Electronics, dogs and cattle

Odds-and-ends regarding technology

My phone is glitching. The phone is the primary source of images for the blog. I have a new battery ordered and that might resolve the issue.

I gave up on the Chromebook. If it was all I had or all I could get, I could make it work. I now have a Dell with an large screen, a number pad on the right and Windoze 10. It also has a feature where the screen orientation shifts if I tilt the unit. Undoubtedly for those people who want to prop it up like a book for privacy and watch videos while eating at a table.

Kubota

He was a no-show yesterday for work here. I have no clue what is going on for him but am not going to pry.

Equivalencing between humans and animals

Belladonna was floating the idea of her getting a rescue dog. I don't know why she was involving us unless she considers us to be "the backup plan" if it does not work out.

Sadly, there is at least one family saddled with an ill-mannered brute of a dog that a child gave to her parents as a gift. Oddly, the gift was timed exactly with when she and her boyfriend moved to an apartment that did not take animals.

How ill-mannered? I was on my daily walk-about one morning and the woman-of-the-house was trying to clip the dog to the lead on the dog-run. The dog saw me in the middle of the road, and pulled out of her hand, sprinted across the yard and bit me on my hand. 

I kept walking.

The woman and her husband caught up with me about a 1/4 later. They were in their car. They asked if the dog had connected. I lifted my hand and showed them the blood dripping down my fingers.

I learned later that the woman had bypass surgery a few weeks later.

That is the kind of crap I will not tolerate. A selfish daughter getting a dog to see if her boyfriend is baby-daddy material and then dumping her untrained animal after it is done serving its purpose. Dumping it on her ailing mother.

I am going to be brutally honest with Belladonna, if her new dog "does not work out" she will just have to put it down. We WILL NOT take our kid's rotten decisions and ease their conscience and assuage their guilt. Unless it is a baby human.

Humans are different.

Pasture

Zeus and I walked the two acre paddock on March 7. We had run the calves in on February 20 or 16 days earlier. By eyeball, it looks like they have taken off about half of the standing grass.

If my math skills are up-to-snuff, that means that I will need to have another paddock ready by March 20.

I want to run them into a couple of my paddocks that are mostly grazed over. There are still a few patches with standing forage that they missed because of snow drifting. I want them to tidy those areas up.

Individual plants of grass are responsive to sun hitting the soil. They start growth more quickly. The warmer soil releases nutrients earlier in the season, coinciding with longer days and good soil moisture. Grass tillers much more aggressively when the base of the shoot receives sunlight and that results in a thicker sward.

Clover seedlings need sunlight. The seeds are tiny and don't have much get-up-and-go. They do not have the wherewithall to punch through a heavy thatch  of smothered grass.

I figure three days will be enough time for the calves to polish off that grass.

I base my math on guestimates of 600 pound average weight and a daily consumption rate of 4% of body-weight (dry matter basis). That works out to a beef animal eating its body-weight in hay/standing grass every 25 days.

What that tells me is that Sprite's pasture only had 1200 pounds per acre of usable, standing dry-matter at the end of winter.

The good news is that she has at least two more acres that is already fenced off. The bad news is that the fence is in disrepair and that some of the grass is unimproved Reed Canarygrass which cows find as unpalatable as fiberglass insulation.