Walk-In Freezer

Last year my friends down at the vegetable farm got a bigger walk-in freezer and I agreed to buy the old one. I was supposed to take it last fall, which turned into last winter, which turned into this spring, which turned into…well, I haven’t taken it yet, but, finally, the site is ready, and before my friend’s patience was entirely exhausted.

The previous owners of the property torn out a section of the back wall of the barn and put in a dog kennel with runs that extend beyond the barn. They poured concrete to serve as the floor of the runs, and the concrete pad is perfect for the freezer (and for the grain bin). A friend of mine who is an equipment operator is going to move the freezer from the vegetable farm up the hill to my place. Once he gets it here, he’ll have to hold the freezer just above the ground and ease it slowly under the overhang in the barn that was created when the back wall was torn out.

On Sunday, my brother Peter and I started working on tearing down a section of the kennel to open it up enough to get the freezer in. As I expected, it actually didn’t take all that long. Altogether, it probably only took five or six hours, and since we were demolishing something, it was fun. I don’t think I’ll ever get over my boyish enjoyment of smashing things with a sledgehammer or cutting them into pieces with a sawz-all.

For the past few years, I have been using two freezers that I keep down in the basement. One is a new chest freezer that I bought and the other is an old upright that I got for free from my neighbors. Between the two freezers, I currently have just under forty square feet of freezer space. The walk-in freezer is roughly 350 square feet, or nearly ten times what I currently have. I could probably get by with another forty square feet of space, but adding forty square feet — assuming new freezers — would cost the same as purchasing the walk-in. Of course, the walk-in will cost substantially more to run each month than would the chest freezers. However, when I agreed to purchase the walk-in my hope was that I would grow out of even two additional chest freezers, and even faster than I expected, I have. I will still only need about half of the space, so what I plan to do to keep the operating cost of the freezer down is to run up to the cheese factory and get a tankful of whey and get a whole bunch of five gallon buckets and freeze the whey in the five gallon buckets. The thermal mass of 250 gallons of frozen whey will help keep the freezer cold. I will pull a bucket or two out each day to defrost and feed to the pigs.

One other thing I am looking forward to about the walk-in freezer is that it isn’t in the basement! Right now I have to lug coolers packed with 100 pounds of meat up and down those stairs every Saturday when I go to the farmers market. I also need to carry all of the full meat boxes down there whenever I pick up at the slaughterhouse. I haven’t wrecked my back doing any of that yet, but I have come close. I will be able to back the truck up to within about ten feet of the walk-in.

 

Tractor Woes

Yesterday while I was walking up the road toward the house, I saw drops of oil on the road. I looked behind me back towards the barn, and sure enough the trail of drops indicated that they were coming from my tractor. I turned around and walked behind the barn to where the tractor was parked, and then laid down on my back and checked the hydraulic line at the distribution box between the pump and the loader, and sure enough, the o-ring in the box had blown, for the third time in a year. The first time was last summer, and I fixed it. The second time was this winter, and I had the tractor mechanic fix it. This time I will have to have the tractor mechanic fix it again because I don’t have time to take care of it and I want to ask him to take a serious look at the relief valve this time. The blown o-rings are definitely related to the fact that I am overtaxing the loader by carrying around tanks of water — and in the winter, heavy baleage — that are at the loader capacity. However, trying to lift something at or beyond the capacity of the loader shouldn’t blow o-rings. There is a relief valve that activates when the pressure in the lines gets too great, but it must not be working, or if it isn’t the relief valve, something else must be wrong.

Since about the middle of the winter, I have been actively looking for a larger loader tractor and have been talking to Jen to convince her that it is time to move up from a compact tractor to a full-size utility/ag tractor. Between toting around tanks full of water and large heavy bales of baleage and getting into plowing and fitting fields, it is definitely time. The o-rings on the compact tractor are not the only issue. Compact tractors are well-built and sturdy, but they are not designed to do serious work. Even if I were to stop blowing o-rings, if I continue to cart around bulky tanks of water and big bales of hay that extend way out in front of the tractor, I will end up needing to re-build the front end of the tractor. The front axle simply can’t take that kind of stress over and over again.

Safety is another issue. In order to carry that kind of weight on the loader, I need to add substantial ballast to the back of the tractor. I use either the back blade, which weighs 700 pounds, or the bush hog, which only weighs about 550 pounds but sticks way out in back. (The lighter bush hog actually provides more ballast because it is so long.) During the winter I use the back blade. During the summer I use the bush hog because I am constantly bush hogging anyway. Every now and then when I am doing something quick and there is no ballast on the tractor, I don’t add it, and I usually regret it. I have nearly flipped the tractor three times. With a utility/ag tractor, I can carry around the weight that I need to without adding ballast.

Because of supply and demand issues, it is possible for me to get a relatively little used used ag tractor in the 60-80 hp range for just about the same amount of money that we spent on the compact tractor. Compact tractors are marketed primarily to suburban folks with five to ten acres and to true hobby farmers that only need to really push them a couple of times per month. Because there are so many of the former, compact tractors per horsepower are much more expensive than utility and ag tractors.

I recently priced a new utility tractor, but the initial quote was just under $40,000, and while it did have 0% for 60 months financing so that we could probably work out a trade-in deal in such a way that we would be paying about the same monthly payments that we are for the compact that cost half as much, neither Jen nor I want to extend our payments out for another three or four years. When we bought a new tractor the idea was that we would make payments on it for four years and then own a tractor payment free for another eight to ten years. Free money for five years is nice, but right now the farm can’t justify — or pay for — a $40,000 tractor. To be perfectly honest, it can’t even pay for a $20,000 tractor with free money for four years.

Because tractor prices (due to substantially higher steel prices, amongst other things) have gone up so much since we bought the compact, we should be able to sell the compact privately for not a whole lot less than we paid for it, which means that the amount we’ll have to finance on the bigger tractor won’t be all that much more than we currently still owe on the compact. However, whatever it is, it won’t be at 0% interest.

One problem is that there are very few used tractors around that meet my criteria. It might take some time to find one. There is one out by Rochester that I would like to ask a friend who lives out that way to go take a look at for me, but I don’t want to ask him unless I am really sure that if the tractor is in good shape that we are going to buy it. My friend is a farmer and makes a lot of hay, so this time of year isn’t really the time of year for him to be running around looking at tractors as a favor. That means that I’ll need to make sure that Jen is on board with getting a bigger tractor before talking to my friend.

 

Mowing Season Has Begun

Yesterday marked the first of many hours that I will spend sitting on the tractor this year mowing pastures and fields with the six foot rough cut rotary mower, also known as a bush hog. Mowing serves a number of purposes. First, it keeps any grass that is getting ahead of the animals in terms of its growth in a vegetative and palatable state. As grass matures, it sends up thick woody stalks high into the air on which the seed head forms. These thick stalks are less palatable than grass leaves and there is less protein in them. Horses, especially non-working horses, do very well on coarse mature grass, and they find it reasonably palatable. However, sheep and cows in a high state of production (growth and milk production) do much better on grass that is kept in a vegetative state.  Second, mowing helps keep weeds in check. As animals graze, even very even grazers like sheep, they graze down some parts of the pasture more than others and they leave untouched some weeds, especially as those weeds mature and themselves become rank and woody. This variation in height, especially when the grass is grazed low around the base of weeds when the weeds are untouched makes the sunlight available to the weeds, which gives the weeds a growth advantage over the now shorter grass. Mowing literally levels the playing field, tipping the balance back in favor of the fast growing grass. As the grass gets ahead of the weeds, it will shade the weeds out, preventing them from getting an abundance of sunshine, thereby retarding their growth. Mowing also helps keep weeds in check by cutting off weed flowers before they have had a chance to go to seed, or by cutting off seed heads before the seeds have had a chance to mature. However, weeds have a defense against mowing. Once they have reached the flowering stage, the plant “feels” like it is nearing the completion of its annual cycle. When it “suffers” the “trauma” of having its flower or seed head cut off, it “knows” that if it were to go through a whole growth cycle it wouldn’t have time enough to set seeds before winter, so rather than sending up another long stalk to get the seeds up high in the air, which would best distribute those seeds, it simply makes new seed heads on the short stumps of the stalks, or it grows new short stalks on which the new seed heads are formed. A large percentage of these new flowers/seedheads, will be lower than the lowest one would want to set the mower when the field is mowed again some weeks later. Because of their low height, these seeds do not get well distributed, but they mature and fall to the ground nonetheless where they persist for years, forming a weed seed “bank” in the soil, just waiting for the opportunity to germinate. Third, mowing keeps the pasture surface clean and free of the mat of dead grass that would lay on top of the grass in spring, slowing, or even preventing grass growth. (On large ranches where mowing pastures is not possible, this mat is burned off each spring) Fourth, as the cut vegetable matter decomposes, it returns much of the soil nutrients it used to grow back to the soil.

Mowing is a reasonably enjoyable way to spend time. If you know the field and the field is open and reasonably flat, it requires only a sort of passive awareness. You get into the rhythm of the hum of the engine and the rapid swish, swish, swish of the rotating blades. If you don’t know the field, however, it is an extremely stressful, draining task, especially if the growth is tall enough that you can’t see the ground. Their might be huge rocks. Their might be gaping groundhog holes. Their might be old rusty equipment. There might be long strands of barbed wire waiting to get wrapped and wrapped and wrapped around the mower. The stress and potential damage to the mower and/or tractor and the potential danger for the operator are a couple of the reasons that people charge so much to mow tall fields for the first time. The mind is pretty good at mapping fields, however. Even after only a single time around a field, I have been able to recall where (more or less) the hazards are a year or even two later.

For the next sixteen weeks or so, I will spend at least some part of nearly every week rumbling about a field on the tractor.