Farming Tool Manufacture

Farm tools for efficiency

2009-02-26T21:57:00.000-08:00

A FIFTH YEAR of drought in the West has focused attention on water like nothing else could. That blues lyric is exactly right: you don't miss your water 'til your well runs dry. At a recent farm tour sponsored by the Committee for Sustainable Agriculture (*), the growers all had the lack of rain on their minds, but the most innovative among them are not merely adapting to the drought. Looking at farming as a system, and making changes toward greater efficiency wherever they can, they are finding themselves in relatively good shape to make it through a drought. But the changes they have made save much more than just water.

Better Bell Peppers

Pat Herbert raises some of the best bell peppers on the market. He also grows onions and broccoli, with 600 acres spread over two farms near Hollister and Gilroy in central California, where his great-grandfather settled in 1868. The ranch produces 300,000 boxes of bell peppers a year; at the peak of the season 150 employees pack out over 7,000 boxes a day. Pat designed and built his packing-shed equipment. He is an innovator who has recently switched his pepper production to organic methods, explaining, "I got tired of spending a lot of money and not getting any results."

The clay soil here has to be worked during the winter when it is wet, because once dry it acquires the consistency of adobe brick. Herbert started his changes by posing one key question. "I just asked everybody -- why do we work the ground?" He thought back to the horsedrawn plows of his grandfather, and compared them to the enormous tillage tools on modern tractors. One reason farmers plow as often as they do, Herbert concluded, is because they have technology that lets them. The other reason is to control weeds. He has discovered that "working the ground deep is a big mistake. The less you work the ground, the better it is, and the less you need the herbicides." This is because plowing brings buried weed seeds to the surface, where they sprout.

Herbert's new way of raising bell peppers starts with fields arranged into permanent beds, with a buried irrigation drip tape running under each one. He uses a turbulent-flow drip irrigation tape manufactured by Chapin Watermatics, Inc. It comes on a big roll and is buried directly behind a single chisel plow moving down the bed. This is precision farming: the tractor wheels always roll in the same place so the soil in the beds is never compacted. The plastic irrigation tape is buried permanently, not so shallow that tillage tools can tear it up, but not so deep that the plant roots have trouble finding the moisture. The tape also delivers liquid fertilizers.

The peppers are direct-seeded the first week of April, and aluminum sprinkler pipe is spread out over the fields to germinate the seed. Peppers like warm soil, so what comes up first is a crop of weeds. With the old method, Herbert would have gone through and sprayed herbicide, but now he has opted for an older technique -- he uses propane to kill off the weed seedlings with a brief searing flame a day or two before the peppers break ground. The young weeds don't catch fire or turn black, but their cell walls rupture in the intense heat and they wither and die.

Up come the peppers in a weed-free field. At this point, the sprinkler irrigation is removed and the underground drip system turned on. The surface of the ground dries out, the pepper plants' roots reach down and find the buried moisture, and no more weeds can germinate during the rest of California's rainless growing season. This system eliminates the need for both herbicides and expensive tillage, or as Herbert says, "No herbicides, no hoeing."

The innovations don't stop there. Herbert used to bring the peppers in from the field, wash them in chlorinated water, and then wax each one. More chemicals, more expense. Now he does neither, and spends his money instead on trucking and streamlined handling, to assure that each pepper reaches the cold-storage locker in less than one hour.

Herbert grew 220 acres of peppers last year and used no herbicide. His drip-irrigation tape cuts water use by half. His new cropping system means he saves fuel and needs to buy new tractors less often. The old system required twelve to fifteen tillage passes each year, low-gear grinding at one to three miles per hour. The new system using a propane flame means only two or three passes each year, at a speed of seven or eight miles per hour. The average yield on bell peppers in this part of California is twelve to thirteen tons per acre. The Herbert Ranch produces twenty-sven tons to the acre, peppers famous for their thick walls and in great demand on the market.

Hand-Held Soil Lab

Understanding what's going on in the soil is basic to any kind of farming. Up to now, most answers to questions about soil chemistry have required taking soil samples, sending them off to a lab and awaiting the results. That's starting to change, thanks to a line of products from Horiba, Ltd. of Japan. A classic example of a technology-based company, Horiba has thirty-five years' experience with electronic sensors, used mainly to measure emissions in factory smokestacks. Founder Art Horiba decided to expand the idea of sensors out in the field instead of in a lab, and came up with the Cardy family of meters ("Cardy" from credit card, although these sensors are closer in size to a cassette tape).

At present the family has six members -- a pH meter, a soil-salts conductivity meter, a nitrate meter, a potassium meter, and a pair of sodium meters that utilize the same sensor but give readouts either in parts per million or as a percentage. Place a drop of liquid from a soil solution (or from a crushed leaf, a vat of wine, or your well) on the sensor and you get an instant readout. Each meter will register between two and three hundred times, after which a replacement sensor can be quickly snapped into place.

Ted Peck works in the soil-test lab at the University of Illinois and helped Cardy's American distributor, Spectrum Technologies, with evaluation and calibration. He calls the meters "disgustingly accurate." And Richard Smith, Cooperative Extension Agent in Hollister, reflects on the Cardy as yet another incredibly useful hand-held gizmo from Japan: "This is the kind of equipment you can make when you don't have an economy that's geared toward making laser-guided missiles."

So will these hand-held meters put the soil-test labs out of business? Spectrum Technologies' Michael Thurow says no. As yet, there is no meter for measuring total nitrogen, or for phosphorus. He sees Cardy Meters as diagnostic farm-management tools that will help farmers make vastly more sophisticated decisions in the field, and also tell them whether they need the more definitive information that can come from a soil-test lab.

One more question, one more tool. Just how do you get that drop of soil solution to put onto the Cardy Meter sensor? You use a soil-solution access tube, a suction line and a syringe. Basically that's a piece of half-inch PVC pipe fitted with a porous ceramic tip, a small suction hose, a stopper and a finger clamp, to which you attach a disposable (and reusable) 50cc syringe. Stick the tube into the soil to the desired depth, pull a vacuum, and out comes the liquid for testing. All these tools are available from the Irrometer Company, Inc., which sells a whole line of devices for measuring soil moisture.

Whirling the Bottles

2009-02-26T21:52:00.000-08:00

Early Cream Test Centrifuges

Small hand-cranked tube centrifuges were commonly used on dairy farms in the early 20th century, while larger versions, powered by a steam turbine or belt drive, were used in commercial dairies. Although not yet generating the collector interest shown for the hand cranked cream separators (continuous flow centrifuges), early and rare tube centrifuges are actively sought.

Cream separators were first introduced in Denmark, in 1878, and rapidly spread through Europe and America. While various tests were devised for measuring the fat content of milk in the 1880’s, most were beyond the expertise of the average farmer, who wanted to compare the butter fat content of milk from each of his cows. In 1888, F.C. Short, of the University of Wisconsin, published a paper on a milk test in which the sample was first treated with a strong alkali and then an acid. Separation of the released fat was achieved by gravity, which required the samples to stand in a hot water bath at least 1 hour, and a mathematical formula was required to convert the length of the fat column in the neck of the tube into percent fat. In 1890, a colleague of Short, at Madison, S.M. Babcock, published his famous paper on the “Babcock” milk test. This much simpler test required the addition of sulfuric acid, but, a calibrated test bottle was used so the percent fat could be read directly on the tube. In addition, a small centrifuge was used to greatly hasten and improve the separation. This test proved extremely popular and test kits were heavily marketed to farmers, all including a small hand operated centrifuge.

While it is commonly believed that all such centrifuges must be no earlier than Babcock’s 1890 paper, in fact, the earliest reference I have found to a tube centrifuge for testing the cream content of milk was published in The Cultivator and Country Gentleman, in 1881. The author, Henry Alvord, of Hampshire County, Massachussetts, describes the centrifuge in detail, including its swinging buckets and water cushion tubes. The device was invented by Rev. H.F. Bond, of Worcester County, Mass, and was being manufactured in Northborough. One of the machines, costing $10, had been in use by the city milk inspector of Boston for several months. I have found no record of any advertising for this centrifuge and no patent was granted.

Two milk test centrifuges were patented prior to 1890. The first, filed in 1894, used special narrow neck tubes inserted into horizontal holes drilled in the segmented wooden rotor. The tubes had graduated necks for directly reading the percent fat, with different tubes provided for testing skim milk, buttermilk, or cream. The test did not involve treating the milk with acid. In 1889, a patent was granted for a geared, hand cranked centrifuge for testing milk, along with a gauge for measuring the meniscus in the sample tubes. The milk was untreated and the scale on the gauge was not defined.

Thus, most of the components of the Babcock test were devised and put to use by others prior to Babcock’s 1890 paper. However, his was the first highly accurate and quick assay that did not tax the average farmer’s knowledge of chemisty and mathematics.

How to identify a pre-Babcock centrifuge

Pre-Babcock centrifuges will, of course, not be labeled “Babcock Testers”, as many early 20th c. models were. They will also not use standard Babcock test bottles. However, there are many small clinical and lab tube centrifuges dating to this same period, which have nothing to do with milk testing. Also, several quite crude and primitive milk test centrifuges were patented long after 1890, including all wood, rigid head and cord driven models. Thus, primitiveness is not a good indicator of age. If you think you have a pre-Babcock centrifuge we would love to hear about it.

Information on Medieval Blacksmiths

2009-02-26T21:44:00.000-08:00

Medieval Blacksmiths has as much influence on shaping the age they lived in as they did on the metals they worked on. Medieval Europe was the time of the first great advancements in science and technology and new practices in farming, fabrication, construction and fighting were constantly being introduced. None of these would have been possible without the blacksmith.

The medieval blacksmith first came into being as a part time metal worker. In small settlements scattered all over the continent, a person with the right physique was chosen, or volunteered, to do his best in heating and shaping iron to meet the needs of the community her lived in. This was part time work to be done only when the primary duties were completed. However, as the part time iron worker’s skills kept improving, the demand for these goods also grew and so producing and selling metal work became a profitable profession.

As the settlements grew in size and more blacksmiths set up shop, the first guilds came into being. There guilds where more than just trade unions. They set the basics standards that the blacksmiths would work to and allowed the sharing of knowledge among the members. Although most tradesmen guilds of the time were secretive, the blacksmiths guilds were more so than most because theirs was a trade that not everyone could undertake and which also required specialized knowledge which was kept closely guarded. This gave the medieval blacksmith an important and powerful position in the society of the times. Blacksmiths had to be treated with respect or else the house builder would find his nails bending or the knight his sword breaking in battle.

The guilds adopted the apprentice approach to teaching young men the trade. Boy of 15 or so would be apprenticed to a master blacksmith and would live with him as part student and part servant. The apprentice would do all the cleaning and menial chores in both the forge and, if need be, in the blacksmith’s home. He would normally live and sleep in the forge itself and would be responsible for its upkeep, cleanliness and ensuring the forge was lit and ready to use. Initially he would just observe the master blacksmith at work but slowly, as time passed would be allowed to participate in minor aspects of the forging process until such time as he could perform simple blacksmith jobs on his own. Once the master blacksmith was confident of the apprentice’ skills, he would be given more complex work to do, always under the supervision of his master, until such time as the master was satisfied that the apprentice had learned all that the master could teach, at which time he was allowed to go forth and set up his own forge.

The blacksmith was an important member of society and in times of civil unrest or war was allowed to live and work within the premises of the local castle, which was the most secure place. The army needed it armaments and having their blacksmiths captured or killed by the enemy meant that the army’s ability to fight was severely limited. Blacksmithing was not a glamorous profession in medieval times unlike the writer, artist or knight; but his contribution to the society he lived in was as much, if not more, than those to whom he supplied his goods.

Go to Blacksmith Zone to get your free ebook on Blacksmithing at Blacksmith. Blacksmith Zone also has Blacksmith Information, and forums and blogs all about Blacksmithing. Visit Blacksmith Zone today to get your free ebook on Blacksmith. You can visit Blacksmith Zone at http://www.blacksmithzone.com