Planet SCM

My sabbatical is almost over.  I've got one week left.  But at the moment, I'm taking a sabbatical from my sabbatical :).  I'm in Redmond for the next two weeks to attend our MVP summit and some other important meetings.  After that I'll be back on the farm for a week and then back to work for good.  When I'm all done, I'll write a wrap up on what all I did (and didn't) accomplish but for now, I'll share some pics.

To start with, here's a aerial view from maps.live.com.  The center of the picture is the "main" barn - about 7,000 square feet.  Just to the lower right of it is the skeleton of our greenhouse.  It's about 150 feet long and probably 40 feet wide.  Sometime in the next few years I hope to refurbish it.  Just above the pond toward the lower right is the tractor barn and the livestock barn.  The livestock barn had our winter hay supplies (which are now gone) and our cattle handling facilities: chutes, head gate, etc.  Just to the right of that pond are two houses on the property.  One of them was built in the 1850's and added on to over the years.  It's been very well kept and is really beautiful - but small: one bedroom, living room, dining room, kitchen and a small office alcove.

Here's a similar picture that I've marked up extensively with property lines, field numbers, fence lines, water lines, etc.  I've also made it gray scale for better printing on a black and white printer.

The garden is in the lower part of field 8 and the orchard takes up most of field 13.  Fields 11 and 17 and currently on loan to the church camp to the east of us for keeping their horses.  You can actually see a small barn they built in the lower center of 11.

On to some pictures I took...  I'm afraid I didn't have much time when I was taking these so I'll try to take some more later.

This is taken from in front of the existing houses, looking east.  I think this may be the most beautiful view on the entire farm.  I wish I could do a panoramic.

A picture of the tractor barn and cattle handling barn.  The grain silo isn't working (and hasn't for a long time).  On the far left (in the foreground), you'll see an obelisk.  It is actually a scale replica of the Washington monument cut from a single large pine tree.  The previous owner erected it.  I think it's pretty cool.

Here's a view of my vegetable garden.  The garden has some grass growing in it (that we've been weeding out) and that obstructs the view a bit.  For reference, this is looking north, north west and the greenhouse is in the background.

Here's a picture of the orchard, facing roughly east.  The poles down the left edge are the deer fence in progress (when this picture was taken the deer fence holes had been drilled and the posts placed in them, but they had not yet been set, so they are not straight) and the poles in the foreground are the in progress (now finished) structure for the shade cloth for the paw paw trees -  they need shade for the first couple of years.  You can actually see some of the shade cloth sitting on the ground in front of them.  You can't see the trees in the orchard very well because they are all just ~half inch "whips" (no branches) and haven't really started growing much yet.  I'll take another picture later this summer when they have started growing branches and have a healthy supply of leaves.

Here's more of an up-close of the green house skeleton.  The big white box just left of the green house is the severed back-end of a refrigeration truck used to preserve vegetables.  I have not yet determined if it is currently working - yet another project in my future.

Here's a picture of our new house under construction (from across the pond).  The foundation has been built and framing should start this week.  The house is actually just south of the farm (the home site is not shown on the aerials that I included at the beginning.  It's just off the bottom of them about in the middle.

Here is a picture of our "main" barn.  In the foreground, you can see my fire circle (and some old stairs from a mobile home no longer on the property).  I have burned more brush in that fire circle than you can possibly imagine.  I've had flames probably 30 feet high - multiple times.  The green thing in front of the barn is called a "no-till drill".  It is used for planting grass seed without tilling the ground and experiencing the erosion problems that can create.  The red thing obstructed by my truck is our livestock trailer.  In the far back at the very right, you can see a blue 30 cu yard dumpster that we have filled with trash/junk 3 or 4 times already.  The previous owner was not inclined to throw anything away :).  On the far left you can just see a tall pole up against the barn.  That's the weather station that I installed a few weeks ago - I find I know more about the whether and the forecast than I ever have before in my life :)

Here's a picture of my new tractor.  I've been extremely happy with it.  I've got about 70 hours on it now - tractor usage is measured in hours, not in miles :)

A picture of my bull taken from the main barn (he's standing in field 9 up by the barn).  His name is Inky.  In the roughly center background you can see my chicken coop (white) with my free range chickens.  I didn't get a chance to go out there to take pictures or to get pictures of my cows and their calves.  Maybe next time.

This is Mary, our donkey.  She is the sweetest donkey you can imagine.  It took us a very long time to get her accustomed to us but now she is very gentle and friendly.  In fact, I had a hard time getting this picture because she wouldn't stay far enough away from me to let me get a good picture.  She kept walking over to me, wanting to get petted.

These are our 5 recently sheared sheep that are my children's 4-H project.  I can't remember their names or keep them straight.  I remember the biggest one is called "Pig" for the obvious reason.  One of them is creatively called "Sheepy".  I don't remember the others :)

And last, but not least... Here is my psychotic dog.  He seems to have befriended the bull and hangs out with him instead of staying with the chickens like he is supposed to :(.  He won't let us get close to him any more.  We are still trying new things and trying to figure out what to do.

There you have it.  A rather long overview of my farm and still it just barely scratches the surface.  There are so many more things I could show you but I don't have the pictures and you probably don't have the time :)  I'll do one more sabbatical post in a few weeks.  In the mean time, expect to see a bunch of TFS/work related post while I'm on my sabbatical hiatus.

Thanks for listening,

Brian

I finally went pretty much completely dark.  The first 2 or 3 weeks of doing email every morning and evening finally passed and I've been focusing 100% on the farm.  It's pretty much a 12 hour day 7 days a week.  It's been tiring but it's been fun.  The list of things I've gotten accomplished is long so I won't try to list everything but I'll highlight some stuff...

After the orchard, I started work on the pastures.  I spread about 11,500 pounds of 17-17-17 fertilizer across about 45 acres.  The 50 tons of chicken litter was delivered about a week ago and I just finished spreading it today.  Mid last week, Southern States (a local farming business) delivered and spread 100 tons of lime for me across about 90 acres.  The only thing left is to seed the warm season grasses in 2 to 3 weeks (I'm only doing about 10-12 acres of that).  That will pretty much cover it for the pastures this year.

I have to say it's pretty amazing how much better they look.  I'm not sure it has anything to do with anything I've done.  Some warm whether and a reasonable amount of rain goes a long way :)  Hopefully all the seeding, fertilizing and liming I've done will help though.  Although they are looking much better, I really only have one pasture where the grass is long enough for the cows to graze.  You're not supposed to let them graze grass down short because it depletes the grass's energy reserves and can result in either death or VERY slow recovery.  To add to this, I'm down to 2 750lb bales of hay left - about enough for 1 week on full rations.  I'm holding my breath that the grass will come in on a few more pastures before my one good pasture and my last two bales of hay give out.

After the pasture came the vegetable garden.  My original plan was to plant about 1 acre.  After a bit more thinking, I decided to cut that back to 1/2 acre.  In retrospect, I'm really glad I did.  It's been probably my most difficult and time consuming project so far.  Fairly early on, I decided to do raised bed gardens (to help with drainage).  However, I don't have a bedder (a piece of equiment that is pulled behind a tractor and forms raised beds).  After thinking hard about buying one and deciding not to - this being my first time and not really having any idea how to decide what to buy, I checked around to borrow one.  I found a neighbor that had one.  Further, he was generous enough to come over with his tractor and help me.  Well, it turns out his bedder was of the "home made" variety.  It was a couple of discs from a disc harrow bolted together with 3 draw bars (~3' metal bars with holes in them).  A commercial bedder is generally quite a bit more sophisticated - with subsoilers to break up the soil, discs to form it and a pan to shape and firm the bed.  I'm very grateful for the help I got but, unfortunately, it left me with a great deal of shovel and rake work to further build up the beds, shape them and firm them.  It took me almost an entire week to get the beds in decent shape.  My wife is in the process of planting them (when she's not taking care of our 2 year old).  The March plantings are about done and she'll be starting the April ones in a week or two.

One of the last things I've done is get our chickens out to pasture.  We have about 125 and they are about 7 weeks old.  We are doing "free range" chickens - which basically just means they live on a pasture instead of in a cramped chicken house.  The main tasks here were getting the portable chicken house ready, setting up a maintenance free automatic watering system, setting up a more scalable feeding system (hauling feed out to the pasture once or twice a day just doesn't work for me), getting the live stock guardian dog situated (that's a whole story in an of itself), and moving the chickens - man it takes a long time to catch 125 chickens one at a time :)

The dog - our guardian dog is a Great Pyrinees (might not be spelled right).  He's a nice dog but I swear he is psychotic.  We got him about 6 weeks ago.  Initially we had him in a small room with the 1 week old chicks.  That was a catastrophe.  He destroyed the room - chewed up the in window air conditioner, tore down some blinds, crushed several of the chicks and more.  Having learned from that mistake, we created a pen for him in a small paddock next to the barn.  It's already closed in electric fence but we added cattle grating to be sure he wouldn't get through.  The first night he escaped (I have no idea how) and was gone for a couple of days.  He eventually showed back up on the farm but would not come to us despite our best efforts to lure him.  Ultimately, we managed to trap him in and electric fence area.  So our next attempt was to put him in a stall and chain him up outside during the day.  I think it would be going too far to say that worked but he didn't escape.  However, he didn't seem to be warming up to us or the farm either.  He continues to act very nervous, very fearful and to run away any time someone walks toward him.  A few days ago we moved him out to the pasture with the chickens.  I had him on a chain staked to the ground.  Yesterday he pulled the stake out of the ground and ran away.  If he hadn't gotten his chain caught in some brush there's no telling where he'd be now.  Now I have him tied to a tree (12" trunk - he's not pulling that out of the ground no matter what :)).  I was ready to kill him today.  I spent all morning standing out in the rain splicing hose and hooking up our automatic chicken waterers.  I got them all done, got all the leaks stopped and was feeling very proud of myself.  I walked away for 10 minutes to go do some other stuff and came back.  In his psychosis, he had run circles around the feeders and had them all tied in knots and in shambles.  Let's just say I lost my temper.  Weeks of frustration with him all came out at once.  I didn't touch him but let me just say I'm glad no one was around to hear the stream of expletives.  My wife has started asking around with protection dog experts in hopes of finding out what we should do.  We've gotten some hints on what we might do differently.  We'll give them a try and I'll let you know how it goes.

That's most of the big stuff.  I've also spent a few days clearing brush (have I mentioned that the fence lines are terribly overgrown?).  The farm is pretty old and there's a lot (miles) of fence lines with 30 year old (or more) barbed wire that's no longer in tact and overgrown trees that haven't been trimmed in 10 years or more.  This is my long term project.  I've been working on it for almost a year now and will probably be working on it for the rest of my life :)

I can't say I did much on it but construction on our house has started.  The trees were cleared about a week ago and now I have enough firewood to last an eternity.  Seriously.  I think it was 14 dump truck loads of firewood.  And that's in addition to the 3 truck loads of "large" (probably 18"-36") red and white oak that I'm going to have sawn into lumber.  The footings are poured and they started laying the foundation on Saturday - but had to stop due to rain :(.  It's exciting to see all of the progress though.

It seems like the list of remaining projects just keep growing.  I've already gotten the wheels in motion on a few more.

I think I had been in denial about deer fencing around the garden and orchard.  After all they are in the middle of the farm and there's at least 2 or 3 electric fences between them the woods in every direction.  Well, after seeing deer tracks in the garden beds the morning after I made them, I woke up from my little fantasy world and started planning a fence.  I've now ordered all of the parts - 96 10' posts and 2,400' of deer netting.  Yep, that's right - the fence is going to be almost 1/2 of a mile.  Anyone care to guess how long that's going to take me?

Better late than never?  I really should have already installed the irrigation system for the orchard and vegetable garden.  I have made a few steps toward it but they have all been thwarted.  The last failure occurred when I got an estimate back from a local landscaping contractor.  The estimate was for over $41,000.  I nearly fainted when I saw it.  I expected it to be expensive but that was at least twice as much as I was expecting.  So I've gone back to the drawing board and am now planning on doing much of the work myself.  I'm working on the detailed design and hope to have a plan in the next few days.  Then I can order the components and be ready to do it in a few weeks.

The last major thing I'm looking at is water distribution for the cows.  After dealing with frozen hoses and watering troughs this winter, I knew I wanted to have this problem solved before next winter but was a bit ambivalent about doing it this spring.  Another little fantasy has been burst.  We are doing a rotational grazing system for the cows - moving them from paddock to paddock about every 4 days.  This is to keep them from overgrazing the pastures.  This last week I moved the cows from their winter "sacrifice" paddock to their first spring paddock with new lush grass.  After buying 300' feet of hose, hooking it up to 400' of hose I already had and getting it all set up, I realized that there is really no way I can do this every 4 days all summer.  So, getting water lines run around the farm has suddenly become a priority and I hope to have a plan by the end of the week.

That's about it for now.  Sorry for the length but it's been a few weeks.  I think in the next week or so I'll try to get some pictures posted so you can see what this farm looks like.

Brian

Since so many of you expressed a willingness to listen to me ramble about my sabbatical on the farm, I figured I would (at least a bit) :)

Yesterday was the end of my second week.  The start got delayed a bit from what I was originally planning due to stuff I had to tie up at work.  My first big task has been to plant my orchard.  It's about 2.5 acres and includes a wide variety of fruit trees: 96 apple, 18 peach, 10 pear, 10 plum, 18 fig, 5 persimmon, 12 pawpaw (a little know native American fruit), 126 blueberry.

I estimated it to be a 2 week task.  As with software nothing quite happens as you expect.  Overall, I'd say I'm ahead of schedule though.  The orchard is basically done - I'm just waiting for the last order of blueberry bushes to come in (about 40 bushes) and I'll be done.  However, I've filled in with work I planned to accomplish in my second 2 weeks.

I had lined everything up to be ready for the first week.  I ordered the trees last fall and scheduled them to be delivered in late February.  I rented a skid-steer tractor and an 18 inch auger to dig the holes.

I started with the blueberry area the first day by spreading sulfer (to lower the ph), spreading finely ground pine bark mulch and tilling it all in.  I started drilling holes Tues morning and much to my surprise, I was done before lunch on Wed - 288 holes in just over a day.  It went much faster than I expected.

Wed I planted all of the blueberry bushes that I have (about 70).  Thursday was pawpaws, plums, pears and about half of the apple trees (that I have so far).  Friday I finished the apple trees I've received and planted the figs.

Intermixed with some rain days, early last week I finished the remaining apple trees and some peach trees.  Unfortunately, the rain showed me that I didn't pack the dirt in the holes properly and quite a few of my trees sunk.  I've had to go around and raise most of them once or twice.  I think I'm about done but won't know for sure until after the next rain.

I allocated the next 2 weeks for pasture improvements - fertilizing, seeding, liming, etc.  This is the ahead of schedule part :)  I'm just about done with seeding and will be fertilizing today.  One thing I've learned is how unbelievably slow it can be driving a tractor around a field in 6 foot swaths at 4.2 MPH.  A single field can take hours.

Yesterday we tried spreading my neighbor's horse manure compost (he has 25 horses - and lots of manure :)) on one of my fields.  Hmm, how can I say that didn't go so well?  There's a drainage area between his property and mine and (thank heaven) we've had a lot of rain in the past could of weeks.  While ferrying the 4th bucket full of compost from his pile to the spreader in my field, we nearly got his tractor stuck - it was sunk at least 12 inches in the muck.  Needless to say, we gave up for now.  It was a waste of 2 and a half hours but it was a good try.  I can't bring myself to wish for dry weather though given the incredible drought we've been having for the last year (still short something like 8" of rain).

Another shocking learning for me has been the price of fertilizer.  Holy cow!  I did soil samples last summer (to determine need) and spread some fertilizer last fall but not a lot.  I priced the remaining fertilizer this spring and I nearly passed out.  The bill would have been well over $20,000.  Unfortunately, the fields have not been well fertilized for many many years.  I'm sad to say that I simply can't afford that kind of money for fertilizer.  So I'm getting creative.  As you can read above, I'm trying to get horse manure compost from my neighbor - I'd estimate he has about 200 cubic yards.  I'm also getting about 50 tons of chicken litter from a guy I know that operates some large chicken houses.  I'm only going to spread about 200 lbs per acre of commercial fertilizer (17-17-17).  I'm hoping that between all of that plus the cow manure I have from my 11 cows that I'll be OK for now.  It's still not as much nutrients as I should put down but at those kinds of prices, I'm just going to have to take a multi-year approach to this.

Well, that's it for now.  Time for me to get back out to the farm.  Thanks for listening.

Here's a Visio diagram of my orchard in case you are interested.  My hope is to ultimately plant grapes in the "Future space" in the middle.

Brian