Every watercourse carries both water and sediment.
Practical
My son, who has a Masters in Geology, says a professor told his class it is not worthwhile to try to influence movement of water by bank stabilization, dams, etc. This may be true in the sweep of geological time, but it is not true in the time span of our life. We can make improvements that earn enough more to pay for themselves and benefit us in just a few years. Some of the things you can do above ground (when allowed by law) follow.
The only practical way to preserve a bank where there is cutting on a high gradient intermittent stream is to place stones too big to be moved by the highest flow. We are fortunate to have rocks available on our farm, but it is a hassle to move them from the strip job to streams. I have carried them down when I return from feeding, taking weeks to complete a job, one rock a day.
The creek is, by law, owned by the State of West Virginia, as are all “navigable streams.” This is interpreted as any stream that is not intermittent (does not dry up). Navigable streams are nominally under control of the Army Corps of Engineers. This goes back in common law to a time before the U. S. was a country. The king owned the streams in England. When the American Revolutionary War occurred his ownership fell to the government of Virginia, and when West Virginia broke away, it got the stream ownership. You control the access to it only, but this allows you to keep trespassers out, including fishermen and gas companies who want to pump into their tank trucks or dump out of them.
Presently we have a stream bank erosion plan registered with the U. S. Corps of Engineers and the Soil Conservation folks. You cannot have a (formal, by law) stream crossing without their consent, but we are likely the only farm on Jesse Run (10+ square mile watershed) which does. Other businesses must have one, too, such as a gas company. Materials are not to be filled in or removed from a stream or wetland. Legal use of creek gravel is a thing of the past.
At one time Soil Conservation Service was into straightening streams in a big way, 50 and more years ago. The big stream across from our house had been straightened and put against the south wall of the valley not too long before we came to Jesse Run. John Kolb’s creek (the farm adjacent to ours) had the one big bend cut off, too. If you study the fields, you can find several courses water took in the past. The stream up by the coal road had been straightened, as has the one nearest our house.
There has been an effort to keep cattle from going into steams by conservation interests, because they degrade the banks, and muddy the water. Streams are a great place for cattle to get water, though. What they want you to do is to build watering troughs and fence cattle away from steams. That may be possible for main streams, but not feasible for intermittent streams such as the three that flow south through our property into Jesse Run.
These smaller streams will have a number of crossings. Check dams below the crossings will help to stabilize them, and you may have to maintain a few additional check dams made of rocks, to stabilize these streams. Keep one point along the top of check dams below he surroundings, and let the edges come up to or slightly above the steam bank. Slope the downstream side and/or allow impact of the stream at high flow to hit rocks so the check dam will not be undercut. Go for several small ones, rather than few large ones. Watch and maintain them – usually little is needed.
Where cattle run through heavily used lots you can use rocks in another way. Cattle don’t like to walk on rocks, so you can put large rocks along the streams to control where they walk. The lot where we keep heifers has a stream quite close and parallel to a fence. We place rocks about a foot or so in two dimensions between the fence and the steam to keep them from mashing in the bank between the stream and the fence.
Try using a few piles they won’t want to walk over (one rock thick) every fifteen feet or so perpendicular to the fence and the stream, just so they won’t walk along the fence. If this doesn’t stabilize the banks in some places, you may have to fill piles at shorter intervals.
Particular attention will have to be paid in some areas. We have a stream behind a concrete block well house in the middle hollow, because it is in a very high traffic area. Loss of the block building would ruin a very expensive watering system, which is quite important in a dry year. If it starts to wash, we will build up the watercourse with large rocks so the wall remains intact. The entire channel can be lined with rocks, which is called rip-rap, and you may have to do that in such a location.
If you build a culvert, stabilize the down stream side by using rock or some other method. You don’t need to stabilize the upstream side unless it is quite high. Water piles up against it in times of high water but has little effect. If water flows over the culvert, however, it washes out the fill on the lower side where it splashes over the steep slope, and can make the culvert impassable.
There is a sedimentation basin in one of our small streams near the creek. This is to catch the considerable amount of sediment that comes from the hill. It needs to be cleaned out and the sediment transported every second year or so. We should also have one in the other small south-flowing streams, but there would be some considerable expense in cleaning them and transporting the sediment to some appropriate place. Sedimentation basins should be fenced off to keep the cattle out of them.
Drainage of storm water in small areas is best accomplished by a grassed waterway. The idea is to maintain a broad shallow area that is well grassed over. The grass will contribute to removal of suspended matter, mostly clay and organic debris, from the drainage area above it.
However, if a continuous stream runs for days, several times a year, a channel will develop. This can further develop into a gully if not controlled. Trees along the stream are the easiest control measure. Usually you find them in place. Just don’t remove them. If it is necessary to establish them, Sycamores are a good choice. Willow is easy to establish, just make cuttings three feet long abut the size of your thumb and stick them in place several inches down where they can get plenty of water. I don’t like willows as well as sycamores because they are more difficult to control and the wood is never of any value. Sycamores can be cut and the roots will sprout up again.
Farm roads are a largely ignored area of erosion. Crushed rock is the only real answer. Sometimes you can pick up small rock in your fields, helping both the place where the rock comes from and the place you put it on the road. Water must not be allowed to flow down the road. It washes away the rock and makes gullies. The answer is breakers. Get a technician to help with this. The grade of the breaker and distance apart depend on the grade of the road, and what area drains into the road. The breakers should drain onto established grassland, preferably not too steep. Expect the sediment from the breaker to build up a hump where the breaker ends. Sometimes this becomes too large to allow proper drainage, over a period of decades. In this case the hump must be removed or a ditch maintained through it.
The lower side of a breaker requires special attention, especially if the road is used frequently. If you use the bulldozer to maintain it, and there is plenty of rock, you can push up a lower side of rock. If you don’t have the opportunity to do this put some rock in place, cover it with plenty of dirt and add more rock, building up until you have a pile of rock and dirt well mixed large enough so that it will be high enough to control the flow when it settles. The dirt is necessary to seal the water into the breaker and to keep the rock in place. The rock is necessary to prevent wheel tracks from draining water through the breaker.
The objectives always are (1) to slow the movement of water, (2) to hold the sediment in place, and (3) to prevent gullies and minimize loss of top soil and fertility.
You don’t have to speed up the runoff of water. It can find its own way down hill very well, thank you! When it does speed up, it takes solids with it, and you have erosion.
Descriptive
Streams of intermediate gradient, such as one sees away from the mountains, are a series of pools, each empting into the next. These pools are formed in relatively erodable material, clay or loam, with some smaller rock. The lower end of the pool is blocked by coarser material and the water flows rapidly down a shallow course over riffles into the next pool. This coarser material is sometimes brought into the main stream at the riffles by a smaller side stream with higher gradient (slope) and sometimes it is deposited by a change in direction of the stream. Bars and riffles are constantly changing shape, in large part due to rocks moving down stream. Rock size is an indicator of how fast the water flows over the riffle. Bigger rocks in a deposit mean faster water, because the smaller ones have washed on down stream.
In central West Virgnia all our small streams are high gradient for their size, and are inherently unstable. Over a period of geological time (a very long time) the stream has flowed everywhere between the valley walls – that movement defines where the valley is. Changes in the position of streams come very rapidly, and may seriously disrupt your fields, leaving places you cannot get to, or small irregular fields. In the mountains, where there is a high gradient and sufficient water supply, streams may have a rocky bottom even at normal rates of flow. The sediment in streams, and the deposits along streams may include larger, rounded rocks which have moved some distance. They become rounded by bumping into each other, generating smaller pieces. This rounding down process ends with sand. Sand particles are of such size that in water surface tension of the wetted surface acts as a bumper to form a limit beyond which the size of the particle can not be reduced by bumping. (Very fine grained sand is formed by wind in deserts). Smaller particles in streams are formed by chemical action only.
A basic principle is that in going from a higher level to a lower one, water must dissipate energy. The amount is directly proportional to mass of water moving and distance it drops vertically from one point to another along the stream. At normal flow this is little, but in flood stage it is immense. The stream dissipates this energy by extending its length. It does this by developing meanders (bends). It also dissipates energy by warming the water, but so little you can’t measure it. Loss of energy also happens when the water goes over a falls or riffles, and when it rubs on the banks and bottom or hits other obstructions.
For emphasis, let me repeat, a stream is not uniform in cross section, and does not have uniform grade from higher to lower levels. Considered in the vertical dimension, it is a series of pools, deep quiet spots with riffles between. These riffles are often locaterd where rocky sediment is washed into the main stream by side streams, but appear elsewhere, too. Also, looking down from above, the pools at high flow are not identical with the pools at low flow, riffles having less effect at high flow. Any cross section varies when the water becomes deeper with higher flow.
Changes in the course of streams come at high flow. Double the speed of the flow and the size of rocks that it can move increases by the fourth power (x = awE4 where x is the rate of flow of the steam in any convenient units, such as feet per second, w is the mass (or weight) of the rock and a is a constant relating the units of flow and mass). This relation between rate of flow and mass of the rock that can be moved is one of the highest power laws in nature. The rocks moving at the bottom of the stream abrade (sandpaper) the sides and bottom of the stream. The rocks are more dense than the water (rocks are typically 2.8 times as dense as water), and so are more affected by force of movement (inertia) than water.
Any place water gets up over the land at high water, deposition takes place. If the water is slow and shallow, deposition is slight, and the particles are fine. The presence of grass or tree growth helps deposit solids, because it slows the flow and catches debris. If the water is a foot or two deep, deposition can take place rapidly. I have noticed a lot of sand deposited in some places where it must have been suspended two feet above the low flow level. Notice the elevation of the banks of a stream. I take this to be the equilibrium condition between erosion by the stream propelled sediment on the bottom and the deposition by high water on the surrounding land. Much of the finest sediment, however, goes all the way to the ocean, where the salt water causes it to loose its ability to stay suspended. Deltas (like the Mississippi delta) form where salt causes the suspended small particles to fall out.
If you observe carefully at normal flow, you notice that the outside of a steam curve (the side the stream is thrown against, the cutting side) is vertical, and the other side is slanting from the field level down toward the outside. The outside is being cut away at high flow. Vegetation is an effective barrier to cutting, if it extends to and below the bottom of a steam. Trees are the most important controllable influence on movement of banks. Keep the banks relatively clean, let trees grow where you want the bank to hold, cut them out where you want the bank to be removed. The catch to this last is that the roots do the holding, and they last for years before they rot away, so you have to anticipate, and not let trees get big where you don’t want them. You have to watch the stream banks and cut trees when necessary. It’s an art, not a science. Due to the present environmental-political understanding, it’s best not to cut a lot at a time, especially big, conspicuous trees. The environmental-political group don’t care if the stream changes course and ruins you bottom!
Saturday, December 20, 2008
Movement of water below ground
Every watercourse carries both water and sediment.
Most people understand the flow of water underground poorly. The common idea is that water flows in “streams.” When you dig shallow ditches you do observe water flow (if the weather has been sufficiently wet) through crab holes and the like. This is not the major mechanism of movement of water under ground, however.
Imagine a bank of sand along a stream. Water can flow through it moving in the pores between sand grains. These are tiny holes left because the sand grains are irregular in shape. If each was shaped like a brick or a child’s toy block, all the space could be filled in and very little flow permitted. The irregular shapes between sand grains do not completely fill the space, so water is permitted to flow. This is the way water flows down into soil and in some kinds of rock.
Most of the underground water in Central West Virginia (and elsewhere) resides in sandstone (as does the oil and gas). Geologists can measure the porosity of rocks which gives some indication of the space available and the speed liquids can flow through them. Soil is also porous, although not as much as some sandstone. Some rocks are not porous, such as coal and soapstone.
When it rains, water that doesn’t run off seeps down into the soil through pores, some spaces between soil particles, some through earthworm holes, some through spaces caused by plants. It sinks down to some impervious layer, perhaps clay, and there moves laterally (sidewise) through the soil. The process is slow, but it operates through the entire surface. In some places water accumulates due to presence of clay in the soil, and must be drained. Drains must be buried at about 2% grade with no low spots to drain properly. If the work to place drains is not carefully done, the sediment carried by water in drains accumulates in low spots and blocks the drains. Proper design allows for high water in the stream where the outlet is located. The outlet should be far enough above stream level so that there is plenty of time the stream is below the bottom of the outlet. Otherwise the sediment accumulates in the drain. The outlet should be a foot or so above stream level at normal flow. More is better. Anticipate changes in stream level as a result of the processes described in the article “Movement of water above ground.”
An aquifer is a strata of rock which has enough porosity to hold water and allow it to flow into a well bore rapidly enough to be useful. Most aquifers in Central West Virginia are sandstones. To the East there are limestone strata that have enough cracks to allow water to flow in useful amounts.
Water can be pumped readily from the borehole. But the volume of water in the borehole will allow pumping only a brief time. If more than a few gallon is needed, water must be resupplied from the porous rock aquifer. The combination of thickness of the aquifer and porosity determines how rapidly the well will be supplied.
The well may be drilled through a succession of porous and non-porous strata (layers), each aquifer contributing to the production of the well. Aquifers are sometimes held up by some impervious strata, like coal. These are said to be said to be “perched” on the impervious strata. Rarely, drilling through the impervious layer allows the aquifer to drain into an empty porous layer, draining the aquifer.
Some aquifers lie between impervious strata and are replenished from rain percolating down from the soil at some distance from the well at a higher elevation. Drilling into these produces an artesian well. Generally speaking, a well must be in an aquifer thick enough and porous enough to contain a supply of water that will allow the pump to run for several minutes, preferably longer. Often there are several aquifers in an area, in which case the driller should not stop at the first one. The moral of the story is not to stop drilling at the first trickle of water to save yourself money. In some areas, like ours on Jesse Run, go too deep and you get salt water, however. If you have a gas storage field in your area you can expect some of the gas to work its way up through pores toward the surface, away from the pressurized layers to flavor the water. In one of the wells on our farm, gas accumulates above the water, is ignited occasionally by a spark that blows the aluminum well cap off. We know this is the reason, because of the black carbon deposit where the gas-rich mixture explodes.
Aquifers may be thought of as having a lens shape. Not round looking down from above (if you could see through the earth) like a glass lens, nor with a smooth top and bottom, but pinching off in thickness from top to bottom as you move away from the thickest part. When you drill the water well, there is no way to tell where the lens shape of the aquifer is, or how thick it is, in order to best locate the well. The oil and gas people have a way to do this (they only kinda know) looking for their much more valuable target, but such methods are too expensive for water wells. Details of what they do need not concern us here.
The position of the “lens” is unknown and it's shape It can not be found by technology in drilling for small water wells. It bares no relation to surface features with one exception. Very shallow wells may be resupplied by steams in the vicinity. Even when the surface is dry, water continues to follow the unconsolidated material (soil and small gravel) below the surface along streams. If you are a farmer looking to drill a well for a dry time, or a homeowner who doesn’t want to run out of water ever, drilling a well on a hill is a poor choice. The strata tend to drain out in a dry time through the side of the hill into the valley. If you have to drill on a hill, go deep enough to get your water supply below steam level, a few tens of feet.
When you draw water out of the well, the first thing that happens is the water in the bore hole drops. This allows more water from the area of pores around the well to flow toward the hole, refilling it. Then water from further out flows in the newly empty pores, and further out pores resupply those pores. Think about this: When you pump water out of a barrel the water level of the whole barrel goes down, because there is no resistance to the flow of the water. When you pump water out of a hole in a porous strata there is resistance, and so slow flow. The further away from the well the more resistance to flow. Instead of the surface coming down uniformly, like in the barrel, the water nearest the well in the strata comes down most, and further away less. This forms a “cone of depression” in the surface of the water around the well, in the aquifer. If the well is resupplied from above, it is not a good idea to have a shallow well near your septic system, although many people get away with it. The problem is not so much bacteria, but chemicals with molecules nearly as small as water molecules from detergents, cleaners, medicines, etc. that go down the drain. If the water is deep, there is less likelihood of surface water contaminating the resupply.
“Water witching” is an activity that goes back to the time of witches. Although many people “believe” in it, no one has ever been able to prove objectively, that it has any better likelihood of success than pure chance. Drill your well where it is convenient. You are just as likely to hit a lens big enough to meet your needs for a farm or home if you go down until your well is sufficiently deep.
Springs in Central West Virginia (and elsewhere) are most frequently found in the side of a hill or not far from a hill or raised area. They are simply an outlet from an aquifer that can drain, in other words, is above the stream in the valley, and not contained by low porosity rock.. Occasionally they are the result of an artesian aquifer, but not often. If you drill a well in the aquifer above a spring it is likely to reduce the water in the spring.
Fracturing a gas or oil well or blasting by a strip mine or construction job can destroy a well or spring, by making a fracture that lets the aquifer drain below the level of the spring or bottom of the well. If gas or oil well or blasting by a strip mine happens in your neighborhood, it is a good idea to have the production of your well or spring verified in such a way that it can be used in court. In fact it is the law for strip mines to do this. But do it before the work takes place. Afterwards is too late. Consult your friendly lawyer. The company can be expected to fight your claim tooth and nail.
Most people understand the flow of water underground poorly. The common idea is that water flows in “streams.” When you dig shallow ditches you do observe water flow (if the weather has been sufficiently wet) through crab holes and the like. This is not the major mechanism of movement of water under ground, however.
Imagine a bank of sand along a stream. Water can flow through it moving in the pores between sand grains. These are tiny holes left because the sand grains are irregular in shape. If each was shaped like a brick or a child’s toy block, all the space could be filled in and very little flow permitted. The irregular shapes between sand grains do not completely fill the space, so water is permitted to flow. This is the way water flows down into soil and in some kinds of rock.
Most of the underground water in Central West Virginia (and elsewhere) resides in sandstone (as does the oil and gas). Geologists can measure the porosity of rocks which gives some indication of the space available and the speed liquids can flow through them. Soil is also porous, although not as much as some sandstone. Some rocks are not porous, such as coal and soapstone.
When it rains, water that doesn’t run off seeps down into the soil through pores, some spaces between soil particles, some through earthworm holes, some through spaces caused by plants. It sinks down to some impervious layer, perhaps clay, and there moves laterally (sidewise) through the soil. The process is slow, but it operates through the entire surface. In some places water accumulates due to presence of clay in the soil, and must be drained. Drains must be buried at about 2% grade with no low spots to drain properly. If the work to place drains is not carefully done, the sediment carried by water in drains accumulates in low spots and blocks the drains. Proper design allows for high water in the stream where the outlet is located. The outlet should be far enough above stream level so that there is plenty of time the stream is below the bottom of the outlet. Otherwise the sediment accumulates in the drain. The outlet should be a foot or so above stream level at normal flow. More is better. Anticipate changes in stream level as a result of the processes described in the article “Movement of water above ground.”
An aquifer is a strata of rock which has enough porosity to hold water and allow it to flow into a well bore rapidly enough to be useful. Most aquifers in Central West Virginia are sandstones. To the East there are limestone strata that have enough cracks to allow water to flow in useful amounts.
Water can be pumped readily from the borehole. But the volume of water in the borehole will allow pumping only a brief time. If more than a few gallon is needed, water must be resupplied from the porous rock aquifer. The combination of thickness of the aquifer and porosity determines how rapidly the well will be supplied.
The well may be drilled through a succession of porous and non-porous strata (layers), each aquifer contributing to the production of the well. Aquifers are sometimes held up by some impervious strata, like coal. These are said to be said to be “perched” on the impervious strata. Rarely, drilling through the impervious layer allows the aquifer to drain into an empty porous layer, draining the aquifer.
Some aquifers lie between impervious strata and are replenished from rain percolating down from the soil at some distance from the well at a higher elevation. Drilling into these produces an artesian well. Generally speaking, a well must be in an aquifer thick enough and porous enough to contain a supply of water that will allow the pump to run for several minutes, preferably longer. Often there are several aquifers in an area, in which case the driller should not stop at the first one. The moral of the story is not to stop drilling at the first trickle of water to save yourself money. In some areas, like ours on Jesse Run, go too deep and you get salt water, however. If you have a gas storage field in your area you can expect some of the gas to work its way up through pores toward the surface, away from the pressurized layers to flavor the water. In one of the wells on our farm, gas accumulates above the water, is ignited occasionally by a spark that blows the aluminum well cap off. We know this is the reason, because of the black carbon deposit where the gas-rich mixture explodes.
Aquifers may be thought of as having a lens shape. Not round looking down from above (if you could see through the earth) like a glass lens, nor with a smooth top and bottom, but pinching off in thickness from top to bottom as you move away from the thickest part. When you drill the water well, there is no way to tell where the lens shape of the aquifer is, or how thick it is, in order to best locate the well. The oil and gas people have a way to do this (they only kinda know) looking for their much more valuable target, but such methods are too expensive for water wells. Details of what they do need not concern us here.
The position of the “lens” is unknown and it's shape It can not be found by technology in drilling for small water wells. It bares no relation to surface features with one exception. Very shallow wells may be resupplied by steams in the vicinity. Even when the surface is dry, water continues to follow the unconsolidated material (soil and small gravel) below the surface along streams. If you are a farmer looking to drill a well for a dry time, or a homeowner who doesn’t want to run out of water ever, drilling a well on a hill is a poor choice. The strata tend to drain out in a dry time through the side of the hill into the valley. If you have to drill on a hill, go deep enough to get your water supply below steam level, a few tens of feet.
When you draw water out of the well, the first thing that happens is the water in the bore hole drops. This allows more water from the area of pores around the well to flow toward the hole, refilling it. Then water from further out flows in the newly empty pores, and further out pores resupply those pores. Think about this: When you pump water out of a barrel the water level of the whole barrel goes down, because there is no resistance to the flow of the water. When you pump water out of a hole in a porous strata there is resistance, and so slow flow. The further away from the well the more resistance to flow. Instead of the surface coming down uniformly, like in the barrel, the water nearest the well in the strata comes down most, and further away less. This forms a “cone of depression” in the surface of the water around the well, in the aquifer. If the well is resupplied from above, it is not a good idea to have a shallow well near your septic system, although many people get away with it. The problem is not so much bacteria, but chemicals with molecules nearly as small as water molecules from detergents, cleaners, medicines, etc. that go down the drain. If the water is deep, there is less likelihood of surface water contaminating the resupply.
“Water witching” is an activity that goes back to the time of witches. Although many people “believe” in it, no one has ever been able to prove objectively, that it has any better likelihood of success than pure chance. Drill your well where it is convenient. You are just as likely to hit a lens big enough to meet your needs for a farm or home if you go down until your well is sufficiently deep.
Springs in Central West Virginia (and elsewhere) are most frequently found in the side of a hill or not far from a hill or raised area. They are simply an outlet from an aquifer that can drain, in other words, is above the stream in the valley, and not contained by low porosity rock.. Occasionally they are the result of an artesian aquifer, but not often. If you drill a well in the aquifer above a spring it is likely to reduce the water in the spring.
Fracturing a gas or oil well or blasting by a strip mine or construction job can destroy a well or spring, by making a fracture that lets the aquifer drain below the level of the spring or bottom of the well. If gas or oil well or blasting by a strip mine happens in your neighborhood, it is a good idea to have the production of your well or spring verified in such a way that it can be used in court. In fact it is the law for strip mines to do this. But do it before the work takes place. Afterwards is too late. Consult your friendly lawyer. The company can be expected to fight your claim tooth and nail.
Thursday, November 27, 2008
A Little Science in Making Hay
Everyone knows you make hay when the sun shines. The reason depends on two scientific concepts you would learn in a good high school Physics course.
In making hay we dry the grass to a point where decomposition cannot occur, where the fungi and bacteria that cause decay can not multiply. In contrast, when making silage we prevent access to air, and need some moisture. This allows microorganisms to grow, producing alcohols and some organic acids which prevent further decay. It is well known that silage is very palatable to cattle, apparently the oxidation products first formed taste good to them. Humans also like some “partially spoiled” (really partially oxidized) foods: pickles, cheeses, alcoholic products, vinegar, yogurt, to name a few.
Likely there is some microbial action in most hay, you shouldn’t think of it as being 0% moisture. The objective is to keep the moisture content low enough so that it doesn’t progress to a stage where it is unpalatable to the animals. Frequently you can smell the action in hay after it is put up, for a week or two, but the hay is still quite acceptable to the animals.
Ideally, hay is put up as quickly as possible. You seek to avoid bleaching, which causes loss of the green color, an indicator of vitamin quality, so you want it to dry quickly. You also try to avoid getting it wet, because this will remove soluble compounds, among the most important being pentosans, five carbon sugars, which give it the characteristic odor of new mown (curing) hay. The sugars in a mammal’s body are almost entirely six carbon sugars, the most important of which is glucose, sometimes known as “blood sugar,” The cow’s metabolism changes five carbon sugars to six carbon sugars.
Ruminants (cattle, sheep, etc.) have a rich microbial flora in their rumen, a special stomach, which only ruminant animals have. The microbes are capable of digesting plant materials and converting them to compounds which the ruminant can readily absorb, and either use directly in its body or convert to compounds it can use. One kind of these is certain fatty acids which are absorbed directly from the rumen into the blood stream. Cattle can live on the fiber of grass alone, or on pure cellulose, if needed minerals and urea are also available. Cellulose is converted to glucose by the microorganisms.
There was a famous experiment several years ago in Sweden where a cow was fed shredded newspaper (almost pure cellulose), urea, the necessary minerals and water. She was able to survive and reproduce on that diet. But that was a well financed experiment, not something that is economically feasible. Well put up hay will contain protein, minerals and vitamins in addition to cellulose and the sugars which go a long way to make the hay palatable.
If hay is to be dried quickly it helps to have a warm day. Water evaporates more rapidly at higher temperatures. The vapor builds up near the source from which it evaporated, so a little wind helps by replacing the more nearly saturated air around the drying grass with lower moisture air. Turbulence carries it up away from the ground level.
The “dryer” the air, the more rapidly the water in the grass is removed. This brings us up to the first physics principle, relative humidity. A given volume of air is capable of containing only a certain mass (or weight) of water. If it contains all it can hold it is said to be saturated. If it has only half of what it can hold it is at 50% relative humidity. At 65% relative humidity air contains 65% as much water as it can hold. The lower the relative humidity, the more rapidly grass will dry. Hay makers in the West have an advantage over us in West Virginia, because of the dry air there!
Relative humidity varies widely from 100% to very low values. Water evaporates into the air over water and over vegetated land areas. The capacity of air to hold water is higher the greater the temperature. When air is cooled enough by contact with another, cooler, air mass it rains, because it is not able to hold all the moisture. If it cools just below its maximum capacity in any place, dew forms, if more cooling occurs, fog or clouds are formed.
Today I started to make hay when the relative humidity was 95%, but two things helped me, as the day wore on: the relative humidity dropped because it warmed up. The second thing was that it was a bright, clear day. The sun’s energy is about 446 watts per square meter (think square yard) at the top of the atmosphere. This is a little less than a 500 watt lamp. A lot of this gets through in summer, so the sold layer it hits first (the hay) is warmed considerably. This helps remove the water from the grass, into the air. The wind blows the water moisture away, and mixes it in the atmosphere. Presto! Dry hay! Tons of water gone from the hay field.
Now there is another principle we need to discuss here. It is the Latent Heat of Vaporization of water. You may recall that heat is measured in calories, and that one calorie is the amount of heat required to raise one gram of water one degree centigrade. In more modern courses this amount of heat is given as 4.184 joules, the measure of energy. (Heat is a form of energy.) In the physics class, it is explained that the heat energy is used (in large part) to increase the vibrational motion of the water molecules.
Now what is Latent Heat of Vaporization? It is the amount of heat required to break the molecules of water apart. It is 5.4 times the heat required to elevate the temperature of liquid water from freezing to boiling, some 2260 joules/gram. Latent Heat of Vaporization changes water from liquid to water vapor without increasing the temperature. This energy breaks the attractive forces between the molecules, and lets them evaporate to become a gas or vapor at the same temperature as the liquid water in the hay. A vast amount of energy from sunlight is used to dry hay. If it was not absorbed by vegetation through evaporating water the temperature would rise rapidly. If little sunlight is present hay will dry, but much slower, drawing the necessary energy from the surroundings, mostly by cooling the air.
The sun warms the hay at the surface of the ground, but the energy that goes to evaporating water cools the hay. You might say the two processes compete to change the temperature of the hay. When the hay begins to get dry, its temperature will rise, because water is not evaporating as rapidly, so the sun gets an edge.
As long as you keep water away from the dry hay, it will not decay further. Your cow will have a great assortment of compounds that were in the grass to flavor her dinner, and many compounds formed by the partial decay of the grass by the water you could not take out. She is a great gourmet and each day will savor the slight differences in hay from different parts of the field, including the effects of fertilizer on each part, different dryness conditions when it was put up, how broken the stems were, how many leaves were knocked off, weeds present, and a host of other factors. Put out two bales, one from a limed and fertilized field and one from a field without, both properly cured. See which disappears first.
In making hay we dry the grass to a point where decomposition cannot occur, where the fungi and bacteria that cause decay can not multiply. In contrast, when making silage we prevent access to air, and need some moisture. This allows microorganisms to grow, producing alcohols and some organic acids which prevent further decay. It is well known that silage is very palatable to cattle, apparently the oxidation products first formed taste good to them. Humans also like some “partially spoiled” (really partially oxidized) foods: pickles, cheeses, alcoholic products, vinegar, yogurt, to name a few.
Likely there is some microbial action in most hay, you shouldn’t think of it as being 0% moisture. The objective is to keep the moisture content low enough so that it doesn’t progress to a stage where it is unpalatable to the animals. Frequently you can smell the action in hay after it is put up, for a week or two, but the hay is still quite acceptable to the animals.
Ideally, hay is put up as quickly as possible. You seek to avoid bleaching, which causes loss of the green color, an indicator of vitamin quality, so you want it to dry quickly. You also try to avoid getting it wet, because this will remove soluble compounds, among the most important being pentosans, five carbon sugars, which give it the characteristic odor of new mown (curing) hay. The sugars in a mammal’s body are almost entirely six carbon sugars, the most important of which is glucose, sometimes known as “blood sugar,” The cow’s metabolism changes five carbon sugars to six carbon sugars.
Ruminants (cattle, sheep, etc.) have a rich microbial flora in their rumen, a special stomach, which only ruminant animals have. The microbes are capable of digesting plant materials and converting them to compounds which the ruminant can readily absorb, and either use directly in its body or convert to compounds it can use. One kind of these is certain fatty acids which are absorbed directly from the rumen into the blood stream. Cattle can live on the fiber of grass alone, or on pure cellulose, if needed minerals and urea are also available. Cellulose is converted to glucose by the microorganisms.
There was a famous experiment several years ago in Sweden where a cow was fed shredded newspaper (almost pure cellulose), urea, the necessary minerals and water. She was able to survive and reproduce on that diet. But that was a well financed experiment, not something that is economically feasible. Well put up hay will contain protein, minerals and vitamins in addition to cellulose and the sugars which go a long way to make the hay palatable.
If hay is to be dried quickly it helps to have a warm day. Water evaporates more rapidly at higher temperatures. The vapor builds up near the source from which it evaporated, so a little wind helps by replacing the more nearly saturated air around the drying grass with lower moisture air. Turbulence carries it up away from the ground level.
The “dryer” the air, the more rapidly the water in the grass is removed. This brings us up to the first physics principle, relative humidity. A given volume of air is capable of containing only a certain mass (or weight) of water. If it contains all it can hold it is said to be saturated. If it has only half of what it can hold it is at 50% relative humidity. At 65% relative humidity air contains 65% as much water as it can hold. The lower the relative humidity, the more rapidly grass will dry. Hay makers in the West have an advantage over us in West Virginia, because of the dry air there!
Relative humidity varies widely from 100% to very low values. Water evaporates into the air over water and over vegetated land areas. The capacity of air to hold water is higher the greater the temperature. When air is cooled enough by contact with another, cooler, air mass it rains, because it is not able to hold all the moisture. If it cools just below its maximum capacity in any place, dew forms, if more cooling occurs, fog or clouds are formed.
Today I started to make hay when the relative humidity was 95%, but two things helped me, as the day wore on: the relative humidity dropped because it warmed up. The second thing was that it was a bright, clear day. The sun’s energy is about 446 watts per square meter (think square yard) at the top of the atmosphere. This is a little less than a 500 watt lamp. A lot of this gets through in summer, so the sold layer it hits first (the hay) is warmed considerably. This helps remove the water from the grass, into the air. The wind blows the water moisture away, and mixes it in the atmosphere. Presto! Dry hay! Tons of water gone from the hay field.
Now there is another principle we need to discuss here. It is the Latent Heat of Vaporization of water. You may recall that heat is measured in calories, and that one calorie is the amount of heat required to raise one gram of water one degree centigrade. In more modern courses this amount of heat is given as 4.184 joules, the measure of energy. (Heat is a form of energy.) In the physics class, it is explained that the heat energy is used (in large part) to increase the vibrational motion of the water molecules.
Now what is Latent Heat of Vaporization? It is the amount of heat required to break the molecules of water apart. It is 5.4 times the heat required to elevate the temperature of liquid water from freezing to boiling, some 2260 joules/gram. Latent Heat of Vaporization changes water from liquid to water vapor without increasing the temperature. This energy breaks the attractive forces between the molecules, and lets them evaporate to become a gas or vapor at the same temperature as the liquid water in the hay. A vast amount of energy from sunlight is used to dry hay. If it was not absorbed by vegetation through evaporating water the temperature would rise rapidly. If little sunlight is present hay will dry, but much slower, drawing the necessary energy from the surroundings, mostly by cooling the air.
The sun warms the hay at the surface of the ground, but the energy that goes to evaporating water cools the hay. You might say the two processes compete to change the temperature of the hay. When the hay begins to get dry, its temperature will rise, because water is not evaporating as rapidly, so the sun gets an edge.
As long as you keep water away from the dry hay, it will not decay further. Your cow will have a great assortment of compounds that were in the grass to flavor her dinner, and many compounds formed by the partial decay of the grass by the water you could not take out. She is a great gourmet and each day will savor the slight differences in hay from different parts of the field, including the effects of fertilizer on each part, different dryness conditions when it was put up, how broken the stems were, how many leaves were knocked off, weeds present, and a host of other factors. Put out two bales, one from a limed and fertilized field and one from a field without, both properly cured. See which disappears first.
The sensory world of cattle
Cattle have little color sensitivity , like all mammals except the primates, which is the order we humans most closely resemble. It has recently been discovered cattle have some ability to distinguish shades of blue and green. They are sensitive to light and dark in their visual field, somewhat like seeing a black and white photo with just a little color sensitivity to blue and green. They have the ability to see things all 360 degrees around themselves without turning their head, and a cow or steer which is blind in one eye can see a little in front and somewhat more behind without turning its head. They really miss seeing the blind side, and it makes them “spookey,” and hard to handle unless they follow other cattle. Cattle have no idea that you can not see behind yourself.
They have little depth perception, the ability to estimate distance by the difference in images in the two eyes, like we do. Instead they use visual clues, primarily size of recognized objects and objects passing in front of or behind other objects of known distance. Size changes as something moves closer or away in the visual image also give cattle clues to distance.
They see much better than we do when it is twilight or dark, because they have a special reflective layer in the back of their eyes, called the tapetum. This is why car lights shining on them in the dark sometimes make their eyes look like reflectors. Remember, after dark they can see a lot better than you can! If you try to handle them after it begins to get dark a flashlight blinds them, so try to get along with your own night vision.
Their eyes focus well on the grass at the end of their nose and objects over twenty five or thirty feet away, but not as well in between. But they do well enough to aim a butt or kick at a person!
Cattle are exquisitely sensitive to motion, particularly quick changes. They can see you move through gaps in board fences, and if they are inside a roofed area and you are against the light it may excite them. Young ones especially seem not to notice the fence keeps you out, as well as them in.
Bovines are actually quite uncoordinated, compared to a person. They may get their head caught between two trees and never think to move their head up to get out. They can’t place their feet to step on high places or rocks, or to avoid them, especially the back feet. Some animals do well at this, but not cattle. In a cattle chute they kick and flail around without much idea of where their feet are going. You have to protect them from places where feet and lower legs might be caught or injured. They get caught in wire from fences and flail without an effective plan to get out, just instinct.
Cattle have keen hearing, you will usually not be able to sneak up on them, even if you are out of sight, because they hear so well. They are responsive to loud noises both up close and far away, and to very slight noises when the sound is unusual. Their sense of smell is excellent, far better than yours, and their sense of taste can be presumed to be excellent, at least in the area of food materials, since they depend on picking out the best food in the pasture, day by day, bite by bite, for their welfare. Observation shows they can doubtless taste the effects of the lime and fertilizer you use, also the effect of manure and urine dropped on the pasture in the last several months, avoiding it at first and later relishing the effect it has on the grass. This delay no doubt helps avoid parasitic worm larva until the larva die.
They prefer to eat leaf tips of grass, in contrast to the lower parts left after the first bite. At least part of the reason strip grazing works is that hungry animals eat the whole plant, rather than moving on to another especially succulent bite on the top of another tuft of grass, stepping on several plants between.
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Cattle are more active physically and sexually at dawn and dusk. They like to rest in the middle of the day, and sleep about 4 hours at night, in a series of naps. It’s best not to disturb them after they have gotten settled for the night, though. They get excited and are difficult to control if you do.
Cattle are most comfortable at 30 to 50 degrees. They have difficulty getting rid of heat when it is hot, since they do not sweat. They loose heat through breathing, like dogs do, but are not able to pant effectively. A person in good physical condition used to sweating can stand physical activity above 80 or 85 much better than cattle can. One athletic man or a small group of men in good shape can just about run a bunch of cows to death at high temperature.
Tests in California showed that keeping dairy cows heads air conditioned was quite effective in reducing body temperature. Cattle need shade in hot weather, as well as plenty of water to evaporate as they breathe, as evaporation is the basis of getting rid of heat generated by metabolism.
Mother cows do not recognize their new calf by sight, but rather by smell. This knowledge is important if you want to give a cow a calf other than her own (because her calf has died, for example). Some will take the calf, and some won’t. Getting the smell of the cow’s own calf on the new calf helps. Confine them together until the cow allows the calf to nurse. A time or two feeding will usually “bond” them.
The Group Behavior of cattle
A cow keeps track of her new calf by “keeping an eye on it” for several days. If this connection is broken not long after the calf is born (moving the herd to another field, or to the barn) the cow will have a much harder time getting connected with the right calf. If the calf is wild it will run away from its dam. The cow remembers where she was separated from the calf, and will try to go back to that spot. The several days old calf will try to return to the spot where they were separated too, but not a very young calf. Heifers especially will abandon a calf if they are separated from it. You don’t want to separate them, even for a short time right after the calf is born. Eventually the pair seems able to identify the each other visually, perhaps by the way each acts as much as shape. Perhaps also by voice when they call.
Cattle watch each other. The herd generally spreads all over the area available to them in a field. They are in contact by their calls and by watching movement of other animals. They sometimes call others to something that can be eaten, but more often they do not, as though they want to enjoy it by themselves as long as possible. Soon other cows, even out of sight, notice that part of the field is vacant, or other cows are drifting away in a certain direction, and follow them. If cows are huddled together something is wrong, perhaps a predator is in the field. This may be called the drift principle – when they see another animal moving, they tend to move the same way.
The bull is attracted to a cow in heat (ready to breed) by smell. The cow produces a chemical called a pheromone, which the bull smells, not with his regular smelling organ, but with a special smell organ called the vomeronasal organ. He will wrinkle his nose in a characteristic way when using this organ. He may insert his nose in the cows urine as she urinates when she is in heat. The pheromone - vomeronasal organ combination is quite powerful, and a cow in heat may be detected a mile or more away if the wind is right. The bull advertises his presence by a particular “trumpeting” sound, which is easy for the cow (and you) to recognize, a sound which carries great distances.
You can learn several of the characteristic sounds cattle make. In addition to the trumpeting call just mentioned, some of the most familiar are: 1. A cow calling her calf, which changes with her degree of distress. 2. A calf calling its mother. They sometimes appear to be too lazy to walk to each other at meal time (especially when the calf gets older, they seem to call one to the other “Come to me!). 3. A calf that is frightened and calls for help. The cows will come from all directions when they hear this distress call, look out for yourself. 4. A call that is effectively “Report in, I want to know where you out of sight bovines are.” 5. The characteristic sounds cows and bulls make when they warn you not to come too close (this is in the field, they don’t do it as much when confined, they use “body language” in a pen). 6. Infrequently, a sound indicating pain. They seldom make a sound at normal birth. 7. The challenge of one bull to another.
Cattle remember where they have gone. They find their way back by retracing their path. They remember places, but can not be hurried too much. Their analytical ability for the “floor plan” of the area around them is terrible. You observe they can not find their way to feed instantly if they have to walk around a fence to a gate even a short distance away. Sometimes it seems they are just being obstinate, but I am convinced they do not understand these situations. In nature there are few barriers of this sort. They eventually find their way by milling about in a random way, and following the animal which is moving. This is much more effective when they are not under stress. They will also follow you if they think it will lead to food. This is often more effective than to try to drive them.
The desire to be with other animals is very strong. This herd instinct makes it much easier to move them. In contrast, pigs scatter and are almost impossible to drive. If a bovine animal doesn’t stay with the herd, it may be sick or injured, or getting ready to have a calf. Staying away from the herd habitually often goes with an aggressive nature, including toward people.
The herd has a “pecking order,” one animal can boss all the others. This may not be very conspicuous to a casual observer, but it’s there. A second animal will be able to boss all but the top animal. A third all but the top two, and so on down to the bottom animal, which is bossed by all. Much of the pushing and fighting you observe between animals is an attempt to change this order, or to maintain it. Top animals are not threatened by lower animals, so they will not fight unless the lower animal becomes “uppity.” You may not know the order, but the animals do. It’s particularly conspicuous when you have several bulls together. Be careful about trying to separate bulls for their own protection. They are quite serious and very likely to challenge you under these circumstances.
Avoidance circle and handling animals
Every bovine animal has an area around itself, roughly circular in shape, which makes the animal uncomfortable if you enter. The term for this is the avoidance circle. The animal will try to move away from someone who intrudes into this area regardless of whether it is a man, dog or predator.
This circle is not always the same size. The more excited the animal, the larger the circle. The further the intrusion into the circle, the greater the effort by the animal to get away. So the closer you get to the animal, the less control you have over its direction. In other words, if you want maximum control to encourage the animal or group of animals to move in a certain direction, approach from the opposite direction, moving slowly, speaking in a quiet voice, or waving your arm. Get it to move before it is frightened. In the field, it is quite foolish to frighten the animals and encourage them to run. Obviously, cattle can run much faster than you can.
If an individual or group of bovines is going the way you want, follow quietly at a speed that will not alarm it. Yell only when it is doing the wrong thing, such as turning the wrong way. If it is running into a fence you can yell even from the side or somewhat behind to call attention the fence. Although cattle can run faster than you, thier comfortable walk may be somewhat slower than a vigorous walk by a man or boy.
When threatened, a group of animals move closer together. They become excited as a group, with some animals more excited than others. At low levels of excitement an older animal, a dominant cow, will move out first. This is your best option for moving the herd, because the old cow will not run and she is the natural leader. If she is familiar with the field, having made the trip several times before, she will know the way you want her to go. And she will please you or displease you as she sees fit, but she will be relatively easy to handle. If the group becomes more excited, the leader will be a young cow or heifer, or worse yet, a large calf. The younger the animal the more likely it is to try to break away from the herd, and this usually leads the whole herd the wrong way.
The people herding cattle form a line behind the animals and keep in line, close enough together to prevent an animal from trying to run between them. If you look down from above the herders should be like beads on a string, but somewhat separated. No one should be much ahead or behind this line, which may move more at one end than the other, stretching out into corners, dividing to go around obstructions like steep valleys and ponds. Cattle will let you come only so close before moving, and they have greater impulse to move if you crowd close to them. Animals that are not used to seeing several people in the field are much more likely to get excited.
The shape of the area where you want to move them, and the features of the field, such as slopes and valleys are very important. Gates should not be in the middle of the side of a field where you must drive animals. If they are, you have to have one group drive the animals to the gate, and another to prevent them from going past the gate. A better location for a gate is near the corner. The best arrangement to drive them into the handling pen is to start into a V broad at the end away from the chute, narrowing down to the handling pens. The fence may be made stronger as you approach the handling pens.
We had a lot of trouble in one of our fields with the cattle running up hill and circling around the field when we wanted them to go into a corner. We set up a temporary fence using polywire and fiberglass posts to funnel them into the corner, and it worked quite well.
Cattle weigh as much as a man, even at a few months of age. A strong man can manhandle them unless they are very aggressive up to about 300 pounds. Beyond that your strength is no match for theirs and they have four wheel drive. They are not likely to gang up on you, with several attacking at once, that has been breed out of them, but one may. Over 300 pounds you have nothing but psychology of one sort or another to handle them. You can inflict pain, you can frighten them even more, but your options are limited. Well thought out and built handling facilities are the best assistance to handling them. It is necessary to perform some operations that hurt the animal, at least as much as having an ear pierced or getting a shot, so they must be forced. They learn what is coming. Very simple facilities can be used for a small number of animals, or portable chutes used by a group of cattle owners.
Individual cattle vary considerably in their temperament. Temperament is hereditary, and can constitute a very serious problem. The attempts to quantify it have not been very successful, but it is a trait easily recognized by persons handling cattle. The attempts to quantify it have involved “time out of chute” (how quick they leave the chute) measurements and subjective judgments, known as “agitation scores,” but none has proved satisfactory for general use.
Wild cattle are “loosers.” Trials have shown they take a month or more to adjust when weaning, loosing weight when they should be gaining. They drift a lot when shipped, they have a disproportionate number of “dark cutters,” and they pass these traits on to their offspring. The Limousine breed established an EPD (expected progeny difference) for “docility” in the 1990’s, because it had such serious problems previously. The only way to handle these wild cattle is to ship them, as soon as possible, preferably as calves. They can seriously injure or kill someone and no animal is worth that.
As published in the WEST VIRGINIA CATTLEMAN
They have little depth perception, the ability to estimate distance by the difference in images in the two eyes, like we do. Instead they use visual clues, primarily size of recognized objects and objects passing in front of or behind other objects of known distance. Size changes as something moves closer or away in the visual image also give cattle clues to distance.
They see much better than we do when it is twilight or dark, because they have a special reflective layer in the back of their eyes, called the tapetum. This is why car lights shining on them in the dark sometimes make their eyes look like reflectors. Remember, after dark they can see a lot better than you can! If you try to handle them after it begins to get dark a flashlight blinds them, so try to get along with your own night vision.
Their eyes focus well on the grass at the end of their nose and objects over twenty five or thirty feet away, but not as well in between. But they do well enough to aim a butt or kick at a person!
Cattle are exquisitely sensitive to motion, particularly quick changes. They can see you move through gaps in board fences, and if they are inside a roofed area and you are against the light it may excite them. Young ones especially seem not to notice the fence keeps you out, as well as them in.
Bovines are actually quite uncoordinated, compared to a person. They may get their head caught between two trees and never think to move their head up to get out. They can’t place their feet to step on high places or rocks, or to avoid them, especially the back feet. Some animals do well at this, but not cattle. In a cattle chute they kick and flail around without much idea of where their feet are going. You have to protect them from places where feet and lower legs might be caught or injured. They get caught in wire from fences and flail without an effective plan to get out, just instinct.
Cattle have keen hearing, you will usually not be able to sneak up on them, even if you are out of sight, because they hear so well. They are responsive to loud noises both up close and far away, and to very slight noises when the sound is unusual. Their sense of smell is excellent, far better than yours, and their sense of taste can be presumed to be excellent, at least in the area of food materials, since they depend on picking out the best food in the pasture, day by day, bite by bite, for their welfare. Observation shows they can doubtless taste the effects of the lime and fertilizer you use, also the effect of manure and urine dropped on the pasture in the last several months, avoiding it at first and later relishing the effect it has on the grass. This delay no doubt helps avoid parasitic worm larva until the larva die.
They prefer to eat leaf tips of grass, in contrast to the lower parts left after the first bite. At least part of the reason strip grazing works is that hungry animals eat the whole plant, rather than moving on to another especially succulent bite on the top of another tuft of grass, stepping on several plants between.
.
Cattle are more active physically and sexually at dawn and dusk. They like to rest in the middle of the day, and sleep about 4 hours at night, in a series of naps. It’s best not to disturb them after they have gotten settled for the night, though. They get excited and are difficult to control if you do.
Cattle are most comfortable at 30 to 50 degrees. They have difficulty getting rid of heat when it is hot, since they do not sweat. They loose heat through breathing, like dogs do, but are not able to pant effectively. A person in good physical condition used to sweating can stand physical activity above 80 or 85 much better than cattle can. One athletic man or a small group of men in good shape can just about run a bunch of cows to death at high temperature.
Tests in California showed that keeping dairy cows heads air conditioned was quite effective in reducing body temperature. Cattle need shade in hot weather, as well as plenty of water to evaporate as they breathe, as evaporation is the basis of getting rid of heat generated by metabolism.
Mother cows do not recognize their new calf by sight, but rather by smell. This knowledge is important if you want to give a cow a calf other than her own (because her calf has died, for example). Some will take the calf, and some won’t. Getting the smell of the cow’s own calf on the new calf helps. Confine them together until the cow allows the calf to nurse. A time or two feeding will usually “bond” them.
The Group Behavior of cattle
A cow keeps track of her new calf by “keeping an eye on it” for several days. If this connection is broken not long after the calf is born (moving the herd to another field, or to the barn) the cow will have a much harder time getting connected with the right calf. If the calf is wild it will run away from its dam. The cow remembers where she was separated from the calf, and will try to go back to that spot. The several days old calf will try to return to the spot where they were separated too, but not a very young calf. Heifers especially will abandon a calf if they are separated from it. You don’t want to separate them, even for a short time right after the calf is born. Eventually the pair seems able to identify the each other visually, perhaps by the way each acts as much as shape. Perhaps also by voice when they call.
Cattle watch each other. The herd generally spreads all over the area available to them in a field. They are in contact by their calls and by watching movement of other animals. They sometimes call others to something that can be eaten, but more often they do not, as though they want to enjoy it by themselves as long as possible. Soon other cows, even out of sight, notice that part of the field is vacant, or other cows are drifting away in a certain direction, and follow them. If cows are huddled together something is wrong, perhaps a predator is in the field. This may be called the drift principle – when they see another animal moving, they tend to move the same way.
The bull is attracted to a cow in heat (ready to breed) by smell. The cow produces a chemical called a pheromone, which the bull smells, not with his regular smelling organ, but with a special smell organ called the vomeronasal organ. He will wrinkle his nose in a characteristic way when using this organ. He may insert his nose in the cows urine as she urinates when she is in heat. The pheromone - vomeronasal organ combination is quite powerful, and a cow in heat may be detected a mile or more away if the wind is right. The bull advertises his presence by a particular “trumpeting” sound, which is easy for the cow (and you) to recognize, a sound which carries great distances.
You can learn several of the characteristic sounds cattle make. In addition to the trumpeting call just mentioned, some of the most familiar are: 1. A cow calling her calf, which changes with her degree of distress. 2. A calf calling its mother. They sometimes appear to be too lazy to walk to each other at meal time (especially when the calf gets older, they seem to call one to the other “Come to me!). 3. A calf that is frightened and calls for help. The cows will come from all directions when they hear this distress call, look out for yourself. 4. A call that is effectively “Report in, I want to know where you out of sight bovines are.” 5. The characteristic sounds cows and bulls make when they warn you not to come too close (this is in the field, they don’t do it as much when confined, they use “body language” in a pen). 6. Infrequently, a sound indicating pain. They seldom make a sound at normal birth. 7. The challenge of one bull to another.
Cattle remember where they have gone. They find their way back by retracing their path. They remember places, but can not be hurried too much. Their analytical ability for the “floor plan” of the area around them is terrible. You observe they can not find their way to feed instantly if they have to walk around a fence to a gate even a short distance away. Sometimes it seems they are just being obstinate, but I am convinced they do not understand these situations. In nature there are few barriers of this sort. They eventually find their way by milling about in a random way, and following the animal which is moving. This is much more effective when they are not under stress. They will also follow you if they think it will lead to food. This is often more effective than to try to drive them.
The desire to be with other animals is very strong. This herd instinct makes it much easier to move them. In contrast, pigs scatter and are almost impossible to drive. If a bovine animal doesn’t stay with the herd, it may be sick or injured, or getting ready to have a calf. Staying away from the herd habitually often goes with an aggressive nature, including toward people.
The herd has a “pecking order,” one animal can boss all the others. This may not be very conspicuous to a casual observer, but it’s there. A second animal will be able to boss all but the top animal. A third all but the top two, and so on down to the bottom animal, which is bossed by all. Much of the pushing and fighting you observe between animals is an attempt to change this order, or to maintain it. Top animals are not threatened by lower animals, so they will not fight unless the lower animal becomes “uppity.” You may not know the order, but the animals do. It’s particularly conspicuous when you have several bulls together. Be careful about trying to separate bulls for their own protection. They are quite serious and very likely to challenge you under these circumstances.
Avoidance circle and handling animals
Every bovine animal has an area around itself, roughly circular in shape, which makes the animal uncomfortable if you enter. The term for this is the avoidance circle. The animal will try to move away from someone who intrudes into this area regardless of whether it is a man, dog or predator.
This circle is not always the same size. The more excited the animal, the larger the circle. The further the intrusion into the circle, the greater the effort by the animal to get away. So the closer you get to the animal, the less control you have over its direction. In other words, if you want maximum control to encourage the animal or group of animals to move in a certain direction, approach from the opposite direction, moving slowly, speaking in a quiet voice, or waving your arm. Get it to move before it is frightened. In the field, it is quite foolish to frighten the animals and encourage them to run. Obviously, cattle can run much faster than you can.
If an individual or group of bovines is going the way you want, follow quietly at a speed that will not alarm it. Yell only when it is doing the wrong thing, such as turning the wrong way. If it is running into a fence you can yell even from the side or somewhat behind to call attention the fence. Although cattle can run faster than you, thier comfortable walk may be somewhat slower than a vigorous walk by a man or boy.
When threatened, a group of animals move closer together. They become excited as a group, with some animals more excited than others. At low levels of excitement an older animal, a dominant cow, will move out first. This is your best option for moving the herd, because the old cow will not run and she is the natural leader. If she is familiar with the field, having made the trip several times before, she will know the way you want her to go. And she will please you or displease you as she sees fit, but she will be relatively easy to handle. If the group becomes more excited, the leader will be a young cow or heifer, or worse yet, a large calf. The younger the animal the more likely it is to try to break away from the herd, and this usually leads the whole herd the wrong way.
The people herding cattle form a line behind the animals and keep in line, close enough together to prevent an animal from trying to run between them. If you look down from above the herders should be like beads on a string, but somewhat separated. No one should be much ahead or behind this line, which may move more at one end than the other, stretching out into corners, dividing to go around obstructions like steep valleys and ponds. Cattle will let you come only so close before moving, and they have greater impulse to move if you crowd close to them. Animals that are not used to seeing several people in the field are much more likely to get excited.
The shape of the area where you want to move them, and the features of the field, such as slopes and valleys are very important. Gates should not be in the middle of the side of a field where you must drive animals. If they are, you have to have one group drive the animals to the gate, and another to prevent them from going past the gate. A better location for a gate is near the corner. The best arrangement to drive them into the handling pen is to start into a V broad at the end away from the chute, narrowing down to the handling pens. The fence may be made stronger as you approach the handling pens.
We had a lot of trouble in one of our fields with the cattle running up hill and circling around the field when we wanted them to go into a corner. We set up a temporary fence using polywire and fiberglass posts to funnel them into the corner, and it worked quite well.
Cattle weigh as much as a man, even at a few months of age. A strong man can manhandle them unless they are very aggressive up to about 300 pounds. Beyond that your strength is no match for theirs and they have four wheel drive. They are not likely to gang up on you, with several attacking at once, that has been breed out of them, but one may. Over 300 pounds you have nothing but psychology of one sort or another to handle them. You can inflict pain, you can frighten them even more, but your options are limited. Well thought out and built handling facilities are the best assistance to handling them. It is necessary to perform some operations that hurt the animal, at least as much as having an ear pierced or getting a shot, so they must be forced. They learn what is coming. Very simple facilities can be used for a small number of animals, or portable chutes used by a group of cattle owners.
Individual cattle vary considerably in their temperament. Temperament is hereditary, and can constitute a very serious problem. The attempts to quantify it have not been very successful, but it is a trait easily recognized by persons handling cattle. The attempts to quantify it have involved “time out of chute” (how quick they leave the chute) measurements and subjective judgments, known as “agitation scores,” but none has proved satisfactory for general use.
Wild cattle are “loosers.” Trials have shown they take a month or more to adjust when weaning, loosing weight when they should be gaining. They drift a lot when shipped, they have a disproportionate number of “dark cutters,” and they pass these traits on to their offspring. The Limousine breed established an EPD (expected progeny difference) for “docility” in the 1990’s, because it had such serious problems previously. The only way to handle these wild cattle is to ship them, as soon as possible, preferably as calves. They can seriously injure or kill someone and no animal is worth that.
As published in the WEST VIRGINIA CATTLEMAN
Saturday, August 23, 2008
The value of land
There are many things to consider when you think abut the value of land. The most direct value is the sale price, but unfortunately you must sell it to test the value that way. And you may not get as much as you can, even then. I will discuss sale and sale forced by government, which is called condemnation, at the end of this article. Selling is the final benefit of ownership.
The second value of land is its value in producing income. This is ascertained by its rental value and using a multiplier. Even what multiplier to use is subjective. Bankers have a formula that gives the value of a series of deposits or payments, but this is usually for a specified period of time.
Land may be more value to you in producing income than renting. However, if you must have the knowledge and the wealth to put improvements, such as fences, barns, signs, a house, machinery and livestock with it to develop it for a farm. Or you may choose to do other kinds of development. You must also have a lot of initiative and time to do any development, though. Most people lack one or the other.
Timber is another way raw land can produce income. However, it requires some management, too.
A third value of land is as a home. Most people in this day who own a tract have a house on it. Your most important need is for food for your family. When that is met, your family needs a place to relax, sleep and be comfortable. When you use a tract as a home, you become attached to it beyond its value as property. Other people identify you with it, and judge you to some extent by its value and how you keep it. If you own a tract that is home, it will likely be yours for years and it gains a value to you that is beyond what it would have to someone who might buy it.
Speculation on the increase in value of land is another common use. In my lifetime this has been a one-way street, always increasing in dollars, but that is not the case over some time intervals, and may not be true in your lifetime. Another very important factor to be considered is the decrease in value of the dollar. Inflation makes land seem more valuable because the price is denominated in dollars. You want to make time comparisons of price in real money, taking into account depreciation of the dollar through inflation. This is may be done by finding the price at the beginning of the time using the CPI, the Consumer Price Index, published by the United States Government Bureau of Labor. Subtract this from the price at the end of the time period. The difference is the gain in “real money.” The dollar has fallen to one third its value in the last 25 years or so. (This is written in 2005). (See note below.) Short term speculation is safer, and the longer the term, the greater the risk both of greater gain and of loss. If you have other uses for the land you buy, you just have to ride the waves of change in prices. Speculation is probably not justified unless you have special knowledge the land you invest in will change use in a few years or less. Of course you can make a change of use that will increase the value.
Land may also have mineral production value. Under the laws of West Virginia this can be severed, that is, ownership of one or more minerals and the right to produce them its separated from the remainder. This residue is often referred to as the surface, and it is the part that is of most interest to the small owner. The surface estate is less valuable as a result of loosing the right to produce the minerals because it will entail a right of way and drilling sites for the oil and gas producer. At one time, when gas was abundant, the producer granted free gas which went to a house on the farm, but this is being lost as succeeding generations come between the surface owner and the mineral owner.
Water leaving the farm can be expected to be valuable in a few years as more of the earth’s surface is polluted, especially where the water on the land comes from a spring or well. Coal is slow now, but will have value other than for fuel far in the future. It is great starting material for organic chemicals. Other minerals are valuable in some places, and may be expected to provide value where they are discovered.
The development rights, that is, the right to build housing or commercial buildings, can be sold and the farming rights retained. The idea of this is to preserve the land as farmland. The purchaser would be a local government agency or some nonprofit group dedicated to farmland preservation. Check this option out carefully if you decide to take it. It is a one-way street, just as is the sale of mineral rights, but it has its advantages for some families.
Land has recreational value for the family and has potential to attract other people. Hunting, mushrooms and other wild plant gathering, firewood from non-timber trees (selling firewood is not practical since it involves so much time and labor), poles for construction, camping (a very large topic, study it carefully before starting it) and other possibilities are available.
Land can be used to secure a loan, but try to avoid using it that way. The value of the land may be much more than the loan it is used to secure, so be careful. Default on the loan and you loose control of what happens to the land.
Land can be used to set up your own non-farm business, if you have a satisfactory location. This may be related to agriculture or not. Having the land is a significant start. The farm can be a source of materials such as rock, timber and dirt for a business. It can be a site for a business that must be hidden from public view, such as a junkyard or that must be located away from the public for safety. A spot on our farm was once considered for an explosives storage facility.
Market price and condemnation
Of all the ways to value land, the most important to understand is market price. This is the legal basis for value, and is defined as the price paid by a willing buyer to a willing seller. It is determined by a host of factors for a particular piece of land.
The expected use for the land is one. Forest, farming, housing, commercial development for such uses as highway, factories, stores and so on are some possibilities. In this list, if land is suitable for the use later in the list, it would be expected to sell for more than land restricted to an earlier use. This use is referred to as the highest and best use of the land. Location is another factor. If the land is accessible to town or to a major highway, it is more valuable. Obviously the market price is ascertained by selling. How is it established in absence of sale, or in case of a forced sale?
There is an appraisal industry devoted to ascertaining the market value of pieces of land and developments. It is not the same as the real estate industry, which is devoted to locating buyers for property sellers. Real estate often involves a salesmanship factor theoretically not recognized in appraisal. The appraiser chooses three or more similar properties that have sold recently in the same area called comparables and arrives at a fair market value based on the characteristics of the tract he is estimating and the characteristics of the comparables.
The testimony of a professional appraiser is required for condemnation of land for public use and many other legal uses. Note, however, that current use is the basis of condemnation, not the intended future use. If you find yourself in a situation where an appraiser is needed, it would pay you to see a few samples of an appraiser’s work to see how it is done. A word of caution, however. The in-house appraiser, the appraiser who is employed repeatedly by a utility, such as the gas company, or by a government agency, such as the Corps of Engineers, habitually shaves the estimate for his/her employer. (They know which side of their bread is buttered.)
If you face condemnation you might be justified in hiring your own appraiser to put up against the condemning agency. I did a study of condemnation at the Burnsville Dam (a Corps of Engineers taking) and almost everyone who fought the Corps got more for their property if they took it to court. Consider the cost to yourself, though. It is a gamble to not accept the agency offer, but a well advised decision might pay off. It depends on the jury and luck.
If you own land, you are a professional land manager, whether you like it or not.
Note: As this is published in 2008 the dollar is going down like a rock. The CPI calculation has been changed several times in recent years. According to Liz Saunders of Charles Schwab & company, writing in June of 2008, "Over the past 30 years, major changes have been made to the calculation of the CPI due to "re-selection and reclassification of areas, items and outlets, [and] to the development of new systems for data collection and processing," according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. If you eliminate those adjustments and calculate CPI as it would have been calculated in 1980, it would be nearly 12 percent today.” So a simple calculation using the CPI is not really accurate, after all. This further proves my point: value of land is a very subjective matter.
The second value of land is its value in producing income. This is ascertained by its rental value and using a multiplier. Even what multiplier to use is subjective. Bankers have a formula that gives the value of a series of deposits or payments, but this is usually for a specified period of time.
Land may be more value to you in producing income than renting. However, if you must have the knowledge and the wealth to put improvements, such as fences, barns, signs, a house, machinery and livestock with it to develop it for a farm. Or you may choose to do other kinds of development. You must also have a lot of initiative and time to do any development, though. Most people lack one or the other.
Timber is another way raw land can produce income. However, it requires some management, too.
A third value of land is as a home. Most people in this day who own a tract have a house on it. Your most important need is for food for your family. When that is met, your family needs a place to relax, sleep and be comfortable. When you use a tract as a home, you become attached to it beyond its value as property. Other people identify you with it, and judge you to some extent by its value and how you keep it. If you own a tract that is home, it will likely be yours for years and it gains a value to you that is beyond what it would have to someone who might buy it.
Speculation on the increase in value of land is another common use. In my lifetime this has been a one-way street, always increasing in dollars, but that is not the case over some time intervals, and may not be true in your lifetime. Another very important factor to be considered is the decrease in value of the dollar. Inflation makes land seem more valuable because the price is denominated in dollars. You want to make time comparisons of price in real money, taking into account depreciation of the dollar through inflation. This is may be done by finding the price at the beginning of the time using the CPI, the Consumer Price Index, published by the United States Government Bureau of Labor. Subtract this from the price at the end of the time period. The difference is the gain in “real money.” The dollar has fallen to one third its value in the last 25 years or so. (This is written in 2005). (See note below.) Short term speculation is safer, and the longer the term, the greater the risk both of greater gain and of loss. If you have other uses for the land you buy, you just have to ride the waves of change in prices. Speculation is probably not justified unless you have special knowledge the land you invest in will change use in a few years or less. Of course you can make a change of use that will increase the value.
Land may also have mineral production value. Under the laws of West Virginia this can be severed, that is, ownership of one or more minerals and the right to produce them its separated from the remainder. This residue is often referred to as the surface, and it is the part that is of most interest to the small owner. The surface estate is less valuable as a result of loosing the right to produce the minerals because it will entail a right of way and drilling sites for the oil and gas producer. At one time, when gas was abundant, the producer granted free gas which went to a house on the farm, but this is being lost as succeeding generations come between the surface owner and the mineral owner.
Water leaving the farm can be expected to be valuable in a few years as more of the earth’s surface is polluted, especially where the water on the land comes from a spring or well. Coal is slow now, but will have value other than for fuel far in the future. It is great starting material for organic chemicals. Other minerals are valuable in some places, and may be expected to provide value where they are discovered.
The development rights, that is, the right to build housing or commercial buildings, can be sold and the farming rights retained. The idea of this is to preserve the land as farmland. The purchaser would be a local government agency or some nonprofit group dedicated to farmland preservation. Check this option out carefully if you decide to take it. It is a one-way street, just as is the sale of mineral rights, but it has its advantages for some families.
Land has recreational value for the family and has potential to attract other people. Hunting, mushrooms and other wild plant gathering, firewood from non-timber trees (selling firewood is not practical since it involves so much time and labor), poles for construction, camping (a very large topic, study it carefully before starting it) and other possibilities are available.
Land can be used to secure a loan, but try to avoid using it that way. The value of the land may be much more than the loan it is used to secure, so be careful. Default on the loan and you loose control of what happens to the land.
Land can be used to set up your own non-farm business, if you have a satisfactory location. This may be related to agriculture or not. Having the land is a significant start. The farm can be a source of materials such as rock, timber and dirt for a business. It can be a site for a business that must be hidden from public view, such as a junkyard or that must be located away from the public for safety. A spot on our farm was once considered for an explosives storage facility.
Market price and condemnation
Of all the ways to value land, the most important to understand is market price. This is the legal basis for value, and is defined as the price paid by a willing buyer to a willing seller. It is determined by a host of factors for a particular piece of land.
The expected use for the land is one. Forest, farming, housing, commercial development for such uses as highway, factories, stores and so on are some possibilities. In this list, if land is suitable for the use later in the list, it would be expected to sell for more than land restricted to an earlier use. This use is referred to as the highest and best use of the land. Location is another factor. If the land is accessible to town or to a major highway, it is more valuable. Obviously the market price is ascertained by selling. How is it established in absence of sale, or in case of a forced sale?
There is an appraisal industry devoted to ascertaining the market value of pieces of land and developments. It is not the same as the real estate industry, which is devoted to locating buyers for property sellers. Real estate often involves a salesmanship factor theoretically not recognized in appraisal. The appraiser chooses three or more similar properties that have sold recently in the same area called comparables and arrives at a fair market value based on the characteristics of the tract he is estimating and the characteristics of the comparables.
The testimony of a professional appraiser is required for condemnation of land for public use and many other legal uses. Note, however, that current use is the basis of condemnation, not the intended future use. If you find yourself in a situation where an appraiser is needed, it would pay you to see a few samples of an appraiser’s work to see how it is done. A word of caution, however. The in-house appraiser, the appraiser who is employed repeatedly by a utility, such as the gas company, or by a government agency, such as the Corps of Engineers, habitually shaves the estimate for his/her employer. (They know which side of their bread is buttered.)
If you face condemnation you might be justified in hiring your own appraiser to put up against the condemning agency. I did a study of condemnation at the Burnsville Dam (a Corps of Engineers taking) and almost everyone who fought the Corps got more for their property if they took it to court. Consider the cost to yourself, though. It is a gamble to not accept the agency offer, but a well advised decision might pay off. It depends on the jury and luck.
If you own land, you are a professional land manager, whether you like it or not.
Note: As this is published in 2008 the dollar is going down like a rock. The CPI calculation has been changed several times in recent years. According to Liz Saunders of Charles Schwab & company, writing in June of 2008, "Over the past 30 years, major changes have been made to the calculation of the CPI due to "re-selection and reclassification of areas, items and outlets, [and] to the development of new systems for data collection and processing," according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. If you eliminate those adjustments and calculate CPI as it would have been calculated in 1980, it would be nearly 12 percent today.” So a simple calculation using the CPI is not really accurate, after all. This further proves my point: value of land is a very subjective matter.
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