2nd Custom Snail

Another custom snail for you!

-Skip

How the little piggies are coming on

So, before I told you about the little piggies we had on the farm ( ==-Here-== ).

How are they coming on now? Well, they’ve grown pretty big.

Ms Larchfield also pigged 2 weeks later, and now they are all in together.

Scything Pt2

So, I started again after lunch, and made some good progress. The farmer from Botton Farm was cutting our Arable Silage field (The one I sowed in may), he finished a very large field in the time it took me to do about 4 rows of my little field… Well, there is a reason behind technological advances…

Rain stopped play, so I sat in the tractor for a while, waiting for it to blow over.

It didnt… So I finished the last little bit in the rain.
But at 5pm, I finished my little field:

Yay!
Oh I do love scything!
-Skip

Scything Pt1

So, I’ve started to scythe a field in Botton, here it is before I started:

After 45 minutes of work….


Its gonna be a long day!

My beauty!

Custom Snails

Custom paint job on a snail!

I’m not sure… really… I was a little bored at tea-break time…

How the seeds are coming on

So, the seeds that I planted a little while ago have now begun to grow. The lines are not as straight as I would’ve liked, and there are some gaps in places, but overall, it’s not too bad!

We planted some pumpkins about a week ago, and today I went up and checked to see how they were growing, as we’ve another 500 more to plant tomorrow.

When I got there I begun to power harrow the next bed ready for planting, and I moved the fleece off the pumpkins and found that all the pumpkins had been eaten!

There was almost nothing left! Damned slugs! 600 pumpkins! GONE!

So in the end I power harrowed the whole lot and we planted the new pumpkins in the place where the old ones were….

Final Steps

So, the final steps are to grass seed on top of the barley. This is done with a similar seed drill, but without the “drill” part.

See:

Broom! Broom!

The grass is seeded twice over, once up and down like the barley, then side to side to ensure a complete covering of grass. The side to side is bumpy as hell as you’re going through all the wheelings from before… Waaa!

After this the grass seed is rolled in with a Cambridge Roller, which is a bit lighter than the heavy roller.

20h that took me…

Field Work Continues

So, today I had to roll in the Barley I’d seeded yesterday. This is done with a heavy roller

This roller makes a hell of a noise moving it on the road!

Almost there! You can see the turning pattern at the bottom, where you turn over the previous row and end up with a bit missing which you get the next time when you go over the previous row again.

My Ipod got incredibly dusty!

What a full day!

Good things come to those who wait… Apparently. Well, I was hoping for some serious tractor work, and today I got my wish.
The morning began as per usual,
Made Pikachu a nappy,
fed some animals
drank tea.
Then I went to Honey Bee Nest and got the seed drill….
Good old fashioned technology! The seed drills:

My…. almost straight lines… The bit on the right is drilled, the bit on the left is still to be done:

So I finished the field at about 8:30pm and went home and had supper.
Actually it wasn't even that much time, at about 9 I got a call that one of Botton Farm’s sheep was lambing, and since the farmer was on holiday….
Ah…. Well, the first one was incredibly weak and didn’t make it, despite me stomach tubing it with colostrum…. The 2nd was fine… So I took them both into the barn and then was told there was another lamb wondering around in the field….
Sure enough there was a new, wet lamb…There was a sheep seemingly claiming responsibility for the lamb, but she had 2 old lambs already, and I’ve not heard of any sheep having a 3rd lamb so far after…. I brought her and the 3 lambs into the barn and she was determined that this little one was hers… But when I put it with the first mum, she started licking it, so it must’ve been hers!

Baby Piggies

Our pigs all have rather weird names. We’ve got 2 who have the names of where they come from, Larchfield and High Farm, then we’ve got James the Boar, Francesca. And recently, 3 that went to the land where the grass is always green and the sun always shines, Foxy, Moxxi and Roxi. (They fetched us a good price deadweight)

Francesca just pigged the other day, that is to say, she had piglets.

There is 8 in total, 1 is hiding somewhere in this photograph…Or he could be underneath….

 

And one of Pikachu the pet lamb….

Project Freya: Overview

I wanted to give my little Arduino project a proper name. And with it coming along in leaps and bounds I figured it was about time to give it a good one.

So, Project Freya. Freya being the Norse goddess of love and fertility. Fertility being the key here as it’s to be used on a farm to assess fields… (So soil fertility)

Basically the outline of the project is for a device that does the following:

• Records the coordinates for a given position
• Records soil moisture taken from a probe/set of probes
• Logs both of these values onto something that enables easy translation into a GIS program, in my case ESRI’s ArcMap.

My platform of choice is the Arduino (From www.arduino.cc)

I picked up the Arduino Uno Starter Kit.

I figured I’d do all the tutorials and so forth and get my hand in to the language. I did the first tutorial and decided to free lance from there.

The first part of the requirement was for GPS reception:
For this I got an Adafruit Ultimate GPS Logger Shield. http://www.adafruit.com/products/1272

The advantage of this is that it fills both the first and third requirement, GPS and SD card. Perfect!

I wrecked the board whilst soldering on the pins though, I stuck on standard male pins, then realised I actually needed some of the inputs to run the sensors and later the LCD screen, so I had to unsolder the pins and put header pins on, and broke some of the tracks in the process. Note: if you are using this board, choose header pins straight away and don’t even try and solder on normal pins…

 

My moisture sensors are very simple, and partially described in the previous post. The circuit diagram can be seen here:

These are the actual probes of the sensor. Two nails soldered to wires. These will be mounted to something, maybe a broom handle, with some method of ensuring that each sample site the probes are inserted the same distance from each other and to the same depth.

That’s the basics of the project. It has expanded from these few key parts a bit now, see later posts about that though!

-Skipper

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.

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...