I am going to become a FARMER.... Yikes, it will be a redub of Green Acres...

@Mannyrock posted:

Arnold,

Thanks for the story, . . . however, those were not bulls.  They were steers.  (I.e., neutered bulls).  They can grow to a very very large size, but are not aggressive.  They were being raised for meat, to send to the stockyard.

Nobody has a herd of bulls, because they can't.  Bulls kill each other.

Every see a western movie when the cowboys have a Spring Round-Up, rounding up all of the cattle that grazed on the plains for the winter and their calves?   When you see the cowboys tying of the calves and branding them, they are doing more than branding, they are also "fixing" the bull calves.

If a farmer is in the business of breeding cattle, or keeping his dairy cows pregnant, he buys ONE bull, and puts it in the pasture with his female herd.    That bull takes care of that herd, and keeps them pregnant, 24/7.     But, when the farmer goes into that field, he has to be super careful.  He has to maintain a safe distance from the cows, or the bull will get aggressively jealous and charge him.       When the farmer wants to round up his cows, he stands on a hill and calls them.   ("Whoop  whoop").  The cows have been trained to come to the call to get fed or milked every night.  They calmly walk in a line up to the barn, led by a large matriarch cow, and will often go right into their stalls.  (My father-in-law raised dairy cows.)   After they have been trained long enough, you don't need to even call them anymore.  Right at dusk, the matriarch cow knows it's time to get fed or milked, and just leads the herd up to the barn.

The bull which generally follow in the rear, trailing the herd, and the gate can be closed before he gets to it, or he can redirected to another pen by using a metal fence chute.

Bulls on farms are being more and more rare.  The reason is that most farmers now just buy the particular semen they want, using UPS or FedEx, and it comes frozen in small flexible containers and packed in dry ice.  They then just insert a packet into every cow,  (by hand and arm!)  to impregnate it.

So, . . if you want a realistic farm scene, you may want to show a line of cows, with their heads tied or in lock chutes, while a farmer goes down the line, . . . er doing this from the rear.  :-)

As I said, being a farmer is a really messy affair!

Mannyrock

Fascinating, Mannyrock, this information you have shared will help modelers make more realistic farm scenes on their layouts.

@palallin posted:

Here's another alternative:

Hilarious

I'd go with dairy farming. You would need some cows, of course, and you can model a barn, pasture and milking stand, etc.

Not to mention all of those cool Milk Refers.

Plasticville barn and accessories....

Mannyrock has described scenes as l watched on my grandfather's dairy farm, only excepting that those cows would show up at the gate twice a day, like clockwork, to file into the barn and into their stalls to munch bagged feed and be milked.  I would have thought applying the vacuum Surge milkers would have made them avoid the barn, but, no.  I would pet the cows in their stalls as a kid, but was careful, as they could kick.  We were warned which field the bull was in, and stayed out of it, but at least by 1960, my grandfather no longer kept a bull but had gone to artificial insemination.  I guess my mother was lucky there were no cows around when she had to lead that bull away from the fire.

Most common injury, dairy farm was getting your foot  stepped-on.  You had to work in close to the animals to install/remove the milking machines.  Latter years my father broke several ribs, being squeezed between two cows.  Horns were gone early, there is a small electrical tool, that removes horns, from new born calves.  A dairy cow, IMO,  anywhere from 800 pounds, to 2,000 pounds.  Even the biggest of us,  are out-massed, by at least 4 times.   Safety meeting of the day.

Note: there is a need, maternal erge to be milked.  I experience modern robotic milkers, a large farm in Vermont.  The cows were good at figure-ing out the machinery.

There is a large dairy farm Idaho.  An internet search yields some information.  26,000 animals. Manure handling, one of the large projects, involves a methane collection system, where methane is returned to a public utility.  Who would a thunk   At 72, I find the world still fascinating.   Mike CT.  Have fun with your model trains. 

This thread makes me wonder: is model railroading popular among farmers?

Arnold, your subject is timely, as morning TV news today addressed methane problem of billions of belching cows.  They are working with growing a type of seaweed, that if fed to cows, in a small amount, cuts methane production by cattle stomachs back to zero. Article said cows produce more methane than motor vehicle engines.  Now, as l helped shovel out a calf stall three feet deep in manure, handling manure is another unfun part of  cattle farming.  One might need to add piles of that, around the barn, as troughs behind the cows also had to be shoveled twice a day. And then again into a manure spreader to be tractored over the fields as fertilizer.  Is there a scent you can add, givien family members don't object (strongly!).   Your pasture fields will need to be spotted with little brown spots ("cow piles").  This was as my grandfather did it in steam era.  Modern dairy farming is quite different, mechanized and enlarged greatly, to survive economically.

@colorado hirailer posted:

Arnold, your subject is timely, as morning TV news today addressed methane problem of billions of belching cows.  They are working with growing a type of seaweed, that if fed to cows, in a small amount, cuts methane production by cattle stomachs back to zero. Article said cows produce more methane than motor vehicle engines.  Now, as l helped shovel out a calf stall three feet deep in manure, handling manure is another unfun part of  cattle farming.  One might need to add piles of that, around the barn, as troughs behind the cows also had to be shoveled twice a day. And then again into a manure spreader to be tractored over the fields as fertilizer.  Is there a scent you can add, givien family members don't object (strongly!).   Your pasture fields will need to be spotted with little brown spots ("cow piles").  This was as my grandfather did it in steam era.  Modern dairy farming is quite different, mechanized and enlarged greatly, to survive economically.

I'd address this post but it's  so full of the very manure it talks about.

'Billions' of cattle... just wow.

Photo of our farm, stolen well borrowed from my daughter,

I haven't personally counted the cows in Wisconsin, or my home state, or the U S., I just quoted the seaweed show on TV. I am sure state and national ag departments can produce figures.  Getting the numbers from very active Danish and Dutch dairy producers, will take longer, and the Brits and the rest of Europe, and then the world. Next there are beef cattle, and "sacred cows" sharing the streets of India.  That TV statement did not say how they planned to feed seaweed to the Mumbai pets or the rest of the world's "free range" cattle. I have noticed that some local barn yards may have what look like a hundred or more Holsteins, while l am sure the farmhouse does not shelter that many humans, even if it looks like it might if you have been holiday shopping, and looking for a oarking place.