My vision, though, has not been to start a boarding school of my own with a $20,000/yr price tag for students.  That model of spending money (usually through loans) and then trying to come up with the money to pay for them every year, exhausts schools and never allows them to concentrated on…school.  The model that Christians must imitate is that taught by St. Benedict, who was trying to build a community that was free to focus on prayer. How did he establish that community?  By establishing a self-sufficient community that (a) enjoyed simplicity, (b) worked to produce their own needs and (c) maintained an undistracted and cloistered life.    The model for the best boarding school will be no different, for the goals are the same and there are not a million ways to achieve them.

Thus, I have worked to lay the foundation for such a school to exist and that has been the aim of our work in farming: to develop a farm that could become a self-sufficient Christian school community.  I believe that we have finally come to a point where the actual work of the school is ready to begin.

While we yet have work to do, we are planning to begin the boarding school I have dreamed about with a small group of 12 teenage boys from around the country who will live, work and study here together.  They will be boys who appreciate simple things, who learn to work hard, who learn to study for wisdom’s sake alone.  They will be boys who pray every morning and evening together, who plan and carry out real-life projects together, who develop friendships of the most intimate and permanent kind.  They will be boys who offer the future hope of old-fashioned Christian men.  That is what’s needed and they’re not going to come out from modern schools or most modern homes.  Most of the great men in history were educated away from the comforts of home, in a masculine environment that pressured them to grow and become wise and strong.

We’ll be teaching the classical liberal arts with their original goals in view:  happiness.  The classical liberal arts do not tell a man what kind of work he should do, or where he should live, but HOW he should live if he, as a human being, would be truly happy.  That’s what philosophy is, the pursuit of true and lasting happiness.  That happiness cannot be found in any worldly thing, because death and decay makes every worldly thing temporary at best.  The only way human beings, who were made for eternity, can be happy is to prune all of their  desires so that nothing in them disagrees with the truth.  The Stoics taught this, believing that all unhappiness is caused by seeking happiness in things we can neither control nor keep.

Therefore, with God’s help, we’re moving forward…little by little.

Home-Made Horse Stalls on the Michael Family Farm

To accommodate our two  2200lb. Percheron draft horses, we had to build some heavy-duty horse stalls.  I saw all kinds of kits and designs available, but they weren’t our style:  simple and self-reliant.  So, I visited a neighbor, jotted down some ideas and then designed my own.

These stalls (doing the work ourselves) cost us about $500 per stall.  It’s just 4″x6″ vertical posts, 2x10s for the walls, treated 2x6s along the bottom of the walls, and 1/2″ EMT pipe set in 2x4s at the top of the walls.  There are some diagona 4×4″ braces on the corners…and that’s it.

These stalls are huge.  They are 16′ wide and 13′ deep, for a total of  208 sq.ft.  Actually, that’s not big for the size of our Percherons.  I’ve seen 14×14 stalls recommended for Belgians, which are smaller–that’s 196 sq.ft..  So we’re just a wee bit bigger.  Our Percherons are 19 hands high…that means the top of their shoulders are about 6’4″.

So, building horse stalls is now one more project that we’ve proven isn’t too difficult to be done practically and affordably.  I think they turned out pretty good.  I’ve already got the neighbors’ attention–in a good way.  Today, one neighbor brought us two old horse-drawn turn ploughs that he had in a garage for ?? years and told me he could also get me a horse-drawn hay rake and old wire hay-baler.

Hey, what do you know…Monday is Plough Monday and I got me two new…old…ploughs.  Anyway, if you want any more info on building stalls like these, just ask.

WM

In old England, the first Monday after Epiphany was known as “Plough Monday”.  Those were days when farming wasn’t considered an odd hobby for malcontents, but normal human life, working and keeping the ground from which man was made in the beginning.  The Church and the farm were one, for “ora et labora” was still the Church’s philosophy and the work of common people was sanctified and honored among all.

On Plough Monday, the new agricultural year began.  Farmers had their ploughs (i.e., animal-drawn walking ploughs, not state-subsidized GPS-guided John Deere mega-machines), blessed by the Church and celebrated the new year with games and feasting.  One of the traditions, narrated eloquently (as always) by Washington Irving was the “Fool’s Plough Pageant”.  A group of men would dress up and drag a plough though the village making a collection for some poor folk fit for charity.  However, the pageant involved all sorts of silliness and fun as Irving relates:

Sherwood Forest is a region that still retains much of the quaint customs and holiday games of the olden time. A day or two after my arrival at the Abbey, as I was walking in the cloisters, I heard the sound of rustic music, and now and then a burst of merriment, proceeding from the interior of the mansion. Presently the chamberlain came and informed me that a party of country lads were, in” the servants’ hall, performing Plough Monday antics, and invited me to witness their mummery. I gladly assented, for I am somewhat curious about these relics of popular usages. The servants’ hall was a fit place for the exhibition of an old Gothic game. It was a chamber of great extent, which, in monkish times had been the refectory of the Abbey. A row of massive columns extended lengthwise through the centre, whence sprung Gothic arches, supporting the low vaulted ceiling. Here was a set of rustics dressed up in something of the style represented in the books concerning popular antiquities. One was in a rough garb of frieze, with his head muffled in bearskin, and a bell dangling behind him, that jingled at every movement. He was the clown, or fool of the party, probably a traditional representative of the ancient satyr. The rest were decorated with ribands and armed with wooden swords. The leader of the troop recited the old ballad of St. George and the Dragon, which had been current among the country people for ages; his companions accompanied the recitation with some rude attempt at acting, while the clown cut all kinds of antics.

 

Thus, as Christmastide draws to a close, we wish you not only a Merry Christmas, but also a Happy New Year and a Merry Plough Monday.

WM

The nicest rope halter I’ve found (and best, though certainly not perfect instructions) is this one:

http://americashorsedaily.com/images/pdfs/howtomakearopehalter.pdf

If you can master that halter, make sure you tie the poll straps correctly or else your horse/donkey could get hurt.  The halter should be tied with a latch knot like that you see in the picture.

Enjoy.

WM

Jonathan checking out his new donkey at a nearby horse farm.

Our 11yo son Jonathan had an exciting day today.  He bought his first farm animal.  He found a 14 month-old donkey for sale an hour away and went this morning to check it out.  This was his first taste of the real-life rewards of hard work.  Jonathan’s work provides our family’s milk every day and brings us hundreds of dollars of profit every month.  He’s only 11 and he’s learning to think and work profitably like a wise man.   I can’t imagine what he’ll be doing at 16 or 26, especially starting with a growing  farm already in his possession.

The secondary benefit is the influence he has on his younger siblings.  Seeing Jonathan have the  ability to decide he wants to get something as big and impressive as his own farm animal has the younger kids eager to work.  Elizabeth is already thinking of buying a female donkey so they can breed more donkeys.  There’s no confusion in our family that work is better than play. 

I just wrote a CLAA article on the absence of healthful, productive work in our children’s lives and it’s confirming to see it true in the lives of my own family.  Let the kids get back to work and start TODAY developing their adult lives.  

WM

In our spare time, we’ve begun gutting the old farmhouse we purchased back in May.  The house was built in 1889 by a farmer for his wife before they were married.  She moved in in 1902 on their wedding day.   The grandsons told me of stories where grandma spent nights holding a lantern over grandpa’s head while he finished the construction. 

The house  was built to be a productive family farmhouse.  The family farmed all of their land right up to the house–dairy cows, chickens, cotton, etc.. but in subsequent generations the children opted out of the toil of farming for work in construction, buying into the post-WWII “modern world” fallacies.    They put water heaters in the root cellars making them warm and moist so food couldn’t be stored in them any longer.  They opted for central heat and air, which mean that ceilings needed to be lowered and ducts run all through the house–and fireplaces and windows needed to be sealed up.  The wood cookstoves were replaced by electric ranges.  Family time moved from the porch to the TV room.  In the most recent generation, surround-sound entertainment systems were added, Playstations and plasma TVs mounted on the walls and satellite dishes mounted on the roof…of a 19th century farmhouse that grandpa built.

When we first toured the house, my eyes saw grandpa’s work…and I knew I could get a dumpster big enough for his children’s additions.  So, now that things have settled down for us with visitors and outdoor work, we’re tearing it up. 

We’ve pulled all the dropped-ceilings down.  We opened up the original chimneys and uncovered the old fireplaces.  We’re moving the water heaters out of the root cellar and making the root cellar a root cellar again.  We’ve cleaned all of the lawn chairs and RV/camping equipment out of the canning kitchen.  We uncovered the original wood cookstove vents and tore out all of the cabinets–which no farm kitchen needs. 

In time, we’ll be bringing in a new wood cookstove.  We’ll be restoring the original fireplaces and chimneys.  We’ll be filling the root cellar with food.  We’ll be canning in the canning kitchen.  We’ll have no more electric air conditioning or heating filling the dead spaces of the house with t-shirt accomodating forced air, but the ventilation and breezes and the 12′ ceilings that grandpa knew would control the temperature in his house will comfort us as they did him.  We’ll be snuggled in front of warm fire or around the cookstove in the winter.  The kitchen will be processing fresh milk and butter, cheesecloths will be hanging to dry in the windows, girls will be kneading dough on the work table.  The house will be filled with the sounds of bleating sheep, summer crickets and singing birds–not video games and TV commercials that have no place in the country.  

I tell those around us that I’ll be “reveterizing” the house–making it old again.  More importantly, I will make the house make sense again.  I wish the old grandpa was here because I know he knew what he was doing.  Life made sense in his generation.  Not in ours.  We’ll fix it and our kids will only know a world that makes sense.

WM

www.ruralheritage.com

Enjoy!
WM

Never fill a hay rack or the cows will just throw it all over the place. Also, make sure to drive a few rods down to hold a hay ring in place. No use having a hay ring if the cows toss it all over the place.

To determine how much hay to give your cows realize that they should eat a MINIMUM of 10 lbs per day if they’re a 1000 lb. cow–yes, that’s a formula: 1% of the cow’s bodyweight in hay each day. Ideally, they’ll eat more than that, but that excess is for the sake of roughage, not nutrients. 20 lbs. of a good alfalfa mix can provide almost all of the cow’s daily needs. If you add grains to that, even less alfalfa is needed. What you should do depends on the price you pay for grains and hay. We buy hay by the tractor-trailer load (alfalfa/orchardgrass mix for $6.99/bale), so it’s as cheap as any grain we could buy. You could pay $10-$11+ per bale here in NC, which would make grains cheaper. You’d have to crunch those numbers for your own farm.

We aim to provide our milking cows with 3 lbs. of protein per day, non-milking cows with 1.5lbs. We feed them up to 20 lbs of alfalfa hay and then 5 lbs. Of corn/soy meal mix at each milking. Non-milkers get fed just 2lbs in the evening. That mix is 3:1 corn to soy meal. Soy meal is expensive, but it’s 44% protein, wo a 3:1 mix makes a mix with 20% crude protein that’s highly digestible. I have experimented with less grain and the milk supply diminished rapidly in 1 day. Some will recommend less grain, but I say you reap what you sow. If the cow is getting too much grain, it’s manure will be soft and light-colored. Therefore, low milk is a sign that feed is too little, sloppy poop is a sign it’s too much.

I created an excel worksheet that allows me to punch in any ingredients I want and it will tell me how much of what the cows need and what it costs per day to feed them that ration. Maybe I’ll share that some day.

WM

WM via BlackBerry.

First, you’re going to lose lots of money buying in 50 lb. increments.  For example, here in NC, whole corn is selling for about $11.00 per 50 lb. at Tractor Supply.    I can get it from a friend for $9.00 per 50 lb.  However, I can buy it from the mill for only $7.50 per 50 lb. if I buy 3 tons.  Now, let’s do a little math.  3 tons is 120 x 50 lb. bags.  So, I can get 120 bags of corn for $900.  That would only get me 82 bags from Tractor Supply.  My friend can’t sell me more than 40, so there’s no use talking about that.  If I only want 4o bags (1 ton), he’s probably a good deal…and the money goes to a friend.  However, If I’m going to use more than 1 ton, buying in bulk is going to save me lots of money down the road. 

Second, the savings increase over time.  So, if you bought 3 tons per year for 10 years, assuming were relatively unchanged, your savings would continue to multiply.  That’s how businessmen think, but most small-scale farmers aren’t good businessmen. 

Now, if you’re going to buy in bulk, you’ll save even more if you have a place to store grain direct from the farms.  The smart grain farmers save their own grains on their farm and wait for prices to go up before they sell.  To sell their grains, they often have to drive a ways to the mills which adds to their expenses and reduces their profits, so if you’re willing to give them a good price and are closer to them, they’ll gladly sell to you.  You can have a grain truck come from the farm and pump corn or wheat right into your grain bins. 

That is, if you have grain bins.

A grain bin is a large metal tank (see picture), between 6 and 9 feet in diameter that stores grain.  The top of the bin opens and a grain truck can pump the grains right in.  The bottom of the bin has a dispenser that allows you to either (a) fill buckets, barrels or wheelbarrows by hand, or (b) connect the bin to an auger that can pump the grain from your bin into a building or anywhere you’d like. 

The grain bin you would probably be interested in are only 6′ in diameter.  Then, they vary in height–that’s what determines how much your bin canhold.  The good news is that the height is determined by how many rings are set on top of the base of the bin and you can add rings at any time.  So, you can begin with a 6′ wide bin with the minimum height (say 10′) and, if in a few years, you want to add more volume to your bin…just add a ring.  If you look at the picture on the right, you can see where the first ladder ends–that’s the end of the standard bin.  Above that you have a second ring, which also adds a section of ladder.  So, you don’t have to take a gamble on a too-big bin today and you don’t have to suffer with a too-small bin tomorrow.  Your bin can grow with you.

Here in NC, I can buy a grain bin capable of holding 3 tons for $1650–and that includes delivery and installation.  A 4 ton bin will cost $1815.   Yes, I know, the penny-pinching farmer will have chest pains to see that four-figure number, but he simply chooses to invest that money in Tractor Supply over the years instead of investing it in his own on-farm grain bins.  Note:  The successful farmers around you will all be found to have grain bins and not Tractor Supply accounts.

If you’re looking for something smaller, I’ve also seen from Sioux Steel company a smaller set of bins that hold 40 and 65 bags’ worth of grains.    You can check them out here:  http://www.siouxsteel.com/index.php/products/category/feed-bins/.  That would make life more convenient for you, but you’d have to find out if anyone would be willing to haul a smaller quantity of grain to your farm.  As their profit decreases, their interest in helping you will also decrease.   This is business, remember, not charity.

So, if you’re buying a hefty quantity of grain, it’s worth looking into grain bins.  You have to crunch your own numbers, but investing in a grain bin can benefit your small farm if your numbers line up right.

WM