been impacted. If you're going to do a strictly dairy relief, which is not necessarily a bad thing because there are differences between animal and vegetable agriculture, you should probably be working in parallel on something for the other farmers. The traditional argument in favor of dairy price support has always been that (with a very few exceptions) the milk price is out of the farmer's hands, so the idea is that it's not a bailout from a mess of their own making. Whether that makes it better, I don't know, but I do think that given the structure of the milk market and all else being equal, the inevitable endgame is continuing consolidation at the top end, and I for one don't really like that idea. The other wrench in the works vis a vis covid relief specifically is that there have been more serious rumors lately of lawmakers making noises about trying to find a way to use legislation to move farmers out of dairy...which as you might imagine gives the dairy side of the industry their own axe to grind. 
|
|
#
?
Sep 1, 2020 03:06
|
|
|
final price point is out of the hands of any grower who isn't selling direct to consumer, no? that's not really just a dairy concern.
|
|
#
?
Sep 1, 2020 04:35
|
|
|
I think my big issue with the "let them farm something else!" ideas is that it telegraphs that whoever is proposing that idea doesn't have the first clue about farming. Dairy pasture does not equal vegetable fields does not equal cereal fields does not equal pig pasture, etc etc. (Well, technically everything equals pig pasture, but you get my drift.) I'm sitting on former dairy land, and it is rocky as hell. It grows great grass, so long as you never have to plow it. That said though, with continual consolidation, I'm less happy about companies like Hood potentially getting a piece of that pie. If it's DFA or other co-ops, I'm generally more at peace, because at least notionally that cash will make its way into the farmer's pocket instead of getting siphoned off to shareholders. Anyway, I'm still a little stunned that dairy's getting $25m in the current package, and everyone else gets to split $5m between farmers, processors, and all. I really haven't heard much about the next package that's coming down the pipe.
|
|
#
?
Sep 1, 2020 05:05
|
|
|
Dairy producers took a bigger hit than a lot of farmers because there were no drivers to get their products to market for a while and they were dumping thousands of gallons of milk at a time. Over here in grain land I don't think we had much difficulty other than a lovely price situation.
|
|
#
?
Sep 1, 2020 05:19
|
|
|
Farm worker from the other end of the world here! Spent the last three years living/working on vineyards and cattle stations in Australia, currently studying ag (and sociology) in New Zealand. Borders are closed, so I'll either find a research scholarship or some harvest work here for the summer. Agriculture here's doing some pretty interesting things! On one hand, there's some extremely smart operators running intensive grain and dairy outfits with impressive results -- and a lot of inorganic fertilisers, runoff, and topsoil loss. But there's increasing concern about the impact ag has on waterways and carbon emissions, so there's also a growing uptake of regenerative agricultural principles, as well as chasing profit by reducing output, but selling into premium markets. We're in a funny spot: agriculture makes up 5% of total GDP, but 20% of total exports, and 50% of total greenhouse emissions. Real interested if any of you have had experience turning cropland into pasture, or vice versa? Or if you incorporate cropping and grazing into the same rotations. Here's one of the newer arrivals. Probably the first human he's ever seen :3 mama was busy scratching her butt on that wattle there. 
|
|
#
?
Sep 1, 2020 08:59
|
|
|
Really enjoying the dairy discussion! don't usually get to talk to people about dairy because there's such a gulf that divides vegetable farms and dairies at least in this country in this state. I would be really sad to see the collapse of dairy in the state although maybe it's kind of weird to say that because dairy has been in their process of collapse for decades as far as I understand it. The entire tourist aesthetic of the states with its sprawling fields and small copse of trees is entirely dependent on hating. My cynical self is curious if part of the state's effort to support dairy is based on it's desire to maintain this aesthetic for the tourism industry.a hot dad posted:
Awh, cute baby I had some experience training pasture into cropland. I think one of the biggest issues is soil compaction and also the fertility of the soil is usually pretty low from pasture compared to what most crops need. The process of breaking up the sod and killing the weed bed is a process that takes at least a year so I can't really imagine wanting to incorporate it into rotations unfortunately - that process is a pretty destructive one that involves bare fallowing aka about the worst thing you can do to a field in terms of soil retention. One thing a lot of farms or at least small organic farms around here do is a rotation between pastured poultry and a grazing animal. It's supposed to encourage the biodiversity and pence the nutritional diversity of the pasture and in addition suppress the pest or the pathogen load of the field.
|
|
#
?
Sep 1, 2020 11:35
|
|
|
therobit posted:Dairy producers took a bigger hit than a lot of farmers because there were no drivers to get their products to market for a while and they were dumping thousands of gallons of milk at a time. Over here in grain land I don't think we had much difficulty other than a lovely price situation. For sure, and dairy has some serious overhead costs that don't go away when the market drops. I'm not begrudging dairy farms getting a bailout, I'm more dismayed that they only set up $5m for the entirety of ag in the rest of the state - including slaughter and processing. I'm not running any livestock this year, but its hard enough to get to get dates for hogs even when COVIDs not going on, and expensive to boot. I can't imagine what it's going to be like this fall. a hot dad posted:
Sprue talked some about rotating animals over fields to help in the conversion between pasture and cropland. That is something that I worked on before I started my distillery project. Here's a backstory if you're interested in such things: Vermont has a cool/problematic history with agriculture. Right now, the state is largely forested, but most of this is third generation forest. There were the pre-colonial forests (Before the late 1700s) that got cut down for lumber and to make space for agriculture in the early days of the United States. Before the population in the US went west, Vermont and New Hampshire were the "breadbaskets" of the country, producing lots of cereal crops that then got shipped down the rivers to ports along the New England and New York seacoasts. So there was a great deforestation to support that agriculture. Then, as the settler population moved across the Appalachian Mountains and into the Ohio valley, grain production shifted there, because the ground was flatter and way less stony. Vermont experienced a period of forest regrowth as field agriculture declined here, and by the late 1800s the state was covered in second generation forest. This was around the same time the railroads started pushing into the state, and there was a dairy boom. Refrigerated railroad cars meant that milk, butter, and cheese could be sent to metropolitan areas without spoilage. All those former fields that had been taken over by woods got cut back, fenced, and turned to pasture. You can go to the town libraries around here and look at photos of what the state looked like in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and its wild because there are hardly any trees in the photos. There are stands of sugarbush (maple trees that are tapped for syrup making), but otherwise the place looks like verdant grassland. But, as the dairy industry consolidated during the last half of the 1900s, a lot of small farms across the state closed down and the forests came back for another round. Places like my small acreage are former dairy that shut down in the early 1970s, so it's not quite forest yet, but it's also not pasture anymore. It's really scubby, and marshy in spots because all the old drainage ditches have silted up. Beavers damming up the brook every couple of years doesn't help, either. Anyhow, we moved here about 6 years ago, and I started trying to bring the land back into productivity with the thought that when my Distillery was up and running we could plant it to support liquor production, and use the distillery's effluent as an organic fertilizer. (The distillery has since died, a victim of COVID and a predatory distribution industry.) But the first task was getting it turned from scrubby "pasture" into something that could be planted. At the time I was pretty cash poor (still am!) and I didn't want to toss down big money for tractors, plows, excavators, etc before the distillery was profitable. So I decided to see if I could use livestock to do a lot of that work for me, namely with hogs. We fenced off a few acres and ran hogs on it for a couple of seasons and they did a great job of busting sod, ripping out all the woody-stemmed brush, and generally loving poo poo up. It looked like no-man's-land, the Somme, 1917. They even got rid of the fieldbind, which is a sort of morning-glory vine weed that strangles the life out of any sort of crop it gets into. In the end, I could take wagon behind my old tractor and police up most of the stones they had unearthed, and mark the boulders for removal by a heavier machine. The original intent was to then harrow the ground flat do a heavy planting of clover and alfalfa and run some beef cattle and goats on it to further countering the weeds. It's been two years since we last had pigs, but I tilled some of that land this spring to plant some test crops. Then drought hit. Corn did lovely (but honestly I chalk that up to early summer lack of rain), the squash varieties all did great, with delicata being the standout winner. Potatoes also did really well, though they're still going. They're just starting to die back, so I'll probably be digging those out in the next few weeks. We had a fair amount of dock, dandelion, and pigweed I had to stay on top of. Anyway, that's a long rambling way of saying that I think rotational livestock and field crop agriculture is possible, especially on a small scale (under 50 acres.) But I think you need to diversify the livestock, because each animal does different work. I'm hoping I can get this project restarted in the next year or so.
|
|
#
?
Sep 1, 2020 16:59
|
|
|
A 50S RAYGUN posted:final price point is out of the hands of any grower who isn't selling direct to consumer, no? that's not really just a dairy concern. Well sort of. In VT, and most of New England, dairy is about the only product sold on the commodity market; we don't have cash crop farms with the exception of maybe potatoes in northern Maine. So in local/regional politics price relief has maintained a fair amount of support over the years. Even if they're not selling direct to consumer, a lot of vegetable and meat farms will sell to retailers on terms that they're able to negotiate. Milk prices are effectively set by a third party; the farm doesn't have any room for negotiation. The exception is if someone has invested in a processing facility of their own or has connected with an independent processor, but the capital investment required means this is still not too common, especially because you also need someone with the skill set to add value to milk by cheesemaking or similar, fluid milk isn't as often a profitable endeavor. One of the few farms bottling their own milk in the state shut down last fall I think it was because they couldn't keep up with the debt on their milk plant.
|
|
#
?
Sep 2, 2020 02:02
|
|
|
Is my posting so bad it's killed an entire once promising thread? That would suck.Uncle Lloyd posted:One of the few farms bottling their own milk in the state shut down last fall I think it was because they couldn't keep up with the debt on their milk plant. Update: another one bites the dust. Anyway, cows are cool and good, so I'm going to keep posting pictures of cows until someone makes me stop. A little while back we moved one of our non-lactating groups of cows between pastures at work. We stopped sending the milking herd to pasture a number of years back now, but a lot of heifers and dry cows still spend the summer grazing.  My much smaller group of youngstock at home. 
|
|
#
?
Sep 21, 2020 03:48
|
|
|
Threads not dead, we just got chores. I’ve been doing end of season harvest work, and trying to get some brush thinned out for fencing next year. Oof. Yeah, I saw where Thomas is going under. My wife actually noticed it first, and I heard her give one of her ironic “that’s hosed up” laughs a few days ago watching WCAX news. I was like “what happened?” And apparently the news had just announced Thomas going under, and in the next commercial segment they were running one of their ads. Whoops. Have you seen those robo Miller unite that you trailer out into a pasture and it auto kills the cows when they feel like they need milking? I gawked at them last year at the farm show. Keep those cow pics coming!
|
|
#
?
Sep 21, 2020 05:40
|
|
|
We started harvesting today. Time for a solid month of 6-7 day work weeks working 10-12 hours a day!
|
|
#
?
Sep 21, 2020 05:43
|
|
|
we just finished digging all our trees for the year. i only cursed at our tree spade like twenty times!
|
|
#
?
Oct 26, 2020 19:11
|
|
|
this might be a bit of a longshot, but does anyone know of any seed drills with a working width between like 10-11.5 feet in america? most anything i can find is in europe.
|
|
#
?
Oct 29, 2020 19:29
|
|
|
my kinda ape posted:We started harvesting today. Time for a solid month of 6-7 day work weeks working 10-12 hours a day! I want to die.
|
|
#
?
Oct 29, 2020 21:23
|
|
|
A 50S RAYGUN posted:this might be a bit of a longshot, but does anyone know of any seed drills with a working width between like 10-11.5 feet in america? most anything i can find is in europe. Look for older JD/IH probably. Here's a 10' JD 450, IDK where exactly you are, but there are probably others out there. Is 8' too small--I see those pop up on craigslist pretty often. edit: there's a Great Plains EWNT10 on my craigslist right now, so that'd be another model to look for. Uncle Lloyd fucked around with this message at 20:22 on Oct 31, 2020 |
|
#
?
Oct 31, 2020 20:14
|
|
|
A 50S RAYGUN posted:this might be a bit of a longshot, but does anyone know of any seed drills with a working width between like 10-11.5 feet in america? most anything i can find is in europe. My SWCD rents great plains 10’ drills.
|
|
#
?
Nov 1, 2020 14:08
|
|
|
i managed to find a great plains drill at a neighbor's auction, actually, thanks for the recs are there any silage guys in here? have a few q's
|
|
#
?
Nov 7, 2020 12:41
|
|
|
I'm not doing any ensilage now, but I've worked with it (made and fed) in the past.
|
|
#
?
Nov 8, 2020 04:06
|
|
|
any idea about what tonnage you can expect from ~100 acres of corn?
|
|
#
?
Nov 8, 2020 17:52
|
|
|
Well, there's a lot of variables in there, but we estimated it as 1 ton per foot per acre on a planting that was a 30" row. So if you've got an acre of corn that's 5ft high, you'd get 5 tons of silage off of it. If you've got 100 acres, then that'd be 500 tons. Dryness will fudge that number up or down, but that was going with an assumption that we'd be cutting it at about 35% dry.
|
|
#
?
Nov 8, 2020 18:47
|
|
|
Five foot corn is pretty crappy though, isn’t it? We only do grass silage, so I can’t claim first hand knowledge, but my understanding is you really want more like 15 t/acre, and 20+ is definitely possible.
|
|
#
?
Nov 8, 2020 21:31
|
|
|
basic gist is that the silage guy behind me has had some fallow ground around 100~ acres he wants me to do some work on for him over the winter but (i'm guessing) doesn't have the cash right now. wants me to accept a percentage of his yield as pay - obviously i know poo poo happens so it's less about making sure i get my money and more about making sure I'm agreeing to something that's fair on paper. if he gets 5t/a that doesn't even pay for me to get my dozer there or to run it, but 20+ would actually put me on the 'you're robbing this guy' side of the deal
|
|
#
?
Nov 8, 2020 23:28
|
|
|
We haven't done silage since I was a kid so I have no idea personally, but from this: https://fyi.extension.wisc.edu/forage/files/2014/01/BuyingSellingCS.pdfquote:Based on Grain Yield...for stressed corn, about one ton of silage per acre can be obtained from each 5 bushels of grain per acre. For example, if you expect a grain yield of 50 bushels of grain per acre, you will get about 10 ton/acre of 30 percent dry matter silage. For corn yielding more than 100 bushels per acre, about one ton of silage per acre can be expected for each 7 to 8 bushels of grain per acre. So if he's got pretty good dry land corn that yields 150 bushels per acre you're going to get about 20 tons of silage per acre if that PDF is accurate. I assume nobody does silage with irrigated land?
|
|
#
?
Nov 8, 2020 23:41
|
|
|
Uncle Lloyd posted:Five foot corn is pretty crappy though, isn’t it? We only do grass silage, so I can’t claim first hand knowledge, but my understanding is you really want more like 15 t/acre, and 20+ is definitely possible. Never said it was a great yield! Five foot was an easy number I threw out there just to make the example math simple, but honestly I can't imagine getting 15t/acre off of corn up here. Maybe out in the Midwest? In my experience, corn in Vermont is a notoriously fickle crop that will fail at the drop of a hat (or a late frost, which is more common than dropping hats.) Most of the guys doing silage up here do grass silage, which was closer to the 20 t/acre/year range because we got two ~10t cuts a year off of it.
|
|
#
?
Nov 8, 2020 23:43
|
|
|
i'm in south jersey, so while it's not great corn country i have to imagine it's better than vermont, esp given recent trends. it was 70 degrees today and hasn't been below freezing yet
A 50S RAYGUN fucked around with this message at 23:49 on Nov 8, 2020 |
|
#
?
Nov 8, 2020 23:47
|
|
|
Here in Nebraska we had one day where it was cold as gently caress, like 20-25F all day, and since then it's been in the 70s and 80s. hosed up.
|
|
#
?
Nov 8, 2020 23:50
|
|
|
actually looks like 2019 average in NJ was 22 tons/acre. jesus maybe I'm in the wrong line of work
|
|
#
?
Nov 9, 2020 00:02
|
|
|
Weltlich posted:Never said it was a great yield! You gotta find the right place to put it I think. Low lying ground that holds moisture through the summer will do well, even in the hills around me, it's just a matter of whether you're able to get it planted early enough to take advantage of the growing degree days in mid summer. There was a real wide spread of yields nearby it looked like, which I would think reflect what fields retained water this year. I expect that the Addison County farms would do well in their clay even in a drought year like this. My hunch is that silt soils are probably better off in grass where the denser root mat would help limit drainage, but I don't know for sure. Times like these I wish I'd paid more attention in my agronomy classes. Poking around a little, it looks like a Cornell/UVM study from last year got some really good yields in the 20s pretty much across the board all the way up in Alburgh.
|
|
#
?
Nov 9, 2020 00:46
|
|
|
That makes sense. I'm on the line between Washington/Caledonia County and really didn't have access to low-ground, and most of the fields we were using had poor southern exposure. There's a few fields that I see planted with corn along the Rte 2 stretch between Plainfield and Montpelier, and they seem to be doing pretty good. I don't know who owns them, but I imagine they're ensilage fields.
|
|
#
?
Nov 9, 2020 01:18
|
|
|
BEAVERS Goddamn beavers have dammed the stream and flooded two of my fields. Any of you guys have any advice on this? I'm calling Fish and Game tomorrow to see if I can get a warden out to take a look at the problem, but this is a mess. I started seeing activity from them about four weeks ago, and literally in the last week they've emplaced two dams and flooded about ~8 acres of field. Since it's adjacent to Rte. 2, I'm hoping I can get the state to cover removal, but who knows.
|
|
#
?
Nov 30, 2020 01:59
|
|
|
Not sure about your circumstances, but in some places states have started installing "beaver deceivers" to control flooding rather than repeatedly removing them.
|
|
#
?
Nov 30, 2020 08:37
|
|
|
Yeah, I read up on those, and I think they would work in my case. I'm just hoping that VTrans (the state highways dept.) or Fish and Game foots the bill for the project. Income's been pretty lovely this year, and I'm not down for a multi-thousand dollar project.
|
|
#
?
Nov 30, 2020 17:10
|
|
|
anyone have a good way to figure out where the gently caress im losing water because im gonna be blue for weeks at this rate
A 50S RAYGUN fucked around with this message at 17:51 on Dec 1, 2020 |
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2020 17:43
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 25, 2024 00:54 |
|
|
A 50S RAYGUN posted:anyone have a good way to figure out where the gently caress im losing water because im gonna be blue for weeks at this rate What do you mean? Irrigation leak or something?
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2020 18:06
|
|