Getting Home

I left the farm on November 1 and rode a Greyhound bus to Portland, Oregon to catch the Amtrak train to Chicago. From there I took another Amtrak train to Washington, DC, where I caught my last train, which got me to Jacksonville. The train ride was uneventful as a whole, and all of my trains were either early or on time. Many people have the impression that Amtrak is almost always late, but that has not been my experience after riding on trains for several thousand miles. Perhaps I have just been lucky.

Sleeping on a train is not the most enjoyable experience, especially when you have to share a seat with someone you don't know. For the most part, I had two seats to myself, which is pretty comfortable, as it allows you to curl up on your side and stretch your feet out onto the leg rests. If there is someone sitting next to you, there is sometimes the option of stretching out on the floor of the lounge car, which is just a place for people to sit away from their seats. If you do this in the late hours of the night or early morning, the attendants won't bother you about it (at least that was my experience).

Anyway, I am home now for a little over two weeks, until my dad drives me to Kentucky on November 27. I am planning to stay on that farm until March or April, at which time I will hopefully have another farm to work on for the summer and fall. Of course, if I really like the Kentucky farm, or if no other option turns up for the summer (which seems unlikely), I might just stay there until the fall of next year. I suppose it all depends on how it goes this winter.

Planting Garlic, Six-up, and Leaving

Once again I have been neglectful of my duties as a blogger. I will try to make amends for my month and a half absence from the world of blogging by writing about a number of things that have happened within the last six weeks.

We finished our hay making on the second-to-last day of September, and it was a good thing: the day after we brought in the last alfalfa bales, it became cold and rainy, and the weather hasn't changed much since. After a hot, dry, sunny summer, we have been having a cool, cloudy, wet October. Who knew that the weather could change so much in one day? The high on that last day of bale gathering was 86 degrees, and the high the day after was about 55. It was shocking, to a person from Florida, where October temperatures are often in the eighties.

October has been considerably less busy than the previous five months. The days have also shortened dramatically, as they always do in the fall in Northern places. While we used to start work between five and six, then take a several-hour break in the middle of the day, then work until nine or nine thirty at night, we now start between nine and ten in the morning, take a short break or don't break at all, and go until about five or six. It is almost hard for me to remember what summer was like.

One of our big October projects has been preparing ground for and planting two acres of garlic. We starting plowing in the second week or so of October. We used four horses, two in front and two behind, on a sixteen inch plow, which is relatively wide and thus requires three to four animals in this area's sticky clay loam. The plow worked beautifully, as David has recently figured out how to adjust it to plow evenly and cover surface trash well. It was a real learning curve for me to hold four reins in my hands in order to drive the four horses, but I did manage to do it, and I am sure that it is one of those things that gets easier with practice.

We spent two days spreading manure on the plowed ground, using three teams of horses and three manure spreaders. We used a tractor with a front loader to load the manure spreaders, which is unfortunate in some ways, but made the whole job much faster and easier and resulted in the manure being spread more thickly. We ended up spreading several tons to the acre, which will hopefully result in many large bulbs of garlic next year. We had a problem this year with too many undersized bulbs. Customers will not accept small bulbs as seed garlic (planting stock), which is how the farm markets its garlic.

To incorporate the manure into the soil, we used a large disc harrow, which is so heavy that it goes much better when we use six-up. Contrary to how it may sound, this is not a spin-off of a lemon-lime soda drink; it is a way of arranging six horses to pull an implement. Three horses are driven in front, and three follow behind in back. Getting that many horses caught, harnessed, and hitched is a bit of a production, but it sure gets the work done fast. I got the chance to drive the six-up, and it is actually much easier than driving four-up, because we simply tied off the reins of the back three horses and drove the front three horses. The back three follow along just fine. I suppose this could have been done with the four-up, but plowing requires much greater precision than discing.

Planting garlic requires two steps: popping cloves, and the planting itself. Popping cloves consists of sitting on one's butt for hours at a time, taking apart garlic bulbs, and sorting the small or damaged cloves into baskets separate from the large cloves, which get planted. As you may have guessed, this is not hard work, but it can be uncomfortable to set bent over for several hours at a stretch if you are not that used to sitting for long periods. I actually find popping cloves to be somewhat addictive; it is easy and mindless, and it is also productive. What more could you ask for?

Planting is quite a bit less enjoyable, but we have found ways to minimize the back discomfort of that by doing it cooperatively. We generally have one person drop cloves into the planting furrow, and then one person follow along, crawling (not stooping!) and pushing the cloves into the ground right-side-up. Yesterday, we tried having one person drop cloves into three furrows, and then having three people follow along and push cloves into the ground, and this was just as easy and quite a bit faster. The really bad part about planting garlic is the wet, muddy, cold ground that soaks your knees. Nothing to be done about that, really.

I am leaving in three days, on November 1. I will be sad to go, which is a good sign, I suppose. I told the farmers here that I will not be coming back next year, which I think was the right decision, as I want to learn how other farms work with draft horses. Knowing that I have to move on doesn't make the loss of a place and people that have been important to me for almost half a year very much easier, however. Perhaps I will see at least some of these people again some day, at a draft horse or farm equipment sale somewhere.

Horse Buyers and Winter Plans

Selling horses is one aspect of the diversified farming practiced by David and Deborah. Though the alfalfa leaf is the farm's major money-maker, horses certainly contribute their share to the farm's income, both directly and indirectly. Indirectly, horses "save money to make money," as the saying goes, by using no expensive outside inputs like diesel fuel and tractor tires. David and the interns do all of the farrier (hoof) work (as the horses and not shod and only require the occasional cleaning and trimming), and they rarely require medical care. Horses are also the reason that the farm has such an easy time finding enthusiastic, unpaid labor, which saves quite a bit of money, I imagine. Directly, horses make money by being sold as trained draft teams or single horses.

Horse buyers are an unfortunately fickle and unreliable lot, however. Many people contact the farm saying that they would like to buy a team, but most of those people are not serious enough to go further than one or two emails. Some will come and "window shop," as Lisa puts it. Such buyers may come and drive horses and say that they are wonderful and will surely make a good team, and then leave, never to be heard from again. This is one kind of frustrating horse buyer experience.

The other kind of frustrating horse buyer experience stems from horse buyers with specific and difficult to match needs and wants. We recently had two loggers come to look for a single horse to match with their horse. Unfortunately, their horse was a very tall animal who fit poorly with all but one of our horses. Ben, the horse that did match with their animal had not been driven in a week or two, as we were focusing on training two other horses who were too small to be matched with the logger's horse. Ben was thus out of practice (he is quite a young horse, so he sometimes forgets his manners) and did not stand still very well when asked to stop (whoa). Thus the horse buyers drove away without one of our horses in their trailer, disappointing everyone.

On a more positive note, I thought I would share my plans for the winter, which have worked out quite well. After contacting several farms in June, July, and August, I managed to find a farm with draft horses that wanted to take an intern during the winter months. The farm, located in south-central Kentucky, raises a wide variety of livestock and uses draft horses for hay-making, feeding, and water-carrying. I hope to have many opportunities to drive their two Percheron (a breed of draft horse) mares. I will be leaving my current farm internship on November 1st, going back home via train to visit my family for a couple of weeks, and starting work on the Kentucky farm in late November.

The experience of working in the arid West has made me realize that I have little interest in living here. Though working here has been a good experience, I certainly wouldn't want to live in a place where it doesn't rain for four months in the summer, and where much of my time farming would be spent dealing with irrigation. I feel relieved that I found a farm in Kentucky to work on, and I think that I will confine my future internships to the area of the country east of the Mississippi. 

Long-Delayed Update and Photos

It has been two months since I updated. We have done much hay-making, getting in both first and second cuttings of some fields. Our first cuttings of hay all went for horse feed, which will be used to feed the herd and the work-horses in winter. Winter feeding 39 horses takes a considerable amount of feed, and we have several thousand bales for that purpose. Most small square bales are around 50 to 75 pounds, so 2,000 to 3,000 bales is quite a lot of hay!

The hay-making process starts with mowing, which is done on this farm with horse-drawn mowers manufactured in the 1930s and 1940s. The mowers work surprisingly well despite their age, as long as they are regularly oild and sharpened. They work on a "ground-drive" system, which means that the back-and-forth action of the knife is created by the turning of the wheels. In short, the rotation of the wheels turns a system of gears, which in turn rotates a fly wheel, which rotates a pitman stick, which is attached to the knife, which moves backwards and forwards through the hay crop. This ingenious and simple system translates forward rotational motion into back-and-forth motion of the cutting knife.

After mowing, the hay is left down to dry for one or two days. In the East, a process called "tedding" would be undertaking during this time, which consists of fluffing the hay with a specially designed implement. In the dry arid West, however, tedding is unnecessary. The next process is raking, which is done with a tool called a side-delivery rake. It, like the mower, is ground-driven, with the wheels turning gears, which turns a bar covered in curved bars that move the hay into a long windrow. You simply drive along in a straight (more or less, depending on your skill level) line, and the rake does the work of sweeping it into a windrow. It is a difficult thing to do at times, as it requires some tight turns to make the windrows close enough together to sweep up all of the hay.

Raking alfalfa is time-sensitive, as it cannot be either too wet or too dry. If it is too wet, it will rot. If it is too dry, the leaves (the most valuable part, and the part that the Maders sell to the herb companies) will fall off, or "shatter" in the hay-making jargon.

The final process is baling, which is one of the few things that the Maders do with a tractor. Balers require so much power to compress hay into flakes and tie the flakes into bundles that they virtually require the engine-driven power provided by a tractor. There are motorized hitch carts that horses can pull that will supply the neccessary power with considerably less fuel than a tractor would use, but the Maders do not have one (at least not yet).

After the bales are formed, the tractor can pick them up with another power-driven implement called a bale wagon or stack-liner, or we can go into the field with a horse-drawn wagon and pick them up manually. The latter is preferable because of the fuel savings, but we have done the bale pick-up in both ways.

I hope I have not gone into too much jargon and so on in the preceeding, but hay-making is a complex art that is difficult to explain. Hay should really be green on the inside of the bale when you take it apart, even though most people think of hay as a light brown color. Hay turns this light brown color because it gets rained on, which leaches out nutrients, or because it is exposed to light for too long. Out here in the West, hay is almost always of a consisently high quality compared to Eastern, rained-on hay. (Sorry Eastern hay-makers.)

I have posted a few pictures below that will show some things that have been going on around here.

Above is Ben, probably my favorite horse, being driven on a cultivator by Ryan, another intern. Ryan and his girlfriend Casey left a couple of weeks ago after working at the Mader farm for five and a half months.

Here is the horse-drawn wagon being stacked full of hay. Mirah the dog thinks she is being very helpful (she's not). That is Lisa, another intern, on top of the hay stack.

Here's a boring picture of sprinkler pipe in the farm's flattest and best field (plainly known as the Flat Field). The quarter-mile of pipe shown has to be moved twice daily for about two weeks to make it across the 35 acre field.

Here is a shot of me driving horses Flag (on the left from this view) and 'Miah (on the right). That is Ken, who is trying to start his own farm around here, on the hay stack. He has been helping out a lot since Ryan and Casey left.

Same horses, same driver.

The view from the driver's perspective on the wagon. I took this while driving that same load of hay to be stacked by the combine that cleans the alfalfa leaf.

Finally, Photos

I finally managed to get to a library with high-speed wireless internet, so I have decided to post some photographs of the farm. They were taken several weeks ago, so things look a bit different now, but they will serve to show some of the things I have been talking about.

This first image is of the Pine Valley, looking down from the top of the market garden at about 5:30 in the morning. Some of the fields shown are part of the farm, and some are parts of neighboring farms.

Another image of the valley, this time from a pasture/hayfield hill on the farm. The water flowing downhill into the ditch is part of the flood irrigation scheme used on the farm to provide water to fields in sod and alfalfa. Water in the ditch is blocked up with a tarp, and then flows downhill into subsequent field ditches, which overflow onto the other parts of the field. It might sound like erosion would be rampant with this kind of flowing water, but the water moves very slowly and the grass or alfalfa sod protects the soil.

This is a harness with a collar. The collar goes on first by being unbuckled and then rebuckled onto the horses neck. The rest of the harness is then put over the right shoulder and pushed up onto the horse's body. The big curved metal sticks with the golden balls on top are hames, which are buckled onto the collar. The rest of the straps are then buckled in various places around the horse's body.

These are horses Misty (on the right from this front-on view) and Quinna (on the left from this view) being used to mark rows for planting. My room mate Lisa is driving them (she is a pro on this tool). I know that the horses look the same, but after spending so much time with them, it is not hard to tell them apart.

Silly as it is, I couldn't resist including a picture of Mirah, the trusty farm dog. She is super friendly to most everyone, and she chases the deer away from the garden. In this picture, she is lying under the chicken house, watching over (or, um, licking her lips at) the chickens. She has actually been very good about not touching the chickens, plump and tasty as they probably look to her dog eyes.

These are the laying hens out on pasture. They are not yet laying, but they are supposed to start soon. We move their electric netting around every couple of days to give them new pasture to eat. They are a lot of fun to watch, and they even come when called (by the sound of someone with a food bucket saying, "chiiiick chick chick chick").

Here is a picture of six horses pulling a soil-pulverizing tool called a disc. They are preparing the ground to be planted in the garden. We have since acquired a much smaller disc that can successfully be pulled by a team (which is made up of just two horses). This hitch is called "six-up" because there are two rows of horses. If all the horses were walking side-by-side, it would be called a "six abreast."

I hope that gives some insight into how things look around here. I may add some more photographs eventually, especially of haying, which is happening right now, but which I will discuss in a later post.

Field Work and Training Mares

In the last two weeks, I have had the chance to get more experience driving the experienced team of geldings (castrated male horses, if you don't know), Ben and 'Miah, that I have been driving for most of my time here. As I said in my previous post, we used an implement called the disc to cut up and turn under weeds on a half acre piece of ground on which we wanted to plant sweet corn. It took several turns around the field, and I got to do most of those, some without close supervision. The geldings are a good team, very calm and reliable, but they do have one major fault--they try to put their heads down and eat whenever they get near a patch of tasty alfalfa. Even tying their heads back with baling twine looped through their bits and around their hames (see a previous post if you don't know what hames are) does no good to curb this, as the alfalfa reaches chest high on them. That is quite tall considering that their shoulders are above my head. A newbie like me has a hard time getting them to move on when they have reached a patch of alfalfa to eat, though David can just tap them with the reins and click at them to get them to move. There is some kind of subtle difference between how they perceive me and how they perceive him. David says that my "presence" is not authoritative enough yet. Hmm.

After the discing was finally done, I took the harrow out on the field to smooth it and crush even more large clods (this soil, while fertile, tends to clump up into rock-like pieces if it is not pulverized enough). This only took about an hour, as the harrow is a wide piece of equipment that covers a lot of ground quickly. It consists of two sections of metal frame with spikes sticking out of it that drags on the ground, smoothing and pulverizing as it goes. It is one of the simplest and cheapest tools on a farm, and can actually be made from a section or two of chain-link fence (though ours is slightly more sturdy than that).

When that was done, David used a field cultivator to make straight(ish) lines in the soil that we could plant corn seed into. The field cultivator has a few metal bars sticking off of it which drag into the soil and make clean furrows for planting into. This is not actually its original purpose (it was designed to kill weeds), but it works great for it. After the lines were made (which took all of about twenty minutes total), we dropped corn seed into the furrows and shuffled along with our feet to cover the seed. We joked that we were doing the "corn planting duck shuffle" because we had to waddle along dragging our feet to do this. That's farm humor for you, I guess.

We have recently been training two mares to work together as a team. Rose, one of the mares, is one of the largest horses that they have ever had, standing at about 18 hands tall (which means that she is 72 inches tall at the shoulder, not at the head). This makes finding a closely matching team mate for her difficult, as most of the horses here are probably 16 to 17 hands. Despite her height, it is not as difficult to harness her has you might imagine, once you get used to lifting a piece of metal and nylon harness above your head. The other horse that we are driving with her, Flag, is more the normal size.

Both of the horses were first trained individually in the round pen, which teaches them to respect humans, accept a halter, and have a harness and bit put on them. They were then hitched together and driven together. We have been hitching them to a wagon to move loads of firewood around, and they have been a bit nervous, but they are improving quite a lot. It is interesting to see the progress that horses can make is just a week or two--they are certainly adaptable animals.

Week in Review

Unfortunately, despite uploading pictures to my hosts' computer, I still cannot post them here because their internet connection is so slow. However, I will continue to post verbal updates of how things are going here.

This last week, we finished the alfalfa leaf order that we had started working on two or three weeks ago. It did not have to take such a long span of time, but we split up the work because there was no hurry on the order and it was quite small by their standards. A few days ago, Fedex came to pick up our order and send it to Mountain Rose Herbs, one of the two wholesale companies that the farm sells alfalfa leaf to. We loaded 46 sacks of alfalfa onto pallets in the back of the truck, Deborah filled out a billing sheet to pay for shipping, and that was that. It was much more simple than I had imagined.

One of the more tedious parts of the alfalfa leaf production business (such as it is) is the sifting of the leaf and the stems in a grain cleaner. The grain cleaner looks like a giant mesh cone. It rotates around like a rotisserie chicken while someone slowly pours alfalfa leaf into it to sift fine leaves out the bottom and stems out the back. The leaves are scooped up and put into sacks, and the stems are also scooped up to be used as mulch, chicken food (chickens love alfalfa, to my surprise) and sometimes to be re-combined if there is still a lot of leaf left in them. Luckily, we did not have to re-combine the stems this time; we had just enough leaf for the order, but not much more.

It rained from Thursday evening through Sunday, so work was slow during that time. We worked on a horse-drawn mowing machine for part of that time. Mowing machines are more complex than you might imagine, as the blade that cuts the hay actually moves back-and-forth by a series of complex gears that turns the rotational motion of the wheels into a back-and-forth motion on the blade. The blades had to be sharpened, and will continue to be sharpened as we are cutting hay. Apparently, the ideal time to sharpen a mower blade is after only six hours of use. We only have about ten mower blades (all of which have been sharpened at this point), so there will be plenty of sharpening to come. The blades are clamped in place in a vice, then sharpened with a drill with a sander unit attached. It is amazing what sandpaper can do to metal; you can really get a fine point on the blade quickly with the drill-based sharpening unit.

Yesterday and the day before were both sunny, so we got back out to work. The garden is looking amazingly weed free from hand hoeing and the use of the horse-drawn cultivator to kill weeds between the rows. Where I was working last year, weed control was never very good, so I am glad to see that that does not have to be the case. Planting in rows with paths between each row, rather than in beds of clustered plants, is a much more effective way of controlling weeds, at least when using horse-drawn tools. There are many great old cultivators still available from auctions, estate sales, and similar sources.

I spent a large part of yesterday morning using two horses with a small disc, a tool that crushes weeds and clods in the soil in preparation for planting. We are discing about a half-acre to plant more corn, after planting about 3/4 of an acre in corn last week. The patch that I was discing (with some help and supervision from my room-mate Lisa) was very weedy after being plowed in fall and left sitting until early summer, so it will still need a few more passes with the disc and a pass with the harrow (which makes the field smoother and more level) before we can plant.