I was informed this week that the Lineback steers that we are training can only be referred to as ‘oxen’ after they are five years old and fully trained. I also prefer not to call them just ‘steers’ since they have some training and are well beyond just the castrated Jerseys and Red Devons down at the beef herd or in the dairy barn. Their most appropriate name now, in the midst of their training and before their fifth birthdays, is ‘handy steers’. This seems to me to be a nice aspirational name for them, and while I don’t often see them being very handy here on the farm, they were out in the woods skidding small logs this weekend. We have struggled for many years, and through several teams, to raise and keep a successful pair of oxen on the farm, though I think that most farmers here share a belief that a reliable steady team could be a great part of our work and youth programming. Oxen really need regular work and attention, and their intact horns require that we feel fully confident that they are calm and slow moving around the kids. They seem to get more rambunctious and feisty when they are not on a consistent training and work schedule, and this makes them more difficult to work with and then less likely to be taken out for work. This negative cycle has been our undoing in the past, though hope spring eternal in this regard. Grace has been working with this team over the past few months, and they have put in quite a bit of time together this winter to develop regular work habits and good manners. I have not seen this team perform better than they are right now, and I am optimistic that they might be successfully woven into the work of the farm a bit this spring. We have long harbored dreams of using the handy-steers to pull grain and hay deliveries around the farm and to even try moving the egg-mobiles across the pastures too, in addition to what they could do in forestry.
We hosted fifth graders from the Athol public school on the farm Thursday and Friday of this week, and these big groups of excited youth certainly cranked the farm back up to full speed and volume as soon as they got off the bus. Over many years of working at TFS I have rarely seen kids more excited to be on the farm, and these local kids squeezed every drop of experience possible out of their hours with us. The farm is a muddy mess right now, but that seemed to only make the whole thing even more enjoyable. More than a few kids probably bummed their folks out a bit when they got home with clothing, boots and gloves a good deal wetter and muddier than they had been when they went off to school in the morning. I was really happy to get the dairy herd into the barn and to set up big groups of eager fifth graders, armed with curry combs and cow brushes, to give those ladies their first meaningful cleaning since the program ended in December. We moved a lot of hay around the farm, collected eggs, stacked fire-wood, processed root vegetables, and squeezed in a good deal of free-time with the pigs and the goats and on the swing.
The solar panel installation project at our beef herd’s winter barn wrapped up by the end of this week, and now we are just waiting for final approval to flip the switch and to start sending power into the grid. The beef barn, topped with the traditional gambrel roof of a classic New England dairy barn, is oriented east/west on its long axis. This gives it a big south-facing side of the roof, and that face is now mostly covered with nice new solar panels ready to capture free energy. The wiring work installed as part of the solar panel project revealed some issue with the existing wiring in that building, and our electrician had to come over at the end of the week to update equipment in the shop and the milk-house that houses the well. I think work will now begin on the dairy barn to get panels up on that roof, but that building has a north/south orientation so might end up with a different installation approach. The well at the dairy farm finally got a chlorine water purification system installed this week, so once the state signs off on the new setup, we can stop providing bottled water in the bunkhouse. We’ve been waiting a while for this update to our system, and while I’m really sorry to see the end of the delicious pure well water that we’ve been enjoying for years and years, it will be nice to have our well water supply a bit more secure.
The Farm School Manual 