DiamondSCattleCo
Well-known member
Since this appears to be a hot topic, thot I'd toss out another article I wrote a few years back:
Cowboys hate dirt.
It gets in your hair. It sticks under your fingernails. It turns a simple
15 minute shower and shave into 45 minutes of scrubbing, cleansing, and skin removal. It clogs up filters, burns out bearings, and it just doesn't taste all that great.
Cowboys prefer to see endless miles of green grass and luscious hay waving in the wind. What'll ruin that image every time is a patch of brown dirt stuck right smack between the south hay meadow and the north summer pasture.
Ordinarily, we'd just grab a bag of grass seed and turn that chunk of earth
into something useful. Something not so brown. Unfortunately, one thing
stands in our way:
Cows like grain.
Wheat. Oats. Barley. Crushed. Rolled. Whole. It just doesn't matter a
bunch to our bovine pals. They like it all. And they like lots of it. It
makes them happy.
And since happy beefers are a cowboy's aim in life, we here at the Cowboy Way find ourselves trading in our Stetsons and rope horses for a ball cap with a heribicide advertisement and a greasy, dirty, old field tractor and steeling ourselves for a couple unpleasant weeks of sod-busting.
Now don't get us wrong. Dirt farming is an honorable profession. There are thousands of intelligent, hard working folks for whom playing in the dirt is a way of life that they find fulfilling. There's just too much about it
that cowboys don't understand. We're not stupid, its just that it requires
a certain precision that most cowboys aren't capable of handling. We've
seen cowboys that can comfortably discuss genetics, herd heritability, and
EPDs, thoroughly stumped when faced with a simple little table telling them how to set the press drill to ensure that the proper number of little seeds gets stuffed into the ground in the proper place, at the proper time, and at the proper depth.
Over the years, we've learned a few lessons that we feel we should pass on to our fellow cow hands who are only trying to make their critters gain a little more weight, taste a little bit better, and smile a little broader
when they see the sun rise on a bright new day.
Lesson #1 - Tilling the soil.
Before seeding any patch of ground, the dirt must be tilled with some sort
of equipment that will turn the soil over, kill some of the weeds, and make
the ground a hair bit smoother to drive over. Remember your old Gramma out hoe-ing her garden? She wasn't doing that for entertainment value.
Now, you can't just pick any old chunk of iron and hydraulic hoses to ready the soil for those hearty little seeds. Tandem disks, cultivators,
vibra-shanks and ploughs all have their place and time for use. Here is
what we use for our general guidelines:
Plough - If your piece of dirt resembles a collage of pictures from the
textbook 'Common and Not So Common Weeds Of North America', the age-old plough should be your weapon of choice. The plough appears to function well on weeds from 8 inches in height to rope horse belly-tickling height. If your weeds include several well-developed trees, skip the plough. A D6 Cat should be your first choice.
Tandem disk - If your collage o' weeds hasn't quite reached the 8 inch stage of growth, a tandem disk is likely going to do the trick for you. Keep in mind that these come in two flavors, just like your wife's yogurt:
Tandem Disk Light and Tandem Disk Heavy. Just because your 930 Comfort King is capable of pulling 20 feet of the diet variety of tandem disk does not mean it's capable of pulling 20 feet of the heavy, weed-eating variety. If you latch on to the heavy variety and find your wheels pointing at the sky, don't blame us. You were warned.
We would like to see pictures though.
Cultivators, Vibra-Shanks - If there ever was a more confusing piece of
equipment, we haven't found it yet. Cultivators and vibra-shanks can be
equipped with shovels, but you can't dig a hole nor even a nice little
trench. They can be equipped with spikes, but no matter how many fences we've run over, nothing has ever been nailed together properly. We believe that these things are just a way for implement salesmen to make a quick buck. We own two of each, but only because we were told that we needed them. Park one in a convenient spot in your pasture. Not only do they make handy hitching posts for your saddle horses, they give the cows something to run round and round when you're trying to herd them into the working pens.
Lesson #2 - Choosing your seed.
Its no wonder most people think that cowboys aren't the sharpest arrow in
the quiver. What follows is a typical conversation with a seed salesman:
Ring. Ring.
"John Bob's Seed Emporium. John Bob speakin'."
"Well howdy John Bob. I'm looking for some oat seed."
"Oat seed I've got plenty of. What kind of oat seed would y'all be looking
for?"
Hesitate. This is obvously a trick question. "The kind that grows?"
Listen to John Bob's hesitation. "What are ya, some kinda wise guy?"
"No. At least I don't think so. Generally I'm told that I'm not all that
quick."
Listen to John Bob's deep sigh. Then listen as he recites the 40 different
varieties of oat seed that he has in stock, their ability to compete with
weeds, their average yield for given growing conditions, their resistance to
lodging and their genetic make-up. "So what kind of oats do y'all need?"
"Ummmmm. Maybe oats ain't such a hot idea. How about barley? Y'got any barley seed?"
"Yup. Barley seed I've got lots of. What kind of barley seed would y'all
be looking for?"
<sigh>
Having gotten absolutely nowhere with the seed salesman, don't call any of your cowboy pals for help. They'll probably make jokes at your expense and not give you any useful information. What they aren't saying is that they're just as confused as you are. Instead, drive by dirt farmer's homes until you see one that looks friendly. Explain your situation. They'll probably take pity on you and give you a hand selecting the seed thats right for your four-legged friends. Don't bother writing down the name of the seed for reference next year as that seed will have been replaced with something new. Just go visit your new-found dirt farmer friend again. Maybe take him a steak, or a six pack of beer to let him know he's appreciated.
Lesson #3 - Planting your seed.
Ring. Ring.
"John Bob's Seed Emporium. John Bob speakin'."
"And howdy to you, John Bob. Remember, I bought some oat seed from y'all a couple days ago?"
"Uh huh. Lots of guys have bought oat seed from me a couple days ago.
Which one would you be?"
"Cowboy-looking guy. You told me how to set my press drill."
Listen to John Bob's sigh. "Yeah. I remember you now."
Try not to take offense to John Bob's resigned tone of voice. Give him the
benefit of the doubt. Maybe its been a hard day. "Well John Bob, I seem to be having some difficulties. I think you gave me the wrong directions on how to set the press drill."
"Really? How d'ya figger that?"
"Well, I had a hundred acres that I needed to sow down, remember? At 3
bushels to the acre you told me, right? So that should mean it would have
taken 300 bushels of seed? I got that part down all right. I mean its not
rocket science. But I appear to have run out of seed, and I'm not quite
done."
Listen to John Bob's sigh. "Well Cowboy, thats kind of normal. Maybe
you've got a couple extra acres in that field, or maybe your press drill
sows just a little bit heavy. How much do y'figger is left to be seeded?
2, maybe 3 acres?"
"Well, I figger about 70 acres."
"HUH? 70 ACRES?"
"Yup. About that. I don't understand it. I did everything you told me to
do. Set those little levers in front to A2. Twirled that little gizmo on
the side, and drove the tractor slow, probably about 2.5 mph. Can't really
say for sure. The speedometer on my 930 sorta bounces between 1 mph and 7 mph."
Listen to John Bob's curse under his breath. "I didn't say a word about
driving the tractor slow. I said to put the press drill on slow speed."
"Oh."
Lesson #4 - More is not necessarily better.
Oats seeded at 3 bushel per acre will often yield 70 or 80 bushels of
nutrition per acre. Oats seeded at a rate of 10 bushels per acre will often
only yield a hair bit more than 10 bushels per acre. Its very strange.
Lesson #5 - Weeds are bad.
Take a survey of your best summer pasture. Chances are there are some weeds in there somewhere. Maybe quite a few. But as long as they aren't thistle, you're probably going to be just fine. Weeds have a great deal of nutritional content, generally taste pretty good to our lawn mowing cash machines, and they grow, well, like weeds.
Now take a survey of that oat crop. All the green stuff in the rows are
probably oats. All the green stuff in between the rows are likely weeds.
If there is more green between rows than there is in the rows, you're
probably in trouble. This is where your cowboy experience will come in
handy. You know what weeds look like. Heck you can probably identify every last one of the scurvy things because they are the same ones growing in the summer pasture.
The problem comes in getting rid of them. Don't call John Bob again. He
could probably use a break from you. Call your local neighborhood herbicide specialist. Tell him what you got, and then tell him to send someone out with a custom sprayer. Don't even bother trying to attempt to spray those weeds out yourself. No matter how exact you think you've got things set, no matter how careful you are not to miss anything, you'll always end up 10 gallons short and have a 4 foot wide strip of weeds right down the middle of your 100 acres of oats. Its a fact of life. Live with it.
There are hundreds more lessons that can be learned when sod-busting,
however the five that we've attempted to teach to you today are probably the most important of them all. Follow these, and you may even have a bushel or two of oats to feed this winter.
Rod
I hate seeding season. Precision farming? It takes on a whole new meaning around this place. This year, we're precisely sowing between 1 bushel/acre and 10 bushels/acre, at a speed precisely between 1 mph and 10 mph, with precisely 1 foot to 10 feet of overlap per round.
Cowboys hate dirt.
It gets in your hair. It sticks under your fingernails. It turns a simple
15 minute shower and shave into 45 minutes of scrubbing, cleansing, and skin removal. It clogs up filters, burns out bearings, and it just doesn't taste all that great.
Cowboys prefer to see endless miles of green grass and luscious hay waving in the wind. What'll ruin that image every time is a patch of brown dirt stuck right smack between the south hay meadow and the north summer pasture.
Ordinarily, we'd just grab a bag of grass seed and turn that chunk of earth
into something useful. Something not so brown. Unfortunately, one thing
stands in our way:
Cows like grain.
Wheat. Oats. Barley. Crushed. Rolled. Whole. It just doesn't matter a
bunch to our bovine pals. They like it all. And they like lots of it. It
makes them happy.
And since happy beefers are a cowboy's aim in life, we here at the Cowboy Way find ourselves trading in our Stetsons and rope horses for a ball cap with a heribicide advertisement and a greasy, dirty, old field tractor and steeling ourselves for a couple unpleasant weeks of sod-busting.
Now don't get us wrong. Dirt farming is an honorable profession. There are thousands of intelligent, hard working folks for whom playing in the dirt is a way of life that they find fulfilling. There's just too much about it
that cowboys don't understand. We're not stupid, its just that it requires
a certain precision that most cowboys aren't capable of handling. We've
seen cowboys that can comfortably discuss genetics, herd heritability, and
EPDs, thoroughly stumped when faced with a simple little table telling them how to set the press drill to ensure that the proper number of little seeds gets stuffed into the ground in the proper place, at the proper time, and at the proper depth.
Over the years, we've learned a few lessons that we feel we should pass on to our fellow cow hands who are only trying to make their critters gain a little more weight, taste a little bit better, and smile a little broader
when they see the sun rise on a bright new day.
Lesson #1 - Tilling the soil.
Before seeding any patch of ground, the dirt must be tilled with some sort
of equipment that will turn the soil over, kill some of the weeds, and make
the ground a hair bit smoother to drive over. Remember your old Gramma out hoe-ing her garden? She wasn't doing that for entertainment value.
Now, you can't just pick any old chunk of iron and hydraulic hoses to ready the soil for those hearty little seeds. Tandem disks, cultivators,
vibra-shanks and ploughs all have their place and time for use. Here is
what we use for our general guidelines:
Plough - If your piece of dirt resembles a collage of pictures from the
textbook 'Common and Not So Common Weeds Of North America', the age-old plough should be your weapon of choice. The plough appears to function well on weeds from 8 inches in height to rope horse belly-tickling height. If your weeds include several well-developed trees, skip the plough. A D6 Cat should be your first choice.
Tandem disk - If your collage o' weeds hasn't quite reached the 8 inch stage of growth, a tandem disk is likely going to do the trick for you. Keep in mind that these come in two flavors, just like your wife's yogurt:
Tandem Disk Light and Tandem Disk Heavy. Just because your 930 Comfort King is capable of pulling 20 feet of the diet variety of tandem disk does not mean it's capable of pulling 20 feet of the heavy, weed-eating variety. If you latch on to the heavy variety and find your wheels pointing at the sky, don't blame us. You were warned.
We would like to see pictures though.
Cultivators, Vibra-Shanks - If there ever was a more confusing piece of
equipment, we haven't found it yet. Cultivators and vibra-shanks can be
equipped with shovels, but you can't dig a hole nor even a nice little
trench. They can be equipped with spikes, but no matter how many fences we've run over, nothing has ever been nailed together properly. We believe that these things are just a way for implement salesmen to make a quick buck. We own two of each, but only because we were told that we needed them. Park one in a convenient spot in your pasture. Not only do they make handy hitching posts for your saddle horses, they give the cows something to run round and round when you're trying to herd them into the working pens.
Lesson #2 - Choosing your seed.
Its no wonder most people think that cowboys aren't the sharpest arrow in
the quiver. What follows is a typical conversation with a seed salesman:
Ring. Ring.
"John Bob's Seed Emporium. John Bob speakin'."
"Well howdy John Bob. I'm looking for some oat seed."
"Oat seed I've got plenty of. What kind of oat seed would y'all be looking
for?"
Hesitate. This is obvously a trick question. "The kind that grows?"
Listen to John Bob's hesitation. "What are ya, some kinda wise guy?"
"No. At least I don't think so. Generally I'm told that I'm not all that
quick."
Listen to John Bob's deep sigh. Then listen as he recites the 40 different
varieties of oat seed that he has in stock, their ability to compete with
weeds, their average yield for given growing conditions, their resistance to
lodging and their genetic make-up. "So what kind of oats do y'all need?"
"Ummmmm. Maybe oats ain't such a hot idea. How about barley? Y'got any barley seed?"
"Yup. Barley seed I've got lots of. What kind of barley seed would y'all
be looking for?"
<sigh>
Having gotten absolutely nowhere with the seed salesman, don't call any of your cowboy pals for help. They'll probably make jokes at your expense and not give you any useful information. What they aren't saying is that they're just as confused as you are. Instead, drive by dirt farmer's homes until you see one that looks friendly. Explain your situation. They'll probably take pity on you and give you a hand selecting the seed thats right for your four-legged friends. Don't bother writing down the name of the seed for reference next year as that seed will have been replaced with something new. Just go visit your new-found dirt farmer friend again. Maybe take him a steak, or a six pack of beer to let him know he's appreciated.
Lesson #3 - Planting your seed.
Ring. Ring.
"John Bob's Seed Emporium. John Bob speakin'."
"And howdy to you, John Bob. Remember, I bought some oat seed from y'all a couple days ago?"
"Uh huh. Lots of guys have bought oat seed from me a couple days ago.
Which one would you be?"
"Cowboy-looking guy. You told me how to set my press drill."
Listen to John Bob's sigh. "Yeah. I remember you now."
Try not to take offense to John Bob's resigned tone of voice. Give him the
benefit of the doubt. Maybe its been a hard day. "Well John Bob, I seem to be having some difficulties. I think you gave me the wrong directions on how to set the press drill."
"Really? How d'ya figger that?"
"Well, I had a hundred acres that I needed to sow down, remember? At 3
bushels to the acre you told me, right? So that should mean it would have
taken 300 bushels of seed? I got that part down all right. I mean its not
rocket science. But I appear to have run out of seed, and I'm not quite
done."
Listen to John Bob's sigh. "Well Cowboy, thats kind of normal. Maybe
you've got a couple extra acres in that field, or maybe your press drill
sows just a little bit heavy. How much do y'figger is left to be seeded?
2, maybe 3 acres?"
"Well, I figger about 70 acres."
"HUH? 70 ACRES?"
"Yup. About that. I don't understand it. I did everything you told me to
do. Set those little levers in front to A2. Twirled that little gizmo on
the side, and drove the tractor slow, probably about 2.5 mph. Can't really
say for sure. The speedometer on my 930 sorta bounces between 1 mph and 7 mph."
Listen to John Bob's curse under his breath. "I didn't say a word about
driving the tractor slow. I said to put the press drill on slow speed."
"Oh."
Lesson #4 - More is not necessarily better.
Oats seeded at 3 bushel per acre will often yield 70 or 80 bushels of
nutrition per acre. Oats seeded at a rate of 10 bushels per acre will often
only yield a hair bit more than 10 bushels per acre. Its very strange.
Lesson #5 - Weeds are bad.
Take a survey of your best summer pasture. Chances are there are some weeds in there somewhere. Maybe quite a few. But as long as they aren't thistle, you're probably going to be just fine. Weeds have a great deal of nutritional content, generally taste pretty good to our lawn mowing cash machines, and they grow, well, like weeds.
Now take a survey of that oat crop. All the green stuff in the rows are
probably oats. All the green stuff in between the rows are likely weeds.
If there is more green between rows than there is in the rows, you're
probably in trouble. This is where your cowboy experience will come in
handy. You know what weeds look like. Heck you can probably identify every last one of the scurvy things because they are the same ones growing in the summer pasture.
The problem comes in getting rid of them. Don't call John Bob again. He
could probably use a break from you. Call your local neighborhood herbicide specialist. Tell him what you got, and then tell him to send someone out with a custom sprayer. Don't even bother trying to attempt to spray those weeds out yourself. No matter how exact you think you've got things set, no matter how careful you are not to miss anything, you'll always end up 10 gallons short and have a 4 foot wide strip of weeds right down the middle of your 100 acres of oats. Its a fact of life. Live with it.
There are hundreds more lessons that can be learned when sod-busting,
however the five that we've attempted to teach to you today are probably the most important of them all. Follow these, and you may even have a bushel or two of oats to feed this winter.
Rod
I hate seeding season. Precision farming? It takes on a whole new meaning around this place. This year, we're precisely sowing between 1 bushel/acre and 10 bushels/acre, at a speed precisely between 1 mph and 10 mph, with precisely 1 foot to 10 feet of overlap per round.
