RIP Monkey

So, my dear little pet lamb, Monkey, died. She had been unwell for a few days. Possibly as a result of the diarrhoea she has had since we took her in, maybe it just took it’s toll on her system. She got weaker and weaker and refused to eat so we had to try and force feed her with electrolytes and glucose solution, but it didn’t help and she passed away in the night.

I’ll remember you fondly little Monkey.

Raspberry Pi: Minecraft Pi...

So, I've been trying to come up with some ideas for projects for my Raspberry Pi. These are some of the better ones:
First one is for use with Minecraft Pi edition..

So, here it is, couple the Raspberry with a GPS, take the GPS data and convert the coordinates into 1m increments  maybe set a different map datum as well, so where you are is Zero, Zero, Zero. Take that coordinate data and use the following bit of code:

world.setBlock(x,y,z,blockTypeId (Say stone or dirt, whatever))

Take the x, y and z data from your GPS and you've got a little system you can walk about with and it'll crudely map the terrain you're walking over. Of course you'd have to walk every metre of an area you want... but the idea is there.

Second, this one i'm thinking of doing more seriously. Again, needs a GPS, and a tracked robot. So, I work on a farm, we have lots of fields. Something that would be useful to know is the surface moisture, as it can tell us a lot about what is happening in the field, is there a blocked drain, do we need to put one in, will the yield of this area be good or is it too water logged. (There are more interesting things to know about a field, ie Nitrate concentraiton, humus thickness, compaction etc, but moisture is the easiest to get a reading on).

So, moisture probe on a stick. Set the boundaries of the field into the computer, and set the little rover off. Every metre or so, stick goes into the ground and result gets recorded. Get this throughout the field and plug the data into ArcMap, turn it into a heat map and you've got a nice indicator of how the fields look moisture wise. Would probably reveal some interesting trends... Maybe. This could also work as a hand held probe thing, which would save on programming, but would require a bit more leg work and time. 

With the hand held probe, could use LED indicators to point to the next sample point, then maybe a LED to indicate when to sample.

Ideas Ideas!

Pikachu joins Monkey: The Pet Lambs

So, we've got another little pet lamb to keep Monkey company.

I called her Pikachu because she has little black tips to her ears and looks very cute. Funny story surrounding her "becoming a pet lamb"

Her mother is a shearling (That is a sheep that's over 1 years, younger than 2). The shearlings on Botton Farm are still about to fatten up and eventually go for meat. However one of the tups seems to have not been castrated properly and served a ewe shearling... The result was Pikachu walking around in with the 'lambs.' The shearlings are not really old enough to have lambs of their own, so Pikachu became a pet lamb as well. She's just with us for a little while to make sure she survives, then she'll got to another house probably. Till then she can share Monkey's box.

Pet lamb

I've got something to admit. I've known it for some time now... 

I have a pet lamb. Actually I've not known it for that long since I only got her last week.

So, her name is Monkey, and she's a cross between a Mule dam and a Texel tup. 

Her story is a sad one. 

She was born to sheep number 86, one of a triplet, and probably the strongest of the three. 

Near her nursery pen was sheep number 90. She just had 1 lamb, her second lamb died during birth. 

Sheep #86 wasn't producing enough milk to feed all 3 lambs, so we had to foster one lamb onto #90, since she just had 1.  Monkey was chosen as she was the biggest. We skinned the dead lamb from #90, and dressed Monkey in her new macabre jacket. Instead of the new foster mother accepting Monkey, she could tell it wasn't her lamb, and kept beating her up. After 2 days of trying to foster Monkey on, we called it a day and took off Monkey's jacket and I got to keep her!

So, Monkey moved in with us in Old Botton Farm.

Since her diet has somewhat changed from Ewes milk to conventional Lamb Milk Replacer (A powdered milk substitute) she's got terrible diarrhea and so we made her some nappies for when she is in the house.

Lambing Begins

So, we’ve started lambing now… Our first Ewe lambed today, with some difficulty.

I got a phone call at around 10am saying that one of the Ewes was lambing, but it looked like a dead lamb. Off I ran down to the farm.

Sure enough, he looked pretty dead. Just the head was sticking out and his tongue was all swollen up… When I got all cleaned up and pulled him out, I was sure I saw some movement. And when we got him clear he coughed and spluttered back to life, so I carried him around to his mother and she licked him dry. He was a funny looking thing, with a huge head because it had been out so long.

About 30 minutes later his brother arrived, looking much more like a normal lamb.

More snow, more gritting

Hello one and all!

Well, the weather here in Yorkshire has provided me with work once again. It has been snowing for a couple of weeks now, it stopped in the middle and started melting, but then on Wednesday (The 6th February 2013) it all kicked off again. So I hooked up the gritter and off I went again!

My dear little tractor, a Kubota M6040 (15/1/13)

The snow started around the 15th January 2013, and for the first week or two it was pretty heavy. One of the farmers on Falcon Farm, who lives outside, was unable to get into Botton, so I was in charge of the farm for a while.

The Falcon Farm Yard (16/1/13)

Beautiful sky! (16/1/13)

On the night of the 25th/26th Jan the wind picked up, and blew all the snow into drifts, and some of them were quite impressive!

1 meter drifts up by the wood work shop (26/1/13)

Big piles of snow at the sides of the road, picked up by the snow ploughs and later with a JCB digger. (26/1/13)

Big drift in our back garden (26/1/13)

…It wasn't;t that big…

On the Monday (28th Jan) one of my villagers and I went into Guisbrough to the vets. We had to pick up some medicine for two of our pigs which had mites. We thought we should go the safer way, through Danby, then up through the Castleton Moor Road, which we assumed would be clear. We had a 4x4 (Subaru Impreza) and so we figured it’d be fine!

The drifts started to get bigger and bigger, and where the ploughs and diggers had been the walls started to be built up. Eventually we saw a digger parked at the side of the road, with a guy talking to another guy by it, so I asked them if the road was alright ahead, their answer was a thumbs up, so I drove on. A short while later, around a bend, was a vertical wall, 10ft high, of snow, all around… That is the last time I’m trusting a digger driver to tell me if the road is clear…

We turned around and went via Danby in the end, and that road was only just open, but we made it to the vets!

Gritting

So, my winter job as a farmer, now that I'm not morning milking, is gritting duty. This means, if the weather is cold enough, I get a phone call at an ungodly hour and have to grab my tractor and gritter and go out and grit the roads.
This weekend the weather has gone from bad to worse, and since Friday I've been out gritting each morning.
So, here are some pictures...