Pasture and Irrigation Renovation – Part 9

Posted on by
2

I wrote the last post about this project 9 days ago. The crew had removed the old standpipe at the northwest corner of the pasture and replaced it with a new concrete box. When we irrigate the box will fill with water and create pressure to force water into the rest of the system.

In the meantime we were concerned with getting seed on the pasture at the best time. Michael had finished putting up borders, even though the irrigation pipeline work would disturb the upper end of the field. We needed all of that work to be finished before seeding. I had ordered the seed mix from a company in Tracy, about an hour and a half from here. I said that we’d pick it up to save on shipping cost and to have it here when Michael was ready for it. This time of year farmers are trying to get the field work finished before it rains a lot and they can’t get on the fields at all.

The day after the irrigation work was done in the corner we drove to Tracy to pick up the seed we had ordered. This photo is the warehouse there. There was some kind of communication problem between the order desk and the warehouse. Our order was wrong. I had paid for 350 pounds of seed but there was only 64 pounds there. The people at the seed company said they’d get the seed to us on Wednesday of the next week. That was the day before we were to leave on a 5 day trip. (That will be in the next blog post.)

The next morning I took these photos (above and below) of Michael smoothing out the edges of the field.

Skip ahead five days. The irrigation crew planned to come out on the 15th. We left that morning for Arizona. I asked my friends who were going to farm sit to take photos of the progress for me.

The crew spread the pipe out in the proper location. Then there was a lot of digging. They used this excavator at the northwest corner.They used a trencher for most of the lines.

The pipe that runs east-west in front of the blackberries has one T to send water south to the other east-west pipeline.

This is the rest of the pipeline at the north end in front of the blackberries.

This photo shows what the valves look like. They will be at ground level.

Here is that first east-west pipeline completed.

Pasture and Irrigation Renovation – Part 8

Posted on by
1

I wrote the last post about this ten days ago. This project is taking a lot longer than I’d hoped. The last field work was October 31 when Michael put up the borders. It wasn’t until November 6 that the irrigation part of the project started.

This is a photo taken in May when we were starting to irrigate. This is just outside of our fence line. The water is starting to flow down the ditch after SID (Solano Irrigation District) personnel opened a valve. The red wheel controls the position of the gate that lets water into a pipe at the base of that concrete structure.

The water goes through the pipe into the concrete standpipe in the northwest corner of the pasture. There is an opening that faces south and water flows into our ditch. We are replacing the ditch system on our property with a pipeline. We can’t pump because there is no power back here. Therefore the whole system has to work with gravity feed. Engineers from Pacific Southwest Irrigation proposed this system, approved by NRCS.The first step was to replace this standpipe and pipeline

I was surprised at the finesse with which the excavator operator could work around the existing structure. It was important to not damage the concrete structure that has the red wheel control. They had to dig up the existing pipe that went into an opening at the base of that structure. In this view the top of that standpipe to be removed has already been knocked off.

A lot of dirt had to be moved and this pile was a lot bigger by the time they finished.

Some handwork (with a shovel) was necessary to break away the mortar.

They also used a handheld jack hammer to break more away without damaging the concrete box. The excavator loosened the old pipe without damage to the remaining structure.

Eventually they were able to remove the old pipe and the rest of the standpipe.

In the meantime Dan made a frame and poured concrete to extend the walkway behind the barn. The concrete chunks under the new concrete are the leftover parts of that foundation that we hauled out of the pasture after the initial work to remove it.

This is the new pipe.

It was lifted into position and then cut to fit.

The crew dug a pit and made a concrete pad at the bottom.

The next day they installed two concrete box structures with the pipe that connects the SID structure to this one. The view is to the west. That tree is right at the corner of the property.

The view east. This was last Friday. Another crew will be here this Thursday or Friday to work on the rest of the pipeline. We wlll be gone, but that is another story. I need to get my friends to take photos.

A Birthday Hike

Posted on by
Reply

My birthday was last weekend and I wanted to go hiking. I thought about Mt. Diablo or Pt. Reyes or Mt. Tamalpais, all places that I’d like to explore, but the thought of Bay Area traffic discouraged me. Then I realized that I could take advantage of some open space that is closer to home.

Lynch Canyon is in Solano County just north of the freeway between Fairfield and Vallejo. In the 1980’s the property was purchased by a company who proposed a landfill. Thankfully that was rejected by Solano County voters and the land is now owned by Solano Land Trust.

The land is rolling hills dotted with oak trees. We had the first real rain of the season the previous evening so this may start to green up soon. On the morning of our hike the vegetation was all dry.

The trail we chose headed generally west. I wanted to get to the top of the hills for the view.

My brother, Dave, was with us.

This area could be stunning when there are spring wildflowers. The only plant flowering now was tarweed.

The thistles were an interesting contrast.

That’s my brother.

Cattle graze these hills right now.

This was a beautiful day for a hike.

Once we got on top of the hills we had views all around. This is looking southeast over American Canyon and the marsh land where the Napa River ends at San Pablo Bay. If I turned around I could see the windmills along Hwy. 12 to the east.

We could see Mt. Diablo to the south.

An easy 6-mile hike was a good way to spend my birthday.

When I got home I walked Across the Road with Ginny. Do you recognize that mountain in the distance? That’s Mt. Diablo at a little different angle than the phioto from Lynch Canyon.

Pasture and Irrigation Renovation – Part 7

Posted on by
Reply

As I mentioned in the last post we were concerned with the weather. In some years there could have been significant rain by this time. As it was we’d had only a trace. On October 31 Michael brought a tractor here to put up borders in the field. Brett’s job had been to level the field while creating a slight slope west to east and north to south so that the water would flow. The borders are important to direct the water that will be released from the valves during irrigation.

Green and yellow tractor with orange border maker attached.

This tractor is set up with the border maker. The photo shows the wings that were folded in for transport down the road. That coiled up cable will help to set the distance for the wings to spread out. By the way, those back tires are taller than I am!

Green tractor with orange border maker attached.

A view from the back. The part with the oval cut out will form the top of the borders.

I climbed up and took a photo of the inside of the enclosed cab.

The wings are spread out here to create borders with 30′ spacing. Michael figured out where to start and sets uses GPS (I think) to keep the lines straight.

Computer screen inside cab of tractor.

Michael invited me to ride along. I rode for a few passes until his wife came with lunch and his young son who was going to ride along with him to finish the job. I took this photo of the computerized controls. This reminds me of looking in an airplane cockpit. There are lots of knobs and dials and screens. If you want to do the job correctly you need to know how to set all the parameters. At least the tractor stays on the ground.

Tractor pulling border maker in a dirt field.

This is the last pass down the field.

Prepared dirt showing borders for irrigation. Clouds in the sky.

The next job for Michael will be to come back with a different tractor to smooth out the ends of the field where the borders stop. Michael is doing us a favor by working this 7-acre job. The normal minimum is 40 acres. It makes more sense to use equipment of this size for a larger property.

Red barn in background with blue sky. Field has been disced and has borders for irrigation in place.

Here is how the field looks now ready for seeding.

Pasture and irrigation Renovation – Part 6

Posted on by
Reply

The last post ended with land leveling on October 18. Pipe and other supplies had been delivered October 16 but we had to wait for Brett’s work to be finished before starting anything else. The next two parts of this project were to install the irrigation system (Hunter from the irrigation company) and to create borders and seed the pasture (Michael with the field equipment). Initially we thought the pipeline work would be next and we would finish with the rest of the field work. Michael talked to Hunter about the best order of operation here. We were getting worried about weather. It was important to get this work done before there was too much rain that would stall the work. Also both of them have other much bigger jobs that they are trying to finish while the weather holds. I left it to them to work out the best way to accomplish this. Hunter and Michael went to school about the same time, along with my son, Chris. (In fact, Hunter and Chris were on the same rugby team for a season, and Michael’s mom and I carpooled at times to get the kids to school.)

Michael brought a tractor over on October 24. He and Dan and I had walked the field and determined that part of the field could use another discing. That is where the concrete had been. When leveling, that area seemed to have been scraped but left a surface that wasn’t as good for creating the borders and seeding.

Michael had one of his employees disc that portion of the field to help loosen it up.

The next day Dan and I picked up more chunks of concrete that had surfaced. Over the last couple of weeks we had picked up a lot of this that was scattered throughout the field.

Before Hunter could do the first part of the irrigation work Dan had to remove the fence in the northwest corner of the property.

This is the view from the field to the northwest.

The view from outside the field looking to the east. This is part of the SID (Solano Irrigation District) system. There is a metal gate at the bottom of that concrete structure that lets the water into our ditch which is now all filled in and leveled. It will be replace with a pipeline. Dan removed the fence and old posts and other debris from this corner.

To be continued.

Pasture and Irrigation Renovation – Part 5

Posted on by
1

The last post showed the field being ripped. That was the last week of September. Then we had Lambtown–not that it has anything to do with this, but it’s how I put the dates in perspective and remember where I was..

On October 3 when Brett started discing with the L-disk I taught a class at Lambtown. After that Brett had other work to do in Oregon. I think he thought it would also be helpful for the grass to dry out even more. So he didn’t get back to this until October 18.

In the meantime, the irrigation supplies arrived.

It was unloaded on the square of pasture that is not going to be part of the project.

A few days before Brett was going to level the field he brought the land plane.

It’s difficult to tell the scale when you see the equipment working in the field. In this photo I’m standing near the back tire of the tractor. Brett tells me that those tires cost $8000/pair.

He also brought this tower holding a gadget that helps to laser level the field.

The tractor has he other laser and some how they talk to each other and the scraper and bucket of the level is raised or lowered depending on the desired slope of the field

This stage took about a day and a half.

Brett finished this on October 18.

Pasture and Irrigation Renovation – Part 4

Posted on by
Reply
Early morning view of tractor with ripper behind it in dirt field.

Ground was broken for this project with “obstruction removal” September 18. These photos are from September 25, eight days into it. This is early morning as Brett brought the ripper out again, this time going mostly east-west.

I had been asked if NRCS could bring a crew to film while some of their personnel and I were interviewed for an in-house video they wanted to create. I said sure. The crew set up shades, screens, reflectors, and two cameras and were here about three hours.

I learned a few things from the interviews and discussion. I hadn’t thought about NRCS being a voluntary agency as opposed to a regulatory one. That means that we, the clients, volunteer to have them come to our farms. We have asked for help and they provide it. In our case they have provided all the engineering assistance and the request for funding.

Tractor pulling ripper in dirt field with blue sky.

In the meantime Brett was still working.

Dan had borrowed a larger chain saw from our son and needed to finish cutting the tree that was in the way of truck access for the irrigation supplies that would be coming.

Close up view of ring rollers attached to disc behind a tractor.

Close-up of the ring-rollers pulled behind the disc.

Close up view of ripper behind a crawler tractor with blue sky behind and brown dirt in foreground.

Another view of the ripper…

Track loader with a close up view of the bucket.

…and the track loader.

The field when this part was finished.

Pasture and Irrigation Renovation – Part 3

Posted on by
Reply

Phase 1 of this project was Obstruction Removal which I described in the last post.

You’ve probably heard about “Call before you dig” There is a number to call to make sure that there is nothing underground to worry about–gas, power, phone, water lines. You are supposed to allow a couple of days for the various companies or utilities to give you the all clear. Brett took care of this and marked the corer of the property as directed.

He felt comfortable going ahead with the concrete removal before this approval because that concrete had been there for so long. Brett started to disc with the stubble disc (large blades farther apart), but found that the dallisgrass made it a challenge. He came back with a skid steer tractor with a mower. Dan had been mowing but Brett’s mower set up went a lot faster than what we have. Then he was ready to continue discing after a bit more prep.

Brett used the excavator to drop the culvert from the south end of the barn over the fence and away from the field where he would be working.

Dan and Brett used their respective tractors to work on the ditch at the north end of the property.

Dan pulled out the structures he had made to block and direct water while Brett broke down the berm and filled in the ditch.

Then Brett continued discing with the stubble disc.

After that he ripped going in a north-south direction.

The ripper has three stout teeth that are buried in the earth when they are lowered.

This is how the field looked after discing and ripping.

Dan had more tree work to do so that Brett could get his equipment close enough to the fenceline.

After ripping Brett brought the smaller disc with ring rollers.

It makes the field a lot smoother.

The sheep have been locked out of the pasture, They were happy to get a continued supply of green leaves as long as Dan was still trimming trees.

Pasture and Irrigation Renovation – Part 2

Posted on by
1

A few weeks ago I wrote Part 1 of Pasture and Irrigation Renovation. I ended that post with the sheep coming in from the pasture for the last time and a lot of heavy equipment in their place. A lot went on for a couple of weeks and then there was a lull. I have to go back and find the photos I took at each step.

There was still more work for us (Dan) to do. Here he is removing the wood and stakes we had used to make the ditch more functional near the barn and taking out the culvert.

Before work began we were asked to hold a meeting with the contractors where we could all listen to a representative of the tribal people who used to live in the area. He showed photos of the cultural items that one might find when soil is disturbed and talked about procedures if something was found.

The first job was to remove the old cement foundation that ran north to south over 3/4 of our property. We suspect it was the floor of an old barn–I don’t know what else it would have been. That would have been a big barn and maybe someday I’ll be able to talk to a local history buff who knows what this was. It doesn’t really matter–it’s just that we have always had to work around it. Part of it was broken apart to put the original irrigation ditch through and, even though grass will grow on top in the winter, it dries out in summer and the desirable pasture plants don’t grow there. NRCS calls this job “obstruction removal”.

Brett is the contractor with the heavy equipment. He first scraped the layer of dirt and grass off the top of the cement. Most of the concrete was only 2″ to 3″ inches thick and a lot of it broke into smaller crumbly pieces . The borders were a lot larger however.

Brett used the excavator to scoop up chunks of broken concrete.

We found that a clay pipe ran the length of the concrete.

Brett used the teeth on the track loader to rake through the dirt and find the concrete chunks.

The chunks were loaded into a truck for removal to a place where they’d get broken up even more for use in road bed material.

Eventually the pile of dirt that was scraped off the top was incorporated back into the area where it had been.

Manure spreader driving into green field.

While Brett was working on this part, Dan spread the rest of the composted manure pile.

Manure spreader working in green field under cloudy blue sky.

This part of the job took about three days using all this equipment.

Field Surgery for BettyLou

Posted on by
4

Field Surgery doesn’t necessarily refer to doing surgery in a field, but it means that it is not at the hospital or clinic. This surgery was in the barn.

Patchwork BettyLou is a sheep that I bought in 2021 from a well-respected flock in Georgia. She is only three years old and has several years ahead of her. I had a dilemma.

This is Bettylou in May of this year. The UCD Field Service vets were out here for something else and I brought her in for an exam. The recommendation was to take her to C-Barn (the vet school large animal hospital) for a further look. It was determined that she had an abscess. The abscess was lanced and drained and I was to flush the opening for ten days while it was healing. I did that and finally let her back out.

This is September. I had been watching this get larger over the last couple of months.. It didn’t feel like an abscess and it didn’t seem to bother Bettylou. She didn’t show any pain when I touched it and she was acting normal. I needed to do something though. I am trying to sell a few sheep to lighten the load while we go forward with the big pasture project. Bettylou is not one on the list of most likely to sell, but sometimes you have to cull sheep with problems that will make them less fit to stay in the flock. I couldn’t sell her like this and I didn’t want to sell her anyway, but I needed to do something. The first visit was about $350. I talked to one of the veterinarians on the phone and she asked if I could reduce the swelling. I had been hesitant to manipulate that more than to find out that Bettylou didn’t seem to be in pain and that it didn’t feel like an abscess. Sure enough, I could easily squeeze everything back through a hole in the body wall and feel the opening that was about the diameter of a golf ball. It was a hernia that could probably be fixed with surgery. I got estimates for surgery if I took her to C-Barn and for field surgery. I chose field surgery, the less expensive option. That call was three weeks ago and the hernia was definitely larger by the time we had this appointment.

How did Bettylou get first the abscess and then the hernia? It was not on the midline, but off center. Have you ever seen Jacob sheep at the feeder? Sometimes one will put her head down and butt the one next to her. You can imagine the damage those pointed top horns can do. That’s the only thing I can figure out–that she had a small wound that became infected. It turns out that an access can weaken the tissue around it so maybe that is why a hernia developed even though the original abscess was cleared up.

I hope I don’t get somehow blacklisted for showing the following photos. It’s real life and a happy ending. So what’s wrong with that?

The vets brought a cradle on wheels to hold the sheep in position. She was given anesthesia first and the wool on her belly was trimmed away. Notice how the protrusion is gone. Gravity helped with that as the intestine and fatty tissue dropped back inside the hole in her body wall.

Bettylou’s belly was thoroughly scrubbed and the vets injected lidocaine around the place where the wound would be.

This is the extra skin that had stretched as the tissue weighted it down from the inside.

The vets cut an ellipse in the skin around the area.

Once that skin and the next layer of tissue was removed you could see the ring through which the fat and intestines were dropping. The vets made sure that any adhesions were loosened before closing the wound.

They stitched three layers. First they closed that hole and used what I think they said was a mattress stitch. The different stitches they used reminded me of teaching hemstitching in weaving classes. They closed another layer of membrane (or muscle?)

Then they closed the skin wound.

The final coating of an aluminum bandage spray.

Here is Bettylou on her feet…

…and back in a pen where she’ll stay for 2 weeks.

Bettylou won’t be bred this year but she’ll be ready to go for next year. I’m glad to have been able to keep her in the flock.