Between the ceramic canal tiles, the cement mortar and the concrete roof tiles there is plenty of scope for some interesting mosses and lichens to grow.
You don’t notice this when standing on the ground, but once you climb around the roof these things dominate the view.
And the corrugated iron roof likes to grow rust. Those are the Pyrenees in the background.
The old stone barn sits inside the less old cinder block barn. There are only two walls left of it, but they are interesting.
Moss growing on top of the old stone wall where the roof had blown off a couple of years back.
This is no job for people with vertigo.
The first cut hay is in there. If I had the right fork attachment I could get a third layer on top.
How to carry new tiles up to the roof without hurting your shoulders. Those are concrete telegraph poles supporting the roof joists.
Jan on the roof. He comes well recommended. If you want to contact him drop me some mail (bc at wobbly.com) and I’ll send you his contact details. 
The hole in the roof of the hay barn. Our house is in the background.
There’s a nice view from up on the hay barn roof. Here is the herd out in the Florida paddock, so named for the new construction house just at its limit. The barn in the foreground is the wood shed that is full of old vine posts. Yes the roof needs work. No it isn’t on the top of the work list yet.
OK enough writing; back to fencing.
What do you do with twelve hectares of former vineyard? There are a number of special properties about these old vineyards that you have to take into account. Firstly, you are left with rows and rows of long gashes where the excavator has ripped up the line of vines and posts. Then you have the problem of excess hardware – nails, wire, brackets - lying on the ground. There can be an excess of copper in the soil from the vine treatments over the years. And the ground surface on hillsides can be terraced, making a very uneven surface.
I wanted to disc in all the bio goodness but we just couldn’t. The risk to cattle of having all those nails lying on the surface was too great, plus the slight terracing of the rows would make hay very difficult to cut and would complicate all tractor work in general. After talking to many vineyard-owning neighbors we did what they did and plowed it all in.
Well, Didier the neighbor ploughed it all in. In a given year we don’t want to plow so it wasn’t worth the cost of acquisition of a plow and the learning curve to figure out how to use it. Plus I don’t want the risk of stress damage to my tractor. Didier used his 130hp machine.
This buries the surface material to a depth of 20-30cm. There likely aren’t a lot of weed seeds in the soil since the vineyards haven’t been plowed in decades, but plenty of weeds will get blown in. I’ll have to disc it a couple of times to continue the contour smoothing and sod breaking process before seeding in the spring. I’m not sure what is going in there but likely a legume like lucerne or red clover and a cereal like oats. There are two main chunks to seed and I’ll do something different in each.
Red clover is supposed to deal well with excess copper and it grows wild on our farm, but I’d rather have lucerne for the better summer performance. Still, I need to rebuild the surface soil so anything that dumps a lot of vegetation will be good. Oats could be grazed directly, leaving the undersown legume or grass to take over. So many variables!
This is Jan from the neighboring village who fixes pretty much everything. We’ve been working on the various broken barn roofs over the last few days. There’s still a bit to do but the big windstorm has halted work for the moment, which gives me time to upload a few photos.
Gosh that backhoe is useful when it comes to lifting roof tiles.
And from the roof of the little cowshed…
The courtyard in the background of the above photo is where the cattle pens are going to be.
We’re building some new pens inside the old cow courtyard. The first phase is to get rid of the old parts we no longer need.
This is going to be the alley with a bud box at the far end. This end is an entry point but is also a shelter for cows we want to keep inside. It had a similar role in the old design. There’s a small chute off the far end but we aren’t going to use that since it is too short and too wide. The cows hated to go into the chute. The heifers can turn around in it.
This is the same alley, but at this angle you can see the old stone barn hidden inside. Now the rotting wooden barriers are down the old barn is a lot more visible. A couple of the roof joists need replacing but overall the roof is worth keeping.
Some of the fine construction on the cowshed. This post was hanging off the cross beam, which was hanging off the various vertical boards forming the gable end. These boards were all hanging off the roof joist.
Given that everything is hanging off the roof joist it isn’t easy to prop a ladder anywhere stable. So out comes the backhoe with its handy bucket to stand in.
It is fun being up in the bucket. Here’s the view down. The rear stabilizer feet are extended to hold it steady.
Standing up there allows me to rip down all the trash.
It is nice to open up the end. The light will help draw the cows into the bud box and also allows us an exit into the paddock outside.
The next step is to finish the list of parts we need and put in our order for new barriers.
The farm is at zero-point-something degrees of longitude, which makes us just a little east of Greenwich. But we’re in France, so that puts us on Continental time despite us being under Britain. What this means is that the sun hits its zenith some time close to 1pm (2pm on daylight saving days) and the sun rises late in winter. So I get to see it a lot more often.
In the last few months attempts have been made by a few friends to plunder the posts from the vine mountains. Now it is too late; the vine mountains have been set alight.
At one point we had ten bonfires burning around the farm. [Incidentally I am mentioned once in a book about Bon Scott called Bonfire. Although my dog is mentioned twice, illustrating the relative value of dogs versus children.]
The cows were a little too far away to benefit from the warmth.
Every now and then the excavator would poke around the flames and get things burning brighter, just like you do with the fire at home.
One of the mountains had more copper sulfate in it than the others and burned with a green-white flame rather than the usual orange.
After the steel wire has been salvaged the rest ends up six feet under.
There are a lot of mushrooms in our fields. The locals call these rosé des prés, which usually means the regular old field mushrooms but there are at least two distinct species that I see. The ones below are in a fairy ring several meters across and I think they are horse mushrooms. They are way more pungent than the field mushrooms that showed up a few weeks ago, and their bunched growth looks different to the isolated field mushrooms.
The oat and vetch field is sprouting nicely. I borrowed a seeder to get the cereal in the ground and it seems to have worked ok, although I ran out of seed a little too early. There will be a couple of bare stripes that will become more obvious as the oats grow.
Here is the herd moving to some new grass. I haven’t mowed this paddock yet so I can see how the dead grass from the previous grazings decomposes and affects the new growth. My current heuristic is that if there’s a lot of standing dead grass then I need to mow it down, otherwise I can leave it be and the cows will trample it next time through. The dead and trodden in grasses did not decompose over the dry hot months of summer, but now things are changing by the week.
Our grazing system is to let pasture rest for months at a time and this should favor the tall grasses like fescue and dactyle/orchardgrass. Pastures that started with a fair amount of these grasses are doing very well, but areas where the shorter grasses dominate are going to take a while to change. I see clusters of newer tall grass but it is going to take a couple of growing seasons for them to change the character of the field.
Tosca (the perpetually hungry golden retriever) likes to drool on the kitchen door. There might be a calorie or two on offer inside.
Australians don’t say corral, they say cattle yards. And when you link Australia and a Bud Box you get this example of loading cattle onto a truck from Grahame Rees where they cram themselves in. He calls it a Bud Pen instead of a Bud Box. Low-stress stockmanship also made it onto the Landline show on ABC TV (Australia) a couple of years back.
Some Australian yard designs from National Stockyard Systems.
An article in The Cattleman that talks about corral efficiency including some comments on curved versus straight races.
A fancy CAD diagram of a French squeeze chute (although this one doesn’t squeeze).
I’m getting a ton of annual ryegrass shooting up on the farm. The University of Maryland has done a cool factsheet on annual ryegrass.
It has been a warm and dry year so far in France. Still, we have some nicely fed heifers.
I’d heard of a farmer with a herd of Galloway cattle not far from me, so I called him up and went over to check out their farm. Stefanie and Andreas Roth are German, a fact that you could work out on arriving at the farm from the German cars, German MB-Trac tractors and this awesome Unimog with a 3-pt hitch on the front and the back.
His Galloways are a mix of colors, ranging from a light cream to black with a couple of Belted Galloways in his herd.
And they are small! After looking at French cows for years these Scottish girls are a different size altogether. They are very cute and wooly. When I look at our Salers I think they are a small cow compared to the ubiquitous Blondes around here but they are positively giant compared to these girls.
This one liked to pose for the camera.
As did her calf, who reminds me of Fozzy Bear.
I was wondering about getting a couple to try out on the lucerne of our farm, but Galloways don’t have horns and I don’t want to put new animals in with a herd of big strong heifers without having some horns to defend themselves. Maybe we could put a couple separated from the main herd with the finishing animals?
Galloways produce small carcasses. Andreas gets about 130kg of meat from each animal at about two and a half years of age. As a comparison, a fully finished Salers heifer should give you over 200kg of beef. Both breeds are rustic all-season cows which live outside in the winter and eat just about anything. They can both marble well, although Andreas doesn’t finish his animals to produce marbling. You can see the difference in build when you compare them with our our Salers heifers below, although these girls are looking a little porcine after eating some lucerne hay.
Andreas is dropping by in a few days with some beef for us to try and I can’t wait. One way to look at other farms that direct sell is as competitors, but we don’t do that. There are so few direct sale beef farms that we like to learn from each other and help each other. For those of you in the Gers who would like to talk to Andreas and try his beef he is at 05 62 09 15 30. There’s also a fiche in French with a lot of information.
