Farm News 03-26-06

Sunday morning, after chores, 40°

Incubation Week One
Two days after I started incubating eggs Bebe goose decided it was time for her to start setting. Her nest is in plain view next to the rabbitry, so all the time I'm in the rabbitry she is honking her head off. The racket is incredible. Bebe is a reliable mother so I'll probably give her the goslings from the incubator to go with her own. When cold or tired, goslings generally will crawl under the nearest goose and be accepted. Even the ganders will help care for the little ones.

Training Lucy
Lucy the goat is looking quite pregnant. She is due at the end of April, I think, and I decided I should start training her to come into the barn to be milked. I'm not quite sure why, I don't need the milk, but I might decide to raise a calf or something and goat's milk is a universal substitute for mother's milk.

Just about any baby mammal will do well on goat's milk, but even more important is the colostrum. Colostrum is a thick, sticky, yellowish fluid that most female mammals produce for the first few days after giving birth. It is starter fluid for babies. Puppies from a difficult birth are sometimes too weak to nurse, but if you can get a teaspoon or so of goat colostrum down their throats they will often be strong enough to nurse a few hours later. I like to milk out enough colostrum to fill a couple of ice cube trays, then store it in the freezer. One cube can start several puppies, and two cubes can get a calf going.

Each evening during chores I take Lucy out of the pasture and lead her into the barn. By the third day she had that part down and was hopping up onto the milking stand, putting her head in the stanchion, and finding her grain. She is a nice, gentle, smart goat.

March Madness in Full Swing in the Barnyard
Sexual reproduction is enough to convince me that, if there was a designer, he sure wasn't very intelligent. Mammals are weird, plants are rococco, and birds create madness. Little birds sit around and sing, but big birds, like turkeys, are completely nuts. This nuttiness is frequently the subject of discussions on TurkChatter, a list serve for turkey fanciers, such as what follows.

I have noticed that now that mating is in full swing my toms are going a little...ahem...bare breasted. I think they are rubbing the feathers off during courtship. There is no irritation and it does not seem to bother them. The rest of their feathers are fine - with the exception of their tail feathers which have gotten really ratty but I can understand that having watched them mate.Is this normal?

Yes. They are drumming and their crops are puffed up, putting their breast feathers out there to get scrubbed off when they fight, etc. I think they look like scruffy men in old undershirts when they get that way. :) All they need is a beer can in one wing and the TV remote in the other.

That is the way Guy Noir, the tom turkey, is beginning to look, only he does have a beer can in one wing and a cute pink umbrella in the other. Guy tries to act like he's a refugee from New Orleans. Those girls listen to his line, look at each other, purse their lips, nod their heads, and say, “Hmmm, hummm.”

Yachting
Saturday I took the big plunge and purchased a yacht. At $100, I thought it was a terrific bargain. Also, it fits nicely in the back of the pickup truck so it is easy to move. It has two seats which rotate so you can face in either direction, and a place to attach an electric trolling motor. It is still in the back yard but I hope to carry it down to the pond soon and take an extended voyage.

Book Review
The Evolution of Cooperation by Robert Axelrod

This book was published in 1984 but, like all good science writing, it is still worthwhile. Axelrod very carefully and thoroughly examines the Prisoner's Dilemma. In the traditional form, the Prisoner's Dilemma involves two criminals being questioned by the police. If one prisoner confesses and incriminates the other he will receive a reduced sentence. If both confess there is less reduction, though. The problem is whether to confess or not.

Axelrod strips this problem down to it's most abstract essence and then analyzes it's characteristics. Given any two players, A and B, both can cooperate and remain silent, both can defect and confess, or only one cooperates and one defects. Through a brilliant analysis Axelrod shows that the Prisoner's Dilemma can be used to determine the optimal strategy for such situations as the relationship between two symbiotes, where the payoffs are completely different for the two players.

He then tested his conclusions by inviting people to create strategies for players in a computer environment and conducted tournaments to test the strategies. For the most part, the most successful strategy was a very simple one called TIT FOR TAT. Using this strategy a player always cooperates until the other player defects. Whenever the other player defects, the TIT FOR TAT strategy defects in the next round and then always repeats what the other player did in the previous round.

This isn't an easy book but it is certainly worthwhile. Following Axelrod's reasoning is like downhill skiing: fast and non-stop. He concludes with chapters on such things as optimizing the opportunities for cooperation, something that we all can find useful.

Farm News 03-19-06

Sunday morning, after chores, 40°



Setting Eggs


It's been a dry winter, a situation which often leads to severe grasshopper infestations the following summer. The best thing to do with surplus grasshoppers is to turn them into ducks. Young, growing ducks happily consume lots of grasshoppers. The best way to cook a grasshopper is to feed it to a duck and then fry the next duck egg.

Currently, there are seven ducks in the yard. A mother coon could reduce that number by one every day for a week quite easily, leaving the place without any grasshopper eaters. So, prudence dictates that we hatch some baby ducks to keep in reserve.

The Ancient Egyptians, those masters of the art of moving large rocks, were also very skilled in hatching eggs. They maintained large, underground incubators where they hatched thousands of eggs, and they only had a few thousand years of civilization at that time. If illiterate bronze age Nile Valley farmers could do it three thousand years ago, we should be able to do it. The trick is to be careful to avoid trying to learn too much from one year.

The geese are laying, generally at the rate of one egg every two or three days for each female, so I might as well set goose eggs when I set the duck eggs. Goslings can be very good fun, and there are few things in the world cuter than baby ducks. It's time to put a clutch of eggs in the incubator.

If you are doing this for a living, and you hatch over 10,000 eggs per week during the season, then it pays to follow good incubation practices. Big incubators have automatic egg turners (eggs hatch better if turned over several times daily), temperature and humidity controls, and other kinds of bells and whistles. Most big hatcheries have incubators and hatching boxes: a day or two before the eggs are due to hatch they are moved from incubator to hatching box; the reason being to maintain incubator sterility.

The Agricultural Extension Service instructions generally tell you to mark an 'X' on each egg with a pencil, so that each egg has an up and down. In the mornings you turn the 'X' up, and in the evening you turn it down. Now, I have known lots of mother ducks, and not a single one of them ever showed any sign of an ability to distinguish up from down. Mother ducks shuffle their eggs around several times a day, which is generally what I do.

There are four incubators out in the barn. The best is a classroom incubator that holds ten bantam eggs or four goose eggs. It has a wet bulb/dry bulb thermometer pair, adjustable temperature and humidity controls, egg turner, circulation fan, and a clear plastic cover. Because it is automatic and can be set to operate for a week or more unattended, it's ideal for loaning out to kids who want to hatch a few eggs.

If you would like to borrow the classroom incubator and hatch some chicks, then send me an email, jlware@ruralnet1.com. I'll loan you the incubator and load it with whatever kind of eggs you wish. After they hatch return the incubator and chicks, unless you want to start raising whatever hatches.

I prefer to put the eggs in a homemade box that has a thermostat, an electric oven heater coil, a 40 watt light bulb for extra heat, and a 1/2” hardware cloth raised floor for the eggs to rest on; it's my favorite incubator. I keep it in the same room with my computer and whenever I check my email I try to remember to roll the eggs around a bit. If at least half the eggs hatch, I'm happy.

If I want to incubate a lot of eggs, there are two hover type incubators. These are shaped like giant jar lids, about 2 ½' in diameter and 6” high. Each of those will hold 75 or more duck eggs. They don't have circulation fans, which folklore says is better for waterfowl eggs, and I have to turn the eggs by hand.

Duck and goose eggs like a high humidity while incubating. A flat pan of water seldom seems to be enough, but a 10” pan with a wad of paper towel sticking up out of it seems to be about right. The paper towel wicks the water up and exposes more surface from which the water can evaporate. If your water is as hard as mine you will want to change the towel twice a week. After ten days it will be fossilized.

The first two days of this incubation season were spent hunting for a thermometer. I like lab thermometers, glass instruments about 12” long filled with a red liquid. I bought two of them several years ago and both have been hiding somewhere. I can remember using one of them to check the soil temperature, but that might have been two or more years ago.

On Friday, 3/16, I put eight goose eggs and fourteen duck eggs in the incubator. Ducks take about 28 days and geese take about 30 days to hatch (it's about 21 days for chickens). This clutch should all hatch within a few days of Easter, an ideal time for hatching baby ducks.


A Reader from Lawrence Describes the Storm

We were awakened by a roaring at 8:10 Sunday morning as an impatient giant child went hurtling through the yard kicking chairs deep into rose bushes and knocking over our heavy iron couch while ignoring the fragile purple martin house between the two. Then it skipped around the house dragging its fingers over the West side of our red roof pulling off shingles and dealing them in a diamond flush to our neighbors while not harming a tiny pink petal on the blooming apricot on the East side. It didn't touch our fences but our next door neighbors lost theirs, had small trees uprooted and large trees topped. As a final act of capriciousness, the wind conceded the woodpeckers their dead tree across the street and pulled down the live tree next door to crush their new truck.

All in the time it took us to jump out of bed! We looked out the window to see the daddy of our little giant, or at least part of him.... A large pendulous roll of dark cloud hung down almost into our back yard. Our storm was a good ol' boy whose huge stomach spilled over his grey sky belt and the gust that ravaged our yard was only a little jingle of change in his pocket or one of his toddlers on a lark.

Farm News 03-12-06

Sunday morning, after chores and a thunderstorm, 42°

Pruning Fruit Trees
It's time, and past time, to prune fruit trees. Why can't my trees look like the ones in the books about how to prune fruit trees? Paula did the job this year I'm happy to report. She is more concerned with getting the job done than with doing a perfect job. The trees look no more ragged or chopped up than they did when I pruned them last year, so I guess her approach works just fine.

January and February are generally the months for pruning fruit trees. If they are being grown for flowers, not fruit, then prune them immediately after blooming, but fruit production calls for winter pruning. Dress warmly and arm yourself with hand clippers, lopping shears, and a small bow saw.

Remove all branches that rub against each other and branches that look like they would break easily. Remove all 'bull canes', branches that rapidly grow straight up through the tree and look like stakes or whips. Clip back straggling growth that makes the tree look off balance. When practical clip back to a bud that is pointed in the direction that you want the branch to grow. Try to keep the tree open so that a Robin could fly through it in any direction without striking a branch.

Bunnies Weaned

Saturday afternoon I weaned the brown spotted rabbit's bunnies, who are now six weeks old. I thought I had counted eleven, but there were only eight. They are all ready for new homes now. Any who don't find a new home will be give a place of honor in the freezer.

Later this week I'll breed their mother, again. Rabbits don't ovulate until they have mated. The mating act triggers the hormones that start ovulation. Also, rabbits tend to be 'use it or lose it' types: if they aren't bred for a while they sometimes become sterile. Female rabbits are designed to be bunny factories.

Watering

It is dry here. The daffodils and crocus are blooming, so I've started watering them. The hyacinths are showing color. The flowering crabs are leafing out already and the silver maples are finishing their bloom. It is very early in the year for all this.

This area is now in USDA growing zone 6. When we moved here it was in zone 5a, the northern side of 5; now it is deep into zone 6. Global warming is definitely a reality. Although it is warmer here in the spring and summer, the winter seems just as cold. We haven't had any big winter snows for a while, but that isn't unusual. I have a feeling the the main effect here of warming is that the weather will become more violent.

Armadillos are living south of the Kansas River. I wonder how they ever crossed the Arkansas. Somehow, I just can't picture an armadillo swimming, though I could be quite wrong.

Book Review

Thought Contagion, by Aaron Lynch
Not worth your time to read it. It's all speculation about memetics with no data to support anything.