Losing My Remodeling MoJo

On the very remote chance that someone's worrying themselves sick about where I disappeared to, for the past couple of weeks, I've been working on a "simple" remodel of a bathroom that seems to have spiraled out of control in the typical way that usually happens with most of my remodeling jobs.  It started out as a simple job of painting and replacing the flooring, then grew to include some tile work which led to some plumbing work, which all eventually evolved to include a partial gut-job of most of the bathroom, a lot of drywall work, and some fancy-dancy ceiling texturing.  Thankfully, I was able to stop the madness before I ended up replacing the plumbing fixtures and all of the lighting.  

It's been awhile since I've tackled a job like this, in the past I've remodeled an entire house almost single-handedly, built a small 500 sq.ft. building (super-insulated, stained concrete floors, even a bathroom), remodeled a kitchen, a few bathrooms, and tackled various other smaller projects. But for whatever reason, on this remodeling job it seems like I've somehow lost my remodeling mojo (I still have the skills to do it, I'd just rather be doing something else) and everything seems to be taking forever to finish.  

Losing my remodeling mojo might be because I'm just getting older, I'm more of a perfectionist than I used to be, I'm only working a few hours per day on it at a time (still gotta take care of the cows and walk around the pastures every day), or it always took this long to do my projects in the past and I didn't realize it back then.  Or, it could be all of the above.  

All I know is that I'll be glad when I'm finished with this bathroom project so I can go back to work on more important projects like finally building my portable windbreak, welding the hell out of various stuff that needs the hell welded out of it, cutting down cedars, making bio-char, or fence building.         

I'll spare you the boring details of my bathroom remodel, but stay tuned for exciting updates on  welding stuff, blocking the wind, and watching grass grow. 

Moving Cows, "What The Heck Are You Doing On That Field?", and Pheasants

I hit a few milestones on the farm yesterday and today.  I managed to get the rest of the cows moved from the rented farm back to the farm for the winter, had a neighbor ask about what I was doing with my field of sorghum-sudangrass, and saw my first pheasant in a cover crop I'd planted which might not be a big deal in pheasant country, but it's monumental news on the edge of pheasant country. 

I typically wean the older calves in mid-October, move the cows to the rented farm where the grass has been growing all summer, and graze the cows until sometime in December.  After the first freeze happens, I start supplementing them with my typical 2 lb. of cubes per day routine since dormant native prairie grasses are supposed to be pretty low in protein so supplementing is usually suggested.  I'm not entirely convinced about the low protein levels of native warm season grasses, but the cows always seem to gain condition pretty fast. 

I originally started feeding cows on dormant pasture back during the drought years of 2011 and 2012 because I didn't have enough hay to make it through the winter, there wasn't any hay to buy if I was inclined to buy hay, and I had no other choice except to haul cattle to another farm and supplement them with cubes for part of the winter.  Out of that desperation, I found out that my cows seem to do better under that sort of feeding management.     

I've left cows on dormant prairie grasses until late-December before, but since I have plenty of hay, still have about half of my field of sorghum-sudangrass left to graze, and it's always possible that the weather could quickly turn nasty (snow, ice, etc.) in December, I decided to move them back to the farm yesterday. 

The rented farm doesn't have a great set of loading pens, it's basically a few pens with a long loading chute coming off of one pen, which I sort of modified into a almost-but-not-quite version of a Bud Box.  It's slightly above my pay-grade to explain exactly what a Bud Box is and there is a bunch of better info available online, but it's basically a small rectangular pen that's about 12x24 ft next to a chute.  The cattle are moved into the box and using low-stress handling techniques they circle around and then go down the chute.  When it works right, it works like a dream, but when something goes wrong it can turn into an exhausting cuss-fest of a rodeo, and it can be downright dangerous with wild cattle.   Saying all that, I'd still think seriously about building a Bud Box into any set of working pens that I built in the future.

Yesterday, it worked like a dream and anyone watching would probably have been mesmerized with my cow whispering ability to easily sort and load cattle by just moving this way and that. There have been times when it seemed like most of the cows would just flat out refuse to go down that chute and the few that were willing to go down that chute would then refuse to step onto the trailer.  It's a lot less work and pretty satisfying when things don't go sideways. 

Since I was switching this group of cows from grazing dormant native grasses to grazing sorghum-sudangrass, I put out some hay to help transition them to a different type of forage.  Feeding hay before moving to a field of winter-killed sorghum-sudangrass isn't entirely necessary, but it doesn't seem to hurt anything.   After they'd filled up with hay, I moved the electric fence to give them access to the ungrazed part of the field, and they all dove into the tall grass and started grazing away.  Moving electric fences takes some work, but it's less work than feeding hay not to mention the amount of work involved in cutting, baling, and hauling hay. 

The last part of the field that's going to be grazed is next to the road, so it's hard to see the cattle grazing on this field right now.  While taking to a neighbor today, he asked what was the deal with this field of dead sorghum-sudangrass, and what the heck was I planning to do with it?  I didn't go into all the details of my cover cropping ideas or plans, but told him that I'd divided it up and was grazing it over the winter with the cows instead of feeding hay.  I couldn't tell if he was skeptical about my plans and didn't think it would work, or if he was thinking 'that's a great idea, why didn't I think of that?'.   Regardless of what he thought, it means something when people are wondering about what you're doing, I can't tell you if it's good or bad but it means something.  

I saved the best for last, because this morning I managed to flush a pheasant out of this field of sorghum-sudangrass.  Then, later in the morning, I happened to see a pheasant fly across the field and land in the taller ungrazed grass.  It was likely the same bird, but I'm counting it as two pheasant sightings.  I've seen a few pheasants really close to the farm, but this is the first time I've seen them on the farm in a field that I planted with the thought that it might make decent pheasant habitat.  

From this day forward, December 10 will be designated as the official Pheasant Day in commemoration of the appearance of pheasants on the farm in a cover crop field.  

After actually seeing pheasants on the farm, I've got an overwhelming hankering to plant some cover crop mix borders next year around some of the wheat fields specifically for the pheasants and quail.  Hopefully, if I plant a few strips of pheasant habitat, everyday could be Pheasant Day.

Now, I need to figure out what to plant to attract some elk to the farm because believe it or not, there is an elk hunting season in most of Oklahoma. To my way of thinking, Elk Day celebrations would easily beat Pheasant Day celebrations.

A Few Thoughts About Grazing Sorghum-Sudangrass

It's been almost three weeks since I started grazing this field of winter-killed sorghum-sudangrass as a trial to see if it's possible to graze a field like this over part of the winter instead of feeding hay. Other people are already wintering cattle this way, so I'm not really going to discover anything earth-shattering, but I still like to try things on a small scale before I believe everything I read. 

I split this field into four sections (I'm not sure if I'd call them paddocks) and after the cattle had grazed the first quarter for about a week I opened up the second section.  Since I was still developing my winter-grazing eye and wasn't sure about how much grazing was still left, I got a little nervous and opened up the second part earlier than I planned, but in hindsight I think I could have waited much longer.  Now, I'd just estimate how many bales of hay per acre a field would have made, then I'd simply figure out how many bales of hay I'd feed in a week (factoring in some waste. etc.), and  I'd build my paddock big enough to provide a week's worth of feed (or a day, a month, etc.).  This field is about 25 acres, it should have made about 3 bales per acre, so it's the equivalent of 75 bales of hay.  I usually figure that it takes one 1200 lb. bale of hay to feed a 1200 lb. cow for a month, so I could possibly graze 75 cows for a month or 25 cows for three months if I had no wasted grass (So far, with trampling and waste, it looks like I'll be lucky to get the equivalent of about 50-60 bales?).

I've read accounts that claimed that the protein levels for winter-killed sorghum-sudangrass could be as high as 11%, which is more than enough protein for a dry cow and also kind of hard to believe. Most of the typical prairie hay that I typically feed is supposed to be below 8% protein (I've never had any hay tested, but I really should), so I typically feed about 2 lb. of 20% cubes per day to supplement the hay, and I've also been feeding about 2 lb. of cubes while they are on this field of sorghum-sudangrass.  

When I try doing this again, I think I'd add in something like cowpeas, sunn hemp, turnips, or sunflowers (I've been reading some unexpected info about the high-protein levels of sunflowers) to get protein levels high enough so that I could eliminate the cubes completely.   The money I'd save by not needing to buy cubes would easily pay for a lot of cover crop seed, plus planting a cover crop mixture would be better at building the soils in my fields.  I said it before, but I'll say it again, next year is going to be the year of the cover crop mix, but that's also what I said last year. 

This year it also seems like there are more blackbirds (I'm no birdwatcher, so I'm not sure on the exact identity of these birds) around than there usually are in the winter, they're both in the sorghum-sudangrass field and in the pasture next to it.  I don't know if the field of sorghum-sudangrass has anything to do with it, but they seem to be doing a great job of breaking up all the cow patties by scratching through them like a huge flock of hyperactive tiny chickens.   

Of course, they might also eat a bunch of grain sorghum next year before it's harvested, so I'm not sure if a bunch of blackbirds is good or bad.  But, since there isn't really anything that can be done one way or another, my best guess is that they are neither good nor bad, they just are.

Deer Hunting Out of a Box Blind

In Oklahoma, the deer gun season opens on the weekend before Thanksgiving and I've been deer hunting off and on since then.  Last year, it turned brutally cold early in the gun season with sleet and snow, which both made it hard to hunt and started me thinking about building some sort of box blind so I could get out of the weather if I wanted to.  Then the antlerless deer season in late-December was even more miserable, which made me think even more seriously about building a box blind so I could go deer hunting without getting frostbite or hypothermia.

You would think that building a box blind and then hunting out of it would be a simple matter, but I've always had a mindset about hunting that didn't include things like box blinds, hunting guides, ATVs, etc.  I've never really liked gadgets or shortcuts in hunting, and a box blind always seemed like a really big gadget and shortcut. 

With all those thoughts in mind, I finally broke down and built a simple box blind last summer (with help from my nephew) using salvaged material from a shed that was being dismantled and since it didn't really cost me anything to build, I was able to halfway convince myself that this wasn't really a gadget or shortcut because it was almost free (I think the final tally was about $10 for some hinges).  It's kind of funny how my mind works, ain't it? 

There's about a thousand different ways to build a box blind, so going into all the details isn't really that important (although if anyone asks, I'd share more of the details of how I built this box blind and what I'd do differently), but I basically built a simple 4x6 box on skids with shooting windows on three sides and a good watertight metal roof.  The roof is high enough inside so that I don't bash my head on the ceiling if I stand up too fast and the window openings are about 40 inches high.  If I ever build another one, I'd change a few things like making it 4x8 (so I'd have the crazy option of sleeping in it so I could then tell people that I had a "small hunting cabin in the woods"), I might make the windows openings a little shorter, and I'd try to make it a whole lot lighter so it'd be easier to move around.

Tiny hunting cabin

Windows opened up and ready for business

Looking South

Looking East-Northeast?

Looking North

After it was built, we loaded it up and put it in a part of the farm that used to be a small wheat field down along a creek.  This field is only about 8-9 acres, but it's about 450 yards long, so it's a long, skinny field.  It's been about forty years since it's been planted to wheat, but for years I've been thinking about trying to pasture crop some food plot mixtures of wheat, oats, ryegrass, clovers, turnips, etc. in this field (first, I need to get the bulldozer over there to fix the road to the field so I can get the tractor to it).    If I can eventually get something green growing in this field during deer season, a box blind might be even more useful and I might even go completely over to the dark-side and build an elevated box blind.

After sitting in the box blind a few times over the last week, it appears that I'm getting closer to official old-man status because I was able to sit a whole lot longer than normal without getting as cold or sore.  It's amazing how much easier it is to stay warm when you are sitting in a chair instead of on the ground or up in a treestand.  

Now I'm starting to see why box blinds are popular with old men, little kids, and people that are fond of comfortable chairs.  Shooting a deer out of a box blind with a rifle isn't the same as shooting a deer on the ground with a bow (which is my favorite way to hunt), but hunting out of a box blind is better than not hunting at all because it's too cold and miserable.  

As a bonus, I can always turn this box blind into a chicken house, a pigeon loft, an ice fishing shack, a super-deluxe outhouse, a roadside vegetable stand, or a super tiny house.

More Portable Windbreak Thoughts

I've more or less decided how I'm going to build my windbreaks (as always, subject to change) which I'll go ahead and share. I decided to follow the design from the Ranchers.net forum post which I wrote about in my previous post.

I went ahead and built some little models to scale out of some foam board and wire to make it a little easier to show what I'm talking about, and also so I could huff and puff and try to blow them over to test how stable the design actually is.  I don't know how accurate my "huffing and puffing trying to blow them over" test is or if it even applies to real world conditions, but it was harder to blow them over than I thought it would be, so I'm satisfied they'll work. 

It's easier to look at the photos than it would be to draw and explain my plans, but the relevant measurements are: 

-the windbreak (foam board, sheet metal, wood, etc.) part is 8'x24',

-the width of the base needs to be 1.5 times the height of the windbreak for stability, so the legs are about 12' long,

-the lines on the foam board represent the framing that the sheet metal is attached to,

-there is about a one-foot gap at the bottom for enough air flow (it has something to do with snow drifting),

 -the pipe at the top is so that a tractor with a bale spike can be used to pick up and move the windbreaks. 

-the legs are removable and are simply a 2 3/8 pipe slid into a 2 7/8 sleeve (the Ranchers.net forum post has a picture of the assembly).

Since the windbreak has removable legs and is about 8' tall, I should be able to easily disassemble and load them onto an equipment trailer so that they can be moved longer distances (which is one of my design criteria).  

Two windbreaks attached together and angled for more wind blocking action

Legs need to be 6-feet from the ends so the windbreaks can be angled

Three windbreaks attached together for even more stability and wind blocking

I haven't decided if the windbreaks should be built entirely out of 2 3/8 pipe or a combination of pipe and 3" (or 4") c-channel purlin material (like a steel framed barn).  Right now, I'm leaning towards the pipe and purlin combination to make it less top heavy and easier to attach the sheet metal.

The material used to make the windbreak itself also needs to be decided.  Some sources recommend something like 2x6 lumber spaced a couple of inches apart to make a porous windbreak which is supposed to have an advantage over a solid wall (try going to the Portable Windbreak Fences publication for more info). Wood seems like it would be heavy, more expensive, and less durable.  If I could salvage some treated boards from somewhere, it might be an option.

I've also read about using used billboard tarps (available on eBay for reasonable prices) on a windbreak,  which sounds like it would work reasonably well although I'm not sure how long a billboard tarp would last or what it would look like out in a pasture if the printed part of the billboard tarp was still visible.

Solid sheet-metal (the same as on a barn) is another option, which at the moment, is the type of material I think I'd probably use for building a windbreak.  Sheet-metal is relatively light weight, pretty durable, and is affordable.  Sheet metal should also make it easier to move them on a trailer if I ever decide to.  I'm undecided about whether I'd run the sheet-metal horizontally or vertically.  The framing would need to be built differently depending on how the sheet metal is installed, so I'll have to do some thinking on what would work better, would be easiest to build, etc..

So far, I think that explaining in detail how I'd build my version of a portable windbreak might possibly be the extra shove I need to build one or two this winter, so stay tuned for the possible, maybe, if-I-ever-get-around-to-it building process (I'm still not making any promises though).

Apparently Quail Like Sorghum-Sudangrass

Today was the day that I finally put the cattle on my field of sorghum-sudangrass.  If it hadn't been for the early cold snap we had last week, I would have put them on sooner, but since I've never liked the combination of cold, biting wind and building electric fences, and it isn't that big of a deal to wait a few days to start grazing it, I decided to wait a few days.  

Right after opening the gate, I walked the electric fences to double-check that the deer hadn't knocked them down and almost immediately jumped the biggest covey of quail (20-25 birds) that I've seen in a very long time.  I was thinking that quail might be attracted to this sort of winter cover, but it's nice to have my thinking confirmed by actually seeing that many on a cold, snowy day. 

If I added some sunflowers, buckwheat, or cowpeas to the sorghum-sudangrass, I wonder how many more quail I could raise?    A bird dog would be next to impossible to see in that tall grass, but it would be a heck of a hunt if I had a hundred acres of sorghum-sudangrass full of quail and a good bird dog.

Before the cattle have started grazing

Even more surprising was the number of rabbit tracks I saw in the mowed strip where the electric fence is.  One day of snow, extra cold temperatures, and the rabbits were running everywhere.  A beagle would have ran himself ragged and gone hoarse in that field. 

Rabbit tracks running all over the place

I planted this field of sorghum-sudangrass to feed my soil and a few cattle, but if it will also feed the quail, rabbits, hawks, coyotes, and hopefully some pheasants in the future then it's well  worth the $15/acre it cost to plant.

Thinking About Windbreaks

About a week ago, the temperature was in the 80's, then the most recent "Polar Vortex", "Polar Invasion", "Arctic Outbreak", or "whatever the heck they've decided to call it" reached Oklahoma, and the temperature dropped into the twenties and thirties.  That might be shirt-sleeve weather farther north, but with the wind also blowing 20-30 mph, it's seemed pretty cold to me (especially since the temperature dropped that much almost overnight). 

It's been so cold that the ponds have frozen a couple of days and I've already had to chop holes in the ice for the cows (I don't think I've ever had to do that this early in the year before). This morning it started snowing and they're forecasting a low of around 16 degrees tomorrow, which is awfully cold for mid-November in Oklahoma. 

When it's cold, the wind's blowing, and it's snowing, I'm driving to check the cattle instead of walking

All this cold this soon has gotten me to thinking once again about building some sort of windbreak for the cattle. 

About four or five years ago, when my calving season started in mid-February, a big storm hit right as the cows were starting to calve.  The temperature dropped to well below zero (24 degrees below zero), over a foot of snow fell, and the road to the farm drifted closed for a few days until the county brought in a bulldozer to move the snow.  I was lucky that time and didn't lose any calves, although I ended up with a couple that had frostbitten ears and tails. If the storm had hit a week later when more cows were  calving, I really would have been in trouble. 

After that storm, I moved the calving season to March trying to avoid the worst of winter weather and started thinking about building some sort of windbreak in that pasture.  I also built a loafing shed so I'd have somewhere to put any newborn calves if a storm hit during calving season. 

I soon found out that calving in March didn't mean that I'd avoid most of the ice and snow winter storms.  I also found out that a loafing shed doesn't really help as much as I thought it would with newborn calves, because unless I babysit each and every cow that might be ready to calve, it's impossible to move a calf to the loafing shed quick enough to make a difference in a storm that's bad enough that a calf might need to be in that loafing shed.  A loafing shed has a use on the farm, but it doesn't really help in blizzard unless I could somehow put all the cows into it before the storm hit.   

Most local pastures have enough trees and protected areas that windbreaks would be an unneeded luxury, but the pasture where I like to winter my cows doesn't have enough trees in the right places to provide enough shelter.  Planting more trees is probably the best long-term solution, but for the short-term, building some sort of windbreak might be useful.    

Even though I've thought about building a windbreak for a couple of years, I've never got around to actually building anything (mainly because I can't decide exactly what I want to build or if a windbreak would even work).  In the process of trying to decide what to build, as a test, I hung a tarp on one side of the working pens to make a 6'x24' windbreak last winter right before one snow storm which did block the wind, but I didn't see any cattle around it at all. I'm not sure if it just wasn't tall enough, it wasn't wide enough, it wasn't in the best location, or it was something else? 

Another time right before a snowstorm, I stacked about ten bales of hay in a line next to an already somewhat sheltered area.  This idea did work to block the wind, some of the cattle gathered around it, and some calves even bedded down out of the wind next to the bales like they were supposed to.  The only problem was that the cows ate just enough of the bales that when I tried to move them after the storm, I had a big mess of falling apart hay bales so I had to just leave them out for the cows to clean up.  After they'd eaten part of the hay and wasted a heck of a lot of it, I then found out that it was almost impossible to get all that baling twine cleaned up.   Except for when I'd need an emergency shelter, I don't think building a windbreak out of stacked hay or straw would really work for me.   

After all that , I've been thinking about building a honest-to-goodness windbreak like they use up in places like Canada.  I've seen a few interesting designs online for portable windbreaks that look like they might work that are about 10-12 feet tall and about 20-24 feet long built out of pipe and covered with either 2x6 lumber or sheet-metal.  Last year, I got as far as drawing up some rough plans and making out a materials list (which I can't find now) and estimated that it would cost around $400-500 for materials (for all new steel and lumber).   

For anyone interested, some of my ideas came for these two links:  a forum post on Rancher.net  and an agriculture publication from Saskatchewan about Portable Windbreak Fences.

I hoping that thinking out loud about windbreaks on this blog combined with this early snowstorm might help push me enough to start building a windbreak this winter in time for calving season instead of next summer when it's too late.  Wish me luck, and if I build one I'll share the building process in the future.  

If anyone had any ideas or suggestions to add, feel free to share them.