Dealing with natural resource extractors
You have multiple use of your land whether you want it or not. The state claims ultimate domain, but aside from that there are a host of others who have an interest in your land and how you farm it. Hunters, people who would like to gather woodland products, such as firewood and edible plants, people concerned with the quality of the water which leaves your land (since they catch some of it for use down stream), people who need right of way, such as electricity, water, and telephone companies, and those interested in extracting natural resources, such as coal, timber, gas and oil.
People in the last group require very careful attention, because they have the capacity to provide considerable income, and also to do considerable damage. The product they remove has great value, they use large machinery, frequently requiring them to borrow a lot of money, which means they are always in a hurry-up mode. They employ people who receive good wages for skilled work, so they have large expenses, too. They are invariably in it for the money, and you have to negotiate details of what they do on your land. Both you and the businessman want to get as much for yourself as possible out of the difference between what he gets for the material extracted and his expense.
The extractor usually has a much larger business than your farm, He deals with land owners frequently, with the resulting advantages in knowledge of applicable law and business practice. Oil and gas drillers, for example, associate with other oil and gas drillers and with lawyers who practice oil and gas law. And they take out leases frequently, so they are familiar with what land owners will try to get. You can usually deal with them on such matters as where a new right of way will go, location and type of fences to be built, size of culverts, and other things related to your farming operation. Large corporations will have specialists in dealing with various personality types among land owners. If one can’t connect with you, they will send another, perhaps tougher, agent.
Companies offer a standard payment, which may be a fraction of the value of the product removed, such as one-eighth royalty, or a price for some unit of measurement, such as a ton of coal. Getting a higher price than the standard is difficult. You may be offered less, so you have to find out what the standard is. In cases where the product is going to produce greater value for the extractor, such as low sulfur coal or thin cover over coal, you may be able to extract a premium, but you really have to study thoroughly, know what you are doing and negotiate well.
With timber it may pay to hire a registered forester. He can “mark” trees to be removed, sparing small trees to regenerate the timber. He can “walk” the tract and make measurements to get a very accurate estimate of the timber will to be removed by cutting the marked trees. He can arrange bids for the sale and oversee the cutting operation to see that the laws are followed on your land. This will cost about 8 or 9% of the sale price, but many think it is worth it, not to have to deal with the timberman, especially on large tracts or high value timber. I sell small amounts of good timber and some low grade timber myself from time to time.
Since you make a sale of this sort infrequently, think, think, think about what is going to happen. Once the contract is written, it is written in stone. Errors and omissions can seldom be corrected. You need to think about where roads will be bulldozed, where spoil will be deposited, where piles of trees will go from well platforms (and what their sale value is, because you are entitled to that, even if the value is too small to market). You need to think about where and what kind of fence you will need during and after extraction. Where will check dams be needed, and where will the rock come from? Is there a spring that needs to be protected? Try to visualize what will happen. Go to sites the extractor has worked on previously. Ask the landowners there what they learned.
You must read the contract very carefully – you are the one ultimately responsible for your interests. Think about what each paragraph does for the lessee. Does he need the thing it gives him? Does it give more than he needs? For example, does the lease specify the geologic formation that is his target? It should not surprise you that the lessee will frequently use wording which gives him formations beyond his immediate objective. An example of this is a coal lease which is sought for a seam near the surface, but which allows the lessee to take ownership or extraction rights for all coal, no matter how deep. In general, minerals become more valuable as time passes, so your heirs can loose out big time. Another hazard is paragraphs concerning liability. You should not put yourself in a position where you become liable for negligence or mistakes of the lessee. The lease should expressly say the lessee assumes responsibility for his accidents. What about damage to your business, such as cows being killed by drinking water from the process, or being killed by the operation? Read it all. Read it several times. With your mind “in gear.”
A lawyer can be of some help, especially if he/she has experience with the industry on large dollar items. A lawyer would be familiar with technical terms, and if familiar with the industry, that is, with common practice in the industry. Remember, though: 1. the lawyer is in it to make money, too, and 2. if he is in the mineral extractive industry it is most profitable for him to mind his interests with the industry. This is not to say a lawyer will routinely try to get you to sign a lease that is not good for you, but he can’t be expected to alienate a segment of his potential clientele. Lawyers are most dangerous in connection with major utilities, and in situations where you have a serious adversarial position with the mineral extractor. If you are trying to sue a utility, you need a lawyer with serious ethical commitment.
You are a land owner, but that is a kind of business, and ultimately you will have to live under the conditions of the contract. Don’t expect someone else to carry your responsibility for you.
When the extractive process is going on, try to remain business like and in contact with the person in charge of the operation. Appearing interested in the process will do more at less expense than any other tactic you can employ. If there is a problem, discuss it, but don’t expect to get expensive changes. Don’t expect to “get tough” – the extractor will doubtless have dealt with many trying that before you. Make notes and take pictures of the action, before and after pictures, and pictures of problems that arise. This is a record, and it is proof of how things were at a certain time.
Dealing is knowledge-based work. You may have to hire help in the form of a lawyer, but remember he is your employee. His function is to give you advice in his area of expertise, not to run your business. Ask for alternatives. Ask "What will happen if I do so and so?" Try to be creative – think of things that others are not thinking about. You are the one to get the profit or loss. Your mineral royalty is much more important to you than it will be to the lessee or the lawyer.
Don’t ever threaten anyone. That is guaranteed to take you downhill in a hurry, with no return. Do what you have to do tactfully, but don’t loose your self-respect and your contact with the other party.
Sunday, February 22, 2009
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
On renting, buying and partnering a farm
Renting or buying a farm is a big deal, one of the most important decisions that a renter or a landowner will make. This article concerns some thoughts on the business aspect of renting and buying. You want a written document that will guide each party in what the other expects, and will secure to each what he has to have to make an economic deal. Both should remember that the other has to have certain things to profit from the exchange, to make it worthwhile.
First, a note on using a lawyer. A lawyer is like an architect, in fact more so, in that you have to tell him what you need (or want). The lawyer knows very little about the farming business. He doesn’t do farming, he has never seen the farm and he doesn’t know the people involved. The farmer is the expert on what has to be done, it’s his life, and he has the responsibility. Don’t depend on a lawyer who doesn’t have training or experience in writing the specialized kind of contract you need. You must take the initiative. Lawyers who know farming are “rare as hen’s teeth” in West Vrginia
Any lawyer can help you avoid falling afoul of the law in adversarial situations, but that is about all. Lawyers all think farming is so simple - there is nothing to writing a farm lease or other document. But they will invariably follow a house or business model for the contract, not a farm model. You need to think about everything you need and be sure it gets in. And like everything else in life, you may still get surprises. Don’t be passive.
Renting is not going to involve big money. The best interest of both parties, renter and landowner, is to keep the place up and avoid adversarial relations with the neighbors. The property that is to be rented must be clearly stated and what the renter can do with it described, and someone designated to be the lessor contact person if a group owns the farm. It should say when the money is due and how much, and the length of time the farm lease is to last (such as ten years, or ten years and as long thereafter as both parties agree).
At this point the lessor’s interest and lessee’s interest diverge. The lessor’s interests include: determination of who will be responsible for damage – if cattle get out, farm assets are damaged, etc. What is the lessee allowed to do? Does it include cutting timber, hunting, fishing, digging mushrooms, ginseng, sassafras and the like? Camping? If brush hogging is required, it should be written in. Likewise fence repair, any required rebuilding of fence, maintenance of roads, etc. that the lessor expects.
The lessee’s interests include: can the lessor drive through the fields at any time? Can the lessor make any use of the facilities? Who is responsible for upkeep? If the lessee must leave, is the cut and stored hay his? Does he have to clean out the barn/s before leaving?
Both parties should have a clear understanding of reasons and procedure to remove a farm tenant. Where housing is not involved, it can be rather simple. If the renter plans to live on the rented farm there is a lot of additional law that becomes applicable because of that. If you keep an eye on the property and notice and act on problems early enough, it helps a lot. Especially if a rented house is involved.
Some things beyond the contract should be ascertained by the lessee before signing. Are there continuing complaints from any neighbor, such as straying animals, odors from farming, excessive dust from a neighbor’s road, a history of children or dogs in the neighborhood intruding, complaints about manure in the waterways and so on? If so, it would be best to look elsewhere. If you have any suspicion, talk around the neighborhood. Don’t rely on the lessor to act against his own interest, even if that would be the moral thing to do! Observe, observe, observe and think, think, think!
The most important part of buying a farm is when. Land varies immensely in price over the decades. In 1962 any farm sold for $20,000, regardless of how large the farm and how fine the house was. Today that wouldn’t buy ten remote acres with a tent on it! Part of the difference is the decline in value of the dollar. It has lost (2008) 18% of its value since 2000, according to the Official United States Inflation Calculator. Part of the low price of land in 1962 was at that there were tremendous farm surpluses. This depressed what you could make from a farm, and consequently what the farm was worth. The population was lower, and industry was booming, too. The lucky ones of us coming of age at that time had the chance of a lifetime. However, $20,000 in 1962 represented as much “real money” (purchasing power) as $140,678 as this is written in 2008 (determined by the Consumer Price Indicator calculator).
The present may or may not be a good time to buy a farm. The currency is very unstable, but the demand for food is rising. Grain looks good, but other countries can produce cattle, which can be imported, so demand for meat is difficult to predict. Land is notoriously high now. Maybe if you have a good income elsewhere and want to invest it, or money to invest, or adjacent land is available, it might be a good risk. At best it won’t disappear completely like so many paper assets (stocks and bonds) did in the “Great Depression” of the thirties. There has been a saying around Central West Virginia for the last two decades or so, “If you want to go into farming, get a car dealership first.” The ordinary farmer should consider renting land, if possible, until he has the assets to operate the new land and put up a hefty down payment.
The second most important part is where. If you already own, and adjacent land comes up for sale and it can be farmed, this might be your chance. Adjacent land is much more valuable. Take it from someoneone who has farmed two tracts 12 miles apart. Adjacent land will reduce fence by the common border, will eliminate the need for travel and transportation of equipment and farm products.
You must have a very good farm on the other end to overcome the cost of much travel.
If you are buying a residence too, the thoughtful person will also be aware of the cost of too much distance from stores, utilities, school bus routes and also church, if so inclined. The quality of the land should be of obvious importance in buying a tract to be farmed.
If you are buying or selling to a family member or someone you trust, consider a “land contract.” When you buy something that will take a long time to pay for, the interest will be one third to one half as much as the principal. If the buyer doesn’t need all the money immediately, he can finance it for you. This arrangement cuts out the middleman who makes the loan, because the seller receives the interest. You should be able to negotiate a lower rate from the seller than a standard lending agency. You will need to talk to someone familiar with this practice and will want to work with a lawyer.
The written agreement between the four parties (including the two wives) when we purchased the our farm was written by a Harvard Law graduate, and was so inadequate one manager of Farm Credit was on the verge of denying us credit until we got something better. The agreement made no provision for the responsibility of the parties. My partner never did any work, and almost nothing to compensate. I made two or three trips to State College, PA, home of Penn State, to get something this Farm Credit manager was happy with. (They have expertise in doing work for serious farmers at Penn State.) I told the Penn State lawyer straight out what the situation was. He dallied and I dallied and finally the manager moved elsewhere and the whole thing fell through. I don’t know if my partner would ever have agreed to it. A partnership contract is difficult, of course, because duties would have to be defined if written properly. There’s nothing worse than a non-performing partner. I know, I’ve been there. Make a dime, share a nickel, loose a dime, make it back by yourself!
A partnership agreement should include the following, at least: What the duties of each person would be, how decisions will be made, what the labor, money, machine, land, etc., input from each partner will be, how earnings will be divided and when (monthly, annually), and how expansion will be handled, or reduction, and termination. Also, if there is housing involved, who will live in each dwelling, who will be responsible for upkeep and repairs additions and such.
There should be formal statement of how records will be kept, both of finances and farm operations. This could be considerable on farms keeping livestock. How will demands such as divorce and disability be handled? These do happen, and they can destroy all the partners.
It takes a certain amount of “guts” and diplomacy to do this. You have to be objective, though, to avoid hard feelings later on and to assure continuity. You must be objective, It’s better to be prepared.
First, a note on using a lawyer. A lawyer is like an architect, in fact more so, in that you have to tell him what you need (or want). The lawyer knows very little about the farming business. He doesn’t do farming, he has never seen the farm and he doesn’t know the people involved. The farmer is the expert on what has to be done, it’s his life, and he has the responsibility. Don’t depend on a lawyer who doesn’t have training or experience in writing the specialized kind of contract you need. You must take the initiative. Lawyers who know farming are “rare as hen’s teeth” in West Vrginia
Any lawyer can help you avoid falling afoul of the law in adversarial situations, but that is about all. Lawyers all think farming is so simple - there is nothing to writing a farm lease or other document. But they will invariably follow a house or business model for the contract, not a farm model. You need to think about everything you need and be sure it gets in. And like everything else in life, you may still get surprises. Don’t be passive.
Renting is not going to involve big money. The best interest of both parties, renter and landowner, is to keep the place up and avoid adversarial relations with the neighbors. The property that is to be rented must be clearly stated and what the renter can do with it described, and someone designated to be the lessor contact person if a group owns the farm. It should say when the money is due and how much, and the length of time the farm lease is to last (such as ten years, or ten years and as long thereafter as both parties agree).
At this point the lessor’s interest and lessee’s interest diverge. The lessor’s interests include: determination of who will be responsible for damage – if cattle get out, farm assets are damaged, etc. What is the lessee allowed to do? Does it include cutting timber, hunting, fishing, digging mushrooms, ginseng, sassafras and the like? Camping? If brush hogging is required, it should be written in. Likewise fence repair, any required rebuilding of fence, maintenance of roads, etc. that the lessor expects.
The lessee’s interests include: can the lessor drive through the fields at any time? Can the lessor make any use of the facilities? Who is responsible for upkeep? If the lessee must leave, is the cut and stored hay his? Does he have to clean out the barn/s before leaving?
Both parties should have a clear understanding of reasons and procedure to remove a farm tenant. Where housing is not involved, it can be rather simple. If the renter plans to live on the rented farm there is a lot of additional law that becomes applicable because of that. If you keep an eye on the property and notice and act on problems early enough, it helps a lot. Especially if a rented house is involved.
Some things beyond the contract should be ascertained by the lessee before signing. Are there continuing complaints from any neighbor, such as straying animals, odors from farming, excessive dust from a neighbor’s road, a history of children or dogs in the neighborhood intruding, complaints about manure in the waterways and so on? If so, it would be best to look elsewhere. If you have any suspicion, talk around the neighborhood. Don’t rely on the lessor to act against his own interest, even if that would be the moral thing to do! Observe, observe, observe and think, think, think!
The most important part of buying a farm is when. Land varies immensely in price over the decades. In 1962 any farm sold for $20,000, regardless of how large the farm and how fine the house was. Today that wouldn’t buy ten remote acres with a tent on it! Part of the difference is the decline in value of the dollar. It has lost (2008) 18% of its value since 2000, according to the Official United States Inflation Calculator. Part of the low price of land in 1962 was at that there were tremendous farm surpluses. This depressed what you could make from a farm, and consequently what the farm was worth. The population was lower, and industry was booming, too. The lucky ones of us coming of age at that time had the chance of a lifetime. However, $20,000 in 1962 represented as much “real money” (purchasing power) as $140,678 as this is written in 2008 (determined by the Consumer Price Indicator calculator).
The present may or may not be a good time to buy a farm. The currency is very unstable, but the demand for food is rising. Grain looks good, but other countries can produce cattle, which can be imported, so demand for meat is difficult to predict. Land is notoriously high now. Maybe if you have a good income elsewhere and want to invest it, or money to invest, or adjacent land is available, it might be a good risk. At best it won’t disappear completely like so many paper assets (stocks and bonds) did in the “Great Depression” of the thirties. There has been a saying around Central West Virginia for the last two decades or so, “If you want to go into farming, get a car dealership first.” The ordinary farmer should consider renting land, if possible, until he has the assets to operate the new land and put up a hefty down payment.
The second most important part is where. If you already own, and adjacent land comes up for sale and it can be farmed, this might be your chance. Adjacent land is much more valuable. Take it from someoneone who has farmed two tracts 12 miles apart. Adjacent land will reduce fence by the common border, will eliminate the need for travel and transportation of equipment and farm products.
You must have a very good farm on the other end to overcome the cost of much travel.
If you are buying a residence too, the thoughtful person will also be aware of the cost of too much distance from stores, utilities, school bus routes and also church, if so inclined. The quality of the land should be of obvious importance in buying a tract to be farmed.
If you are buying or selling to a family member or someone you trust, consider a “land contract.” When you buy something that will take a long time to pay for, the interest will be one third to one half as much as the principal. If the buyer doesn’t need all the money immediately, he can finance it for you. This arrangement cuts out the middleman who makes the loan, because the seller receives the interest. You should be able to negotiate a lower rate from the seller than a standard lending agency. You will need to talk to someone familiar with this practice and will want to work with a lawyer.
The written agreement between the four parties (including the two wives) when we purchased the our farm was written by a Harvard Law graduate, and was so inadequate one manager of Farm Credit was on the verge of denying us credit until we got something better. The agreement made no provision for the responsibility of the parties. My partner never did any work, and almost nothing to compensate. I made two or three trips to State College, PA, home of Penn State, to get something this Farm Credit manager was happy with. (They have expertise in doing work for serious farmers at Penn State.) I told the Penn State lawyer straight out what the situation was. He dallied and I dallied and finally the manager moved elsewhere and the whole thing fell through. I don’t know if my partner would ever have agreed to it. A partnership contract is difficult, of course, because duties would have to be defined if written properly. There’s nothing worse than a non-performing partner. I know, I’ve been there. Make a dime, share a nickel, loose a dime, make it back by yourself!
A partnership agreement should include the following, at least: What the duties of each person would be, how decisions will be made, what the labor, money, machine, land, etc., input from each partner will be, how earnings will be divided and when (monthly, annually), and how expansion will be handled, or reduction, and termination. Also, if there is housing involved, who will live in each dwelling, who will be responsible for upkeep and repairs additions and such.
There should be formal statement of how records will be kept, both of finances and farm operations. This could be considerable on farms keeping livestock. How will demands such as divorce and disability be handled? These do happen, and they can destroy all the partners.
It takes a certain amount of “guts” and diplomacy to do this. You have to be objective, though, to avoid hard feelings later on and to assure continuity. You must be objective, It’s better to be prepared.
Sunday, February 1, 2009
Fence Building
There is but one fence and electrified high tensile is its name! There is a certain technology you have to follow, but there is considerable latitude also. A three wire high tensile fence is legal (in West Virginia), if properly built. Posts may be set 75 feet or more apart, but must be close enough to follow the contour of the ground. It is quite adequate to keep bulls and cows in heat separated, the only fence that will do so. However, cattle can be stampeded through it, and new born calves will fumble through, apparently they do not understand the wire is the cause of their pain.
Let’s discuss how it works in general terms. The controller loads a capacitor with electricity, this is allowed to run into the fence for about three thousandths of a second. If anything is in contact with the fence and the ground it will get shocked at this point. After the very brief period the fence is unloaded, that is, the charge is allowed to drain away into the ground. This will repeat in about three-fourths of a second. The electrical quantity that causes pain is the energy that passes from the fence wire to the ground through the animal (or unfortunate person), not the voltage. Energy is measured in joules (pronounced the way West Virginians pronounce “jewels” - jewlz).
The capacitor mentioned previously determines how much energy the charger will hold. Typical values are 8 to 15 joules for a 110 volt charger. The charge is limited by the capacitor in the charger. This is safe, that much electrical shock will not damage your body. My daughter worked in the Cardiac Care unit at Ruby Memorial Hospital, so I asked her what charge was used to restart a person’s heart. She told me 450 joules. So there seems to be a considerable margin for safety. I don’t recommend touching an electric fence while standing barefoot in a stream, of course. A charge from considerably less than fifteen joules is an emotional experience that will be remembered for a long time, I can assure you! The idea is for the fence to cause pain, so the animal will avoid it. You don’t want to hurt people or hurt or damage animals.
Several things affect the amount of energy that a charger actually supplies to the animal. One is the quality of the insulation. The polyethylene and ceramic insulators available are excellent, in effect allowing no charge to leak off. Another is loading by grass or brush. This is often significant, and so one should place the lowest wire17 (or a little more) inches off the ground for cattle, unless there is some special reason. This height would be a joke for barbed wire, the cattle would lift it with their heads and go right under. Keeping the bottom wire up is one of the hardest things for someone used to building barbed wire fences has to learn. I know, it took me two decades! This height also encourages cattle to eat the grass under the fence, an important consideration. You don’t want to supply the labor to trim it out if the animals will do it. If the wire touches the ground, or a metal post, serious leaks will occur.
Your “fence tester” reads in kv (kilovolts), because it is difficult to measure joules, and once the charge is in the fence, the energy (or pain) delivered in a short circuit (you or the animal) is about proportional to the voltage. The animal stands in “bare feet” on the ground. I’ve never seen the ground so dry that they challenge electric fence, but I understand this is a problem in the arid West. You wear shoes or boots, which are good insulators, so you only get full energy when you are on a knee or sitting on the ground. If you wear lined leather gloves of the sort ordinarily used in winter you can handle all but a very hot fence with your hands.
I never use metal posts – wood for permanent and fiberglass for temporary, corners are larger posts set in concrete with no braces. Or drive six-inch posts on firm ground. More than three wires are best for approaches to pens where you work cattle, where you plan to wean feeder calves, and along the road where cows may be with very young calves. In these areas we use six wires, posts at about twelve feet, and in some areas “stiffners,” the “T” shaped fiberglass rods with notches, halfway between posts. Make your own “clips” from short pieces of wire left over from fences. The ones you purchase do not last very long. Cows will try to keep their baby calves away from 2 or 3 wire electric fence, but once in a while they will get through. It is best to build a more secure fence (six wirres) if you plan to have new born calves along the road. When they escape in other directions they will come back through the hot fence. Only a small fraction ever get through, and even those learn very quickly. Occasionally one will get stuck on the wrong side, so look for them when you feed.
If you buy animals that are not used to an electric fence, you have to train them. Put them in a lot that is secure, and put an electric fence across it. A temporary string fence is OK. Feed on one side and put the new animals on that side. They will learn what electricity is, and will approach all fences more gingerly. If a few get through, let them remain on the second side while you feed on the first side. Let them get hungry and try it again. The way a bovine checks the fence is by touching it with its nose, the most sensitive part of its body. An animal which is familiar with electric fence will be easier to control with other kinds of fence, too.
You need 2 to 2.5 kv on the fence to control animals. More is better. This is a fair jolt for you, too, but your shoes help insulate. Use 4.0 kv or better to train. Once they are trained, they do not challenge a fence for weeks, and if you have a gate that uses wires and hooks, they can be hard to get through the gate when you want to move them. The tube gates that are widely used work much better for getting animals from one field to another.
Internal fences on our place are all two wire, the second one mainly for a safety factor. Fences through a woods are not put directly on trees, because trees grow over the insulators or pull nails through the polyethylene insulators and let the wires drop. We use treated 2x4 “ insulator boards” to space the wires like they are on posts, and spike them to the trees through holes cut in the board the size of the spikes drilled through the 2x4’s. (Use junk trees, because the tree must be cut above the top nail for timber.) Do not drive the spikes all the way in, leave an inch or so for tree growth. These “insulator boards” are made at the house of scrap treated lumber on rainy days, and kept for use when needed.
We use barbed wire only in places too isolated to reach with electric fence. The back side of our farm is a strip mine high wall, and we need a few roads fenced where the miners left a road to the isolated hill top. We do not use high tensile, non-electrified fence, due to the necessity of keeping it very tight. For sorting pens we use high woven wire with posts at ten to twelve foot intervals. Electrified fence is not suitable for crowding animals. Even if it is made tight enough so they can’t force their way through, the electrical shocks would make them too wild to handle. We also use woven wire on the road side of the field where calves spend the first two weeks.
Temporary fence can be made with “Polywire” string and fiberglass rods for posts. The Polywire is polypropylene (the plastic used for ropes) with several strands of stainless steel woven in to cary electricity. I always use two strands. The conductivity is not as good as the standard wire, so you have a limit as to how long a fence can be made with it and still be effective. I can’t advise on this distance, because it depends on the charge on the fence you attach it to.
Two uses we have made of temporary fence are to isolate the bales in one corner of the meadow while pasturing it and second to funnel animals into an alleyway. Longer temporary fence can be made with fine gage wire. Either can be wound up effectively on the plastic reels sold to wind longer extension cords on.
To be secure when animals are under stress, such as a sorting lot, the best choice is woven wire. I believe the final pen before a cattle chute for working or loading should be made from two inch lumber and be high enough to prevent cattle from jumping over. Five feet four inches will hold all but the most wild animals. The posts should be ten feet apart or less for four board 2x 8 fences in such a lot.
Gates for sloping ground can be a problem. You want to set posts vertically, but the gate, if it is square, does not adapt to the slope of the hill. You can get around this by making a gate yourself, using hardwood, preferably white oak since it has the best rot resistance. Use a single 3/8 or 7/16 bolt in each end of the horizontal board and don’t tighten the bolts up to the point they prevent the end of the gate from being lifted. Set the post the gate is to be hinged to first, and tie to it loosely with wire or good rope. Then set the other posts the outer end will have to contact. This is necessary because the width of the gate will change as the outer end goes up or down. This isn’t beautiful, but it works. In situations like this you need to put (very small) gravel in the walkway, because it will erode badly when cattle go through it in wet weather.
There is but one fence and electrified high tensile is its name! There is a certain technology you have to follow, but there is considerable latitude also. A three wire high tensile fence is legal (in West Virginia), if properly built. Posts may be set 75 feet or more apart, but must be close enough to follow the contour of the ground. It is quite adequate to keep bulls and cows in heat separated, the only fence that will do so. However, cattle can be stampeded through it, and new born calves will fumble through, apparently they do not understand the wire is the cause of their pain.
Let’s discuss how it works in general terms. The controller loads a capacitor with electricity, this is allowed to run into the fence for about three thousandths of a second. If anything is in contact with the fence and the ground it will get shocked at this point. After the very brief period the fence is unloaded, that is, the charge is allowed to drain away into the ground. This will repeat in about three-fourths of a second. The electrical quantity that causes pain is the energy that passes from the fence wire to the ground through the animal (or unfortunate person), not the voltage. Energy is measured in joules (pronounced the way West Virginians pronounce “jewels” - jewlz).
The capacitor mentioned previously determines how much energy the charger will hold. Typical values are 8 to 15 joules for a 110 volt charger. The charge is limited by the capacitor in the charger. This is safe, that much electrical shock will not damage your body. My daughter worked in the Cardiac Care unit at Ruby Memorial Hospital, so I asked her what charge was used to restart a person’s heart. She told me 450 joules. So there seems to be a considerable margin for safety. I don’t recommend touching an electric fence while standing barefoot in a stream, of course. A charge from considerably less than fifteen joules is an emotional experience that will be remembered for a long time, I can assure you! The idea is for the fence to cause pain, so the animal will avoid it. You don’t want to hurt people or hurt or damage animals.
Several things affect the amount of energy that a charger actually supplies to the animal. One is the quality of the insulation. The polyethylene and ceramic insulators available are excellent, in effect allowing no charge to leak off. Another is loading by grass or brush. This is often significant, and so one should place the lowest wire17 (or a little more) inches off the ground for cattle, unless there is some special reason. This height would be a joke for barbed wire, the cattle would lift it with their heads and go right under. Keeping the bottom wire up is one of the hardest things for someone used to building barbed wire fences has to learn. I know, it took me two decades! This height also encourages cattle to eat the grass under the fence, an important consideration. You don’t want to supply the labor to trim it out if the animals will do it. If the wire touches the ground, or a metal post, serious leaks will occur.
Your “fence tester” reads in kv (kilovolts), because it is difficult to measure joules, and once the charge is in the fence, the energy (or pain) delivered in a short circuit (you or the animal) is about proportional to the voltage. The animal stands in “bare feet” on the ground. I’ve never seen the ground so dry that they challenge electric fence, but I understand this is a problem in the arid West. You wear shoes or boots, which are good insulators, so you only get full energy when you are on a knee or sitting on the ground. If you wear lined leather gloves of the sort ordinarily used in winter you can handle all but a very hot fence with your hands.
I never use metal posts – wood for permanent and fiberglass for temporary, corners are larger posts set in concrete with no braces. Or drive six-inch posts on firm ground. More than three wires are best for approaches to pens where you work cattle, where you plan to wean feeder calves, and along the road where cows may be with very young calves. In these areas we use six wires, posts at about twelve feet, and in some areas “stiffners,” the “T” shaped fiberglass rods with notches, halfway between posts. Make your own “clips” from short pieces of wire left over from fences. The ones you purchase do not last very long. Cows will try to keep their baby calves away from 2 or 3 wire electric fence, but once in a while they will get through. It is best to build a more secure fence (six wirres) if you plan to have new born calves along the road. When they escape in other directions they will come back through the hot fence. Only a small fraction ever get through, and even those learn very quickly. Occasionally one will get stuck on the wrong side, so look for them when you feed.
If you buy animals that are not used to an electric fence, you have to train them. Put them in a lot that is secure, and put an electric fence across it. A temporary string fence is OK. Feed on one side and put the new animals on that side. They will learn what electricity is, and will approach all fences more gingerly. If a few get through, let them remain on the second side while you feed on the first side. Let them get hungry and try it again. The way a bovine checks the fence is by touching it with its nose, the most sensitive part of its body. An animal which is familiar with electric fence will be easier to control with other kinds of fence, too.
You need 2 to 2.5 kv on the fence to control animals. More is better. This is a fair jolt for you, too, but your shoes help insulate. Use 4.0 kv or better to train. Once they are trained, they do not challenge a fence for weeks, and if you have a gate that uses wires and hooks, they can be hard to get through the gate when you want to move them. The tube gates that are widely used work much better for getting animals from one field to another.
Internal fences on our place are all two wire, the second one mainly for a safety factor. Fences through a woods are not put directly on trees, because trees grow over the insulators or pull nails through the polyethylene insulators and let the wires drop. We use treated 2x4 “ insulator boards” to space the wires like they are on posts, and spike them to the trees through holes cut in the board the size of the spikes drilled through the 2x4’s. (Use junk trees, because the tree must be cut above the top nail for timber.) Do not drive the spikes all the way in, leave an inch or so for tree growth. These “insulator boards” are made at the house of scrap treated lumber on rainy days, and kept for use when needed.
We use barbed wire only in places too isolated to reach with electric fence. The back side of our farm is a strip mine high wall, and we need a few roads fenced where the miners left a road to the isolated hill top. We do not use high tensile, non-electrified fence, due to the necessity of keeping it very tight. For sorting pens we use high woven wire with posts at ten to twelve foot intervals. Electrified fence is not suitable for crowding animals. Even if it is made tight enough so they can’t force their way through, the electrical shocks would make them too wild to handle. We also use woven wire on the road side of the field where calves spend the first two weeks.
Temporary fence can be made with “Polywire” string and fiberglass rods for posts. The Polywire is polypropylene (the plastic used for ropes) with several strands of stainless steel woven in to cary electricity. I always use two strands. The conductivity is not as good as the standard wire, so you have a limit as to how long a fence can be made with it and still be effective. I can’t advise on this distance, because it depends on the charge on the fence you attach it to.
Two uses we have made of temporary fence are to isolate the bales in one corner of the meadow while pasturing it and second to funnel animals into an alleyway. Longer temporary fence can be made with fine gage wire. Either can be wound up effectively on the plastic reels sold to wind longer extension cords on.
To be secure when animals are under stress, such as a sorting lot, the best choice is woven wire. I believe the final pen before a cattle chute for working or loading should be made from two inch lumber and be high enough to prevent cattle from jumping over. Five feet four inches will hold all but the most wild animals. The posts should be ten feet apart or less for four board 2x 8 fences in such a lot.
Gates for sloping ground can be a problem. You want to set posts vertically, but the gate, if it is square, does not adapt to the slope of the hill. You can get around this by making a gate yourself, using hardwood, preferably white oak since it has the best rot resistance. Use a single 3/8 or 7/16 bolt in each end of the horizontal board and don’t tighten the bolts up to the point they prevent the end of the gate from being lifted. Set the post the gate is to be hinged to first, and tie to it loosely with wire or good rope. Then set the other posts the outer end will have to contact. This is necessary because the width of the gate will change as the outer end goes up or down. This isn’t beautiful, but it works. In situations like this you need to put (very small) gravel in the walkway, because it will erode badly when cattle go through it in wet weather.
Saturday, December 20, 2008
Movement of Water Above Ground
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!
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!
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.
.
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
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)