Posted on 05/15/2011 7:01:59 AM PDT by bkopto
When farmers Danielle and Matt Boerson realised they could no longer afford to run their tractors, they took the bull by the horns - and ditched them for oxen.
Soaring petrol prices had become so high that the couple, who run an 80-acre farm near Madison, Wisconsin, were forced to get rid of their two tractors, hay baler, plough and rotavator.
So they took a course at the agricultural institute in traditional farming techniques.
'It gave me the confidence that, yes, I could do this', Danielle told the Times. 'It just required a lot of concentration and a firm voice.' Their instructor was former peace core volunteer Dick Roosenberg, 64, who learned the trade while working for the UN in West Africa. He took the skills he had honed back to Michigan and set up Tillers International.
At first the company was aimed at helping Third World farmers harvest in the cheapest way possible.
On the side, he also helped historically-themed villages. But his specialist knowledge is now enjoying a new wave of interest with farmers from Wisconsin to Alaska now joining his courses.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
LOL funny.
Whew! That's a fact.
You can barely stand to drive through Amish-land for the odiferous ox-laden fertilizer.
LOL in the country when a farmer is using his manure spreader on the fields its the same thing. That odor travels for miles if he’s doing a large area. P U .
And people laugh at me when I say the enviro-wackos want us to live in caves.
“Corn produces about 150 bushels per acre with a modern mechanized farm (plowing, fertilizing, applying herbicide and harvesting) . At $7 per bushel they would have a gross income of $84,000 before they pay for a any fuel, seeds, fertilizer, equipment or land payments.”
What about arugula?
****That odor travels for miles if hes doing a large area. P U .***
I’ve shoveled chicken mnure, with scoop shovel, later with tractor and front end loader. Never again!
A Manure truck comes by my place every few weeks and we just about choke! They spread the manure many miles away but you can smell it often for 10 miles, and I’m talking STRONG SMELL! We have to close our windows in summer when the smell gets really rank.
It is worse at night when there is a light fog and no wind. The smell just hangs in the air.
And don’t get me started on pig manure which is worse!
I would shovel it out after sending them off to be butchered and the ammonia smell would only let me work about 10 minutes and the watering eyes and burning in the nose was horrible...30 chickens in a 10 X 10 room was nasty to clean up.. Pigs smell horrible even if kept clean. I think crap oozes from their pores. Nothing worse (except chicken coop cleaning)...
Chickens have no bladder so their poop is also full of urine and thats the ammonia smell. Yikes. Too strong to use as fertilizer unless it sat over the winter or it would burn the seedling..
Its not that noticable in a regular coop and our chickens were let out every day and just came in the coop to roost at night..
Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution
How western capitalists funded Lenin, the Bolsheviks, and the Soviet Union
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Now, the farmer drive HUGE tractors with GPS devices and they plant 24 rows of corn at a single swipe across the field. This is high tech stuff and an 80 acre farm is quite rare.
I’m moving to ND.
I’m absolutely certain. It’s the Official Pronunciation Of Washington, DC.
Corpse.
My description was of doing it the old way, I did that as a little boy, then as a teenager, rubbed blisters on my rear with a farmal H and c and a ford powermaster.
***30 chickens in a 10 X 10 room was nasty to clean up..****
Back in my youth, I had to clean chicken houses with a hand held scoop shovel. Those houses held about 10,000 chickens each and it was rough! $1.00 a manure spreader load. We cleaned only in the spring and summer as these old farmers kept the litter through the winter because of the heat it produced. It kept the fuel bills low. Hot, humid, covered with litter dust, and that ammonia smell, WOW!
Laying hen houses were worse as the litter there was slicker than owl snot, wet, and smelled just as bad!
Now, houses holding 40,000 are cleaned with tractors and front end loaders.
***This is high tech stuff and an 80 acre farm is quite rare.****
Lets all get together and prove you don’t need 80 acres and a team of oxen!
Just 40 acres and a mule! sarc/off
PS we shoveled out the goat barn in the spring also to let the hay they dropped and the poo they dropped keep the barn warmer in the winter...Great fertilizer Goat manure doesn't smell. Their droppings are like deer and rabbit droppings...
Dirty Jobs did a program on cleaning those big commercial chicken barns.
Gross!
darn it, I missed that one.....I told my husband its lucky chickens taste good or we would have wiped them off the face of the earth by now.
I too live smack dab in the middle of corn country. I own 147 acres of tillable ground. I use to farm it myself until it got to expensive. My tenant farms it for me now and it takes him about two hours with a 32 row planter and GPS. Last year it averaged 175 bu per acre, dry. Wet 192/bu/A.
This year look for corn and beans top go hog wild, price wise. Due to the Corps of Engineers flooding millions of acres along the Mississippi.
Have you seen any oxen out there?
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