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Oh good Lord!

This morning I sat down at my desk to do some posts on the website. We’ve had lots going on that was post worthy and I suddenly had some free time because:

  • I got over here about 5am, so I had some time till the sun came up.
  • We were going to move the cows today, but because we had more grass than we thought we are moving them tomorrow.
  • The market has been slow so Miguel and Vicente are somewhat caught up at the moment, freeing me to do some of my own work.

With all this free time and a fresh start, I knew I could get some good writing done before the sun came up meaning the posts for the next few days would be done in advance, plus I could run payroll, and deliver some meat this morning to boot ( Hi Kara!). It was going to be a good morning. Then I noticed this.

Update to WordPress 4.3
“Some humans would do anything to see if it was possible to do it. If you put a large switch in some cave somewhere, with a sign on it saying ‘End-of-the-World Switch. PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH’, the paint wouldn’t even have time to dry.” Terry Pratchett

Huh, a new version of WordPress. A quick look shows it has some new features but nothing I’m jumping up and down about. Usually it updates automatically but for some reason it’s asking me to update manually. Meh, I’ll run the update since it’s way early and nobody is looking at the site anyway. Takes less than a minute. Then I’ll do my post. A quick update later and…

The site wasn’t down, but it was seriously wounded. Error messages displaying on every screen and general crankiness. Usually it’s a plug-in so I’ll just deactivate plug-ins until they get updated. It’s recoverable. After deactivating all the plug-ins we had.

Sigh. Good thing I have a backup program that runs daily. I’ll just restore the backup and go back to yesterday’s setup which is pre-updates. I started restoring the backups, and then things got worse.

After much consternation and a call to hosting tech support, I finally ended up moving the entire website to a sub-directory. Then installing a fresh copy of WordPress, THEN running a backup restore from offline storage, then hooking all the plug-ins back in that stopped working. It’s now 10:16 and I can start my day.

So guess what today’s post is going to be about… 

 

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Minor and major stock repair, and stock bending

Once again I’ve been off farm for a week of gunsmithing school. You are probably wondering how I’m able to be gone from the farm so much and still be a farmer. Two words. Miguel. Vicente.

We have a very large project coming up that is going to occupy everyone’s time for months so if I ever wanted to go to gunsmithing school, now was the time. Miguel and Vicente not only were able to keep everything running, the farm actually looks better when I get back than when I left. It’s a blessing to have these guys working for me.

Back to the gunsmithing. I’ve gotten favorable comments from some folks that they are enjoying the gunsmithing posts so even though they are incongruous with farming I’m continuing on with them as there is something to post. This past week I was back in Troy, NC taking another continuing ed class. This time it was stock finishing and bending with Tim Carrick.

Tim Carrick bending a stock
Tim Carrick, bending the stock on SWMBO’s shotgun

Tim is a graduate of Montgomery Community College’s gunsmithing program from back in the 80s and has been gunsmithing full time since. He is a prince of a guy and was very willing for everyone to learn anything he knew. He is also a wizard at taking a bit of acra-glass, some shavings, and time and making a stock go from literally broken into multiple pieces like this.

To where you can’t even see the break unless you know what you are looking for. Luckily I had a gun that was in need of some serious repair, and another gun that needed a complete refinish so I had good candidates for class projects. I also brought my barrel from the AR-15 class to do some work on it. But that’s going to be in the next post.

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The last of the summer grass

Cows barely visible in the grass
Cows in the upper pond paddock

The cows are finishing up their latest rotation on the farm and will be moving to the neighbors next week to start grazing his grass. When they get back, it will be well into fall and the cows will be eating fescue instead of the warm season grasses they’ve just finished. What you see pictured above is the next to the last paddock they have moved into. The paddock behind the wooden fence in the background will be their last paddock for this week, then it’s onto the trailer and to, literally, greener pastures.

This particular picture shows a bunch of the weeds that are growing in this paddock but the grass in there is just as tall as what you see. Miguel and I were on the way to go select pigs to go to the processor the following week and I just snapped this picture as I went by because I thought it gave a good idea of how tall everything is at the end of the rotation. If you look closely, you can see a bit of cow here or there poking her head above the greenery. Now that’s tall grass.

After the cows move out of this paddock, we’ll take the mower in there and mow things closely. Then we’ll take the disc harrow in and lightly disc the ground. At that point we’ll be broadcasting seed for a pollinator habitat that will allow our bees, and wild bees of course, to have a great nectar flow going into fall. Hopefully the seed we have will reseed itself and we’ll keep this little section of the farm in pollinator habitat. With that and some other things we are working on, hopefully we’ll have some honey for sale in our store before too long which I know a number of you have been waiting for.

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The first sign of fall

I’m always ready for spring. By the end of winter I’ve had enough and I am watching for any sign that spring may be coming. Summer I’m always watching out for because it means going to the lake with the kids, plenty of produce, fat cows and pigs, etc. Winter gets here whether I want it to or not but at least I’m looking forward to weather that makes it fun to be in the shop with a fire going, or cold enough days that we can fire up our smoke house and smoke some bacon or whatever we are planning on smoking.

Fall for some reason always sneaks up on me.  In my head, it’s 102 on August 31st and 81 on September 1st. It’s one of my mental blocks I guess. I have to remind myself that the end of August is the beginning of September and September is fall weather. Nowhere has this mental block been more apparent in the past than with our grapes.

Muscadine and Scuppernong grapes ripen in late August, early September. In my head it has always been September and I can’t tell you the times in my younger days I’ve gone out to the grape vines in early September to find all the grapes gone because it was the first time I’d thought about the grapes. I’m older, wiser, and hungrier now and I know to start keeping an eye on the grapes in mid-August. That experience was rewarded yesterday with this.

Muscadine grapes, just becoming ripe enough to eat
Muscadine grapes, just becoming ripe enough to eat

I generally give a few grapes a squeeze once they start looking dark purple. The first one I grabbed was almost ripe. I was surprised and thought maybe I was late in checking the grapes but it was just luck. I’d grabbed the one grape that was ahead of the others and the next few grapes confirmed they were still pretty hard. We have a few weeks before it’s time to pick grapes although I did go back and pick that one grape. Yum! The first grape of fall!

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A small gunsmithing update

A gunsmithing vise

I’m continuing to get my gunsmithing stuff set up. I’ve nearly completed installing a DRO on my Bridgeport mill and I’ve done my first job on the mill with what has already been installed. I needed a new vise on my gunsmithing bench and I only knew of one vise to use.

A gunsmithing vise
A proper gunsmithing vise

This looks like a relatively normal vise but it is unique in that is rotates 360 degrees so the bottom jaws can be swapped for the top jaws. Yes that would be 180 degrees but the point is besides clamping and swiveling on it’s base, it also rotates. This means that if you are working on something and you need it held in a different position, you don’t unclamp it. You just loosen it slightly and the vise itself will rotate. This makes it a much more usable vise in my opinion. Also, this particular vise is readily available from my friends at Agri-Supply. Yes this means it’s cheap Chinese junk but I’ve beaten on one of these for years and until I broke it by asking WAY too much from it, it did fine.

I mentioned that I’d done a project on the mill. First, here is what a Bridgeport mill looks like.

A nice clean Bridgeport
A vertical knee mill, a handy piece of equipment for all kinds of work.

It’s an internet image because I’m not at the shop to take a picture. Plus this one is clean and mine is NOT.

And here is what my DRO looks like.

DROPROs digital readout
DROPROs digital readout. Now we’re in the 21st century

This thing is accurate to the tenth of a thousandth of an inch. It also has all kinds of functions that I have no idea how to use. You always want your equipment a bit smarter than you so you have a chance to grow. Kind of like buying shoes when you were a kid.

So back to the vise.

A gunsmithing vise
A gunsmithing vise

If you look, the jaws are black. Those are pieces of Delrin, milled and drilled on the mill to replace the metal jaws the vise came with. This gives the vise semi-permanent soft jaws so I don’t mess up the finish on guns or gun parts. It was a joy to work with the new DRO and making these jaws was a snap. I can’t wait to finish the install of the DRO and move onto the lathe for it’s own DRO. But that will be another post.

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What actually happened to #44, a follow up

The post I wrote yesterday was double the length a post on the internet is supposed to be so I decided to put this part in a separate post.

If you recall, #44 showed signs of bloat. But when we treated him for bloat, we got this instead.

Trocar in cow rumen
Trocar pumping out gooey mess

Instead of blowing off a bunch of air as is normal, he blew out breakfast and foam. Even thought we treated him with all we and the vet knew to do, the swelling in his rumen never really went down even after he seemingly returned to normal. The vet said there really wasn’t much we could do for him other than what we’d done. Now that we’d decided to process him we could take our time and look around to try to find the source of the problem. I’m not a doctor or a vet but I’ve seen healthy and normal organs enough times so I know what they look like. So what to look for? Maybe a twisted gut? Maybe some sort of infection? (which would mean tossing the meat.)

When I got inside, I found that his rumen had grown into the wall of his abdominal cavity and attached itself. It appeared to have been that way for a long time, possibly a birth defect? There was no redness or internal swelling visible. The attached rumen appeared to be causing digestive problems and probably some pain. There certainly didn’t appear to be any fix for the problem so it validated our decision to put him down which was a relief. Life and death decisions are hard enough without also being wrong.

Just another day on the farm.

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End of the line for #44

I’ve previously written about #44 and the trouble we’ve been having with him. Despite all the work done to him and all the consultations with the vet, things just didn’t work out. Miguel and I both separately noticed that he was laying down and both met in the barn yard to go look at him. I grabbed my doctor bag thinking maybe the trocar in him was blocked and he’d be ok if I could clear it but when we got to him we found that he was just feeling poorly and there wasn’t much to be done. We had the choice of trying to treat him again or putting him down. If we treated him again, then most likely he’d end up getting buried because we’d have to give him drugs which would make the meat unusable. If we put him down we’d be able to use the meat and there really wasn’t much we could do for him anyway. It sounds more callous than it was but that’s the short version of the decision process.

Once we decided we’d be putting him down, things quickly moved into getting ready. The last time we processed a cow on farm, it was the Ninja Cow so it had been a little while. Of course we process pigs relatively often and it’s not all that different, just bigger and messier.

After a humane stun shot to the head with a .44 (my ears are still ringing), we quickly hoisted him up with the tractor and bled him out. A quick trip back to the barn and we went to work. It took about three hours to go from cow on the hoof to quarters hanging in the walk-in cooler. A week of aging in the cooler and then it then took another few hours to go from quarters to cuts of meat. Any real butchers are probably laughing at the time it takes us but we do everything with a couple of knives and a hand meat saw. We are slow but we get it done.

Cow cut into quarters
Quarters heading for the cooler

Yes, this is the Gator you take your tours in. I always call this Gator “the clean Gator” when I refer to it. If you thought that was odd, now you see why. We only haul people and meat in this Gator and keep the bed clean for times just like this.

I saved a few ribeyes for our freezer as that’s the steak I prefer most. Most of the meat was cut up and given to our various friends at the farmer’s market.

Cow being butchered, front quarter
Butchery in progress

They routinely look after us with all the produce they send our way. Occasionally we try to look after them with some complimentary meat.

Lastly, I called one of our customers and asked if he could come by and get some ribs (the picture above is actually the good morning picture I sent him). Fortunately he was available and stopped right by. This customer is one who is responsible for the food porn posts that I’ve been posting. I knew I’d get some good pics back if I gave him some ribs.

I was right. See below.

Ribs, seasoned and ready for the grill.
Ribs, seasoned and ready for the grill.
Rib dinner
The end result, more food porn

It is tough to look a cow in the eye and put it down, especially when you’ve done all you can to save it and it hasn’t worked. It’s hard and messy work to butcher your own cow, handle the heavy primal cuts, clean up all the blood, etc. But knowing that cow is no longer hurting, and knowing our customers are happy makes all the work worthwhile.

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We finally capture our hard headed pig

We keep our pigs together as a group pretty much from the time they arrive to the day they leave. Sometimes they move to a new paddock but overall they stay together. Over the past few months we’d been loading finished pigs onto the pig trailer to take them to the processor. All we do is lower the pig trailer to the ground, open the gate, put a bit of food in the trailer, and the pigs all rush on to eat the food. We simply close the gate, then get in and sort out who we don’t want. The point is we always have more pigs get on than we need.

However over the past few months we’d notice that one Berkshire was refusing to get onto the trailer. She’d eat the food but she just didn’t want anything to do with the trailer, like she knew it went somewhere bad. We eventually moved all the pigs in her paddock to a new paddock and that’s when we really found out that she was NOT getting on the trailer. We left her by herself for a few days. She refused to get on. We fed her only on the trailer. She refused to get on leaving the food untouched. We tried hiding and tricking her. She refused to get on. This went on for weeks. Finally on July 2nd, Miguel got her onto the trailer by some sort of magic and we quickly transferred her to the stock trailer to take her to the processor. I’d not planned on processing her but with her being this much trouble to handle, she earned herself the trip off of my farm. When I arrived at the processor, I got onto the trailer to shoo her off and that’s when she informed me that she really didn’t like me, or anyone who looked like me. She arched her back and growled, just about to charge. I backed off and let the guy working there move her with a sorting board which finally worked. It was like being in the trailer with a bear who was having a bad day.

Pig at the processor
Finally at the processor, after weeks of work

But get off she did and that was one less problem to deal with. The best thing about being a farmer is your problems taste like bacon.

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Come take a tour, bring the kids

Cute girl on the farm
Cuteness overload after a farm tour

We give a lot of tours here on our farm. Sometimes to large groups, sometimes to just a single family. One thing we get a lot of is kids.

I always try to make the tour fun for the kids while informing mom and dad about our farm and what we do. On the day this was taken, we’d received in a pallet of grapes that had nothing wrong with them. As we headed out for the tour, while I was getting some food to feed the cows I grabbed a bunch of grapes  and handed them to the kids so they’d be entertained during the tour.

Just as we were finishing the tour, I was able to capture this picture which pretty much summed up the whole tour. Sticky, happy, grapes still clutched in one hand, flowers in the other picked from the pasture. I’m sure she slept all the way home but at this point she was wide open and too cute.