Black Friday

It's 9:00 AM on Black Friday. You're late. Time to pull on those Ugg boots, stop by Starbucks, and head out to a big box store to score deals on items the recipient of won't be using 12 months from now.

Full disclosure: I went out at 5:00 am once to buy a console TV at Best Buy. It was fun. One other time, I went toy shopping for my kids, then bailed out and had a Cracker Barrel breakfast with my sister. Also not too shabby.

But, twice in the last 10 years, I've gone "oxen shopping" on Black Friday.  

In 2012, I took the trailer over to Tillers, then helped John Sarge and Dulcy try to herd a pair of unhandled, 6-month-old Shorthorn calves into the barn so we could load them. Sight unseen. I had asked her to pick me out a pair that she thought would work for me. 10 years later, Brutus and Cassius are still a nice choice, although we didn't get them loaded until the next day. The wind on that Black Friday had everybody agitated, so we waited until Small Business Saturday to bring them home.

Last year, after stopping at an outdoor pottery show in town to pick up a "Well behaved women rarely
make history" flask for my daughter, I drove to look at a pair of Brown Swiss calves. The following week, Hamilton and Burr came home with me and started their training. Now they are at Tillers as a "staff team."

No lines, no fuss, no fistfights over Cabbage Patch dolls. Go shop for your next team today.  

The Plane(r) Truth

The new 11', laminated yellow pine yoke is coming along.  Current totals on time for each step:

Layout and cutting 3 center laminations: 1.5 hours 

Handplaning, sanding and glue up of center 3 laminations: 1.5 hours

Drilling bow holes on drill press: 1 hour (probably less, but I started them on the drill press and finished them using a corded hand drill and a forstner bit with an extension. It actually worked pretty well.

Layout and cutting of the outer 2 laminations: .5 hours.

Planing and glue up of outer laminations: 1 hour.

Flattening and smoothing the yellow pine 2 by 12's is by far the hardest part of the job.  Using a jack plane on each works, but I wasn't as happy with my glue lines as I'd like. I'm sure they are plenty strong, just not as nice as I would like, so I pondered other options.

I decided to run the outer 2 by's through my 13' thickness planer, taking 3-4 skim cuts off of the "glue" side. That worked quite well, as I'd just changed the blades. Spurred by that success, I decided to run the beam itself through the planer to flatten and smooth it as well. How did it work? Surprisingly well.

I have a shop-made outfeed table on the planer, so the beam was supported as it came out and it caused a little snipe (uneven cutting) on the end, but overall it worked well with about three light passes per side.  

Hindsight being 20/20, I should have started by running each 2 by 12 through the planer, but that will have to wait for next time.  

Now on to the fun work: shaping and carving.  

Or it didn't happen

 

The standard disclaimer I make to people is: "pictures or it didn't happen." If you spot the alien landing craft, you better have a photo.  So, let's just assume this is a work of fiction. That, or at least it all happened so fast that getting a camera out would have been a level or two above "foolhardy."

Zeus and Cassius were working - and not all that well- yesterday. They just aren't as crisp on turns and sidestepping as Cassius is with Brutus. But, working a span is preferable to a single for me and I like to keep Zeus doing a little something so. . .

I walked them up facing the stoneboat and dropped the chain off the front of the yoke, hooking it to the front of the stoneboat.  This had us facing the stoneboat.  A quick pivot where Cassius steps over the chain (he's the off ox) would have us moving forward. Except the memo didn't make it to Zeus, as he sidestepped out rather than stepping in and back.  

The result was that, while Cassius got three feet over the chain, he had one that didn't make it. His left front foot was up pretty high with the chain between his toes. Zeus, remember Zeus? Zeus who doesn't sidestep well? He was staying put, but coming no closer. 

Cassius started shaking his foot, but it was clear that he wasn't able to move it, step in, or take the tension off the chain. 

Pop quiz time: What do you do?

A. Unhook the chain from the yoke (nope, the aforementioned tension.)

B. Unhook the chain from the stoneboat. (Maybe. I didn't think of that, but it requires moving to the back, unhooking a tensioned chain, then hoping the slack allows him to get his toes off of it)

C. Drop somebody's bow.

Smart money's on "C." I was already in front of them, so I pulled Cassius's bow pin and he was suddenly free. Zeus stayed put when the yoke dropped, which was mighty nice of him.

Cassius backed up to stoneboat and tried to get a nibble of grass next to it. In spite of what just happened, he allowed me to pick up his end of the yoke and drive him under it. Cassius got a lot of praise and brushing when we were all back together.  

Of course, without photo or video documentation, this could all be made up.

Quidditch

“Bad news, Harry. I've just been to see Professor McGonagall about the Firebolt. She – er, got a bit shirty with me. Told me I'd got my priorities wrong. Seemed to think I cared more about winning the Cup than I do about staying alive. Just because I told her I didn't care if it threw you off, as long as you caught the Snitch first.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

Quidditch, the most popular sport in the world of Harry Potter has as its most distinctive feature that it’s played on broomsticks.

Not being a wizard, I’ve never played quidditch, but I do like to keep a broomstick handy when working with a cart. 

When hauling manure in the cart and I’m done for the day, or when switching between compost and hay,  a couple of minutes with the broom tidies things up. No sense in sending for a Quality Quidditch Supplies catalog, any old stiff-bristled push broom will work as well as a Comet 260 or a Firebolt for cleaning a cart.

And if you’re able to fly around the pitch, score a goal, or catch the snitch, so much the better.

Bracket the Problem

 

Tom "being nice" to Blue.

Tom Nehil helps with the oxen classes at Tillers and we've worked together for a few years now in that capacity. While adjusting an Oliver 99 plow (How fine a "99" is as a walking plow will surely be the subject of another tale), Tom mentioned that - as a structural engineer- he recommended that we "bracket the problem:" adjust it too far one way, then the other. Once we had the limits, we could fine tune the middle. The simplicity of the idea struck me and I started employing it in other places.

At school, I teach kids to use 'bracketing' when problem solving or estimating. Kids who have me for multiple classes probably grow weary of the story, but I don't. Lucky them, eh?

Recently, we trained chickens in our psychology class. Amazingly, with nothing but positive reinforcement, the chickens learn- in one class period- to peck a green 'X,' while ignoring a green circle. That got me thinking about the limits of positive reinforcement.

I'm not describing it fully here, but reinforcements make behaviors continue or increase. Punishments make behaviors decrease or stop.  

I'm still not describing it fully here, but please stop calling punishments 'negative reinforcements.' They are NOT synonyms. (Also another tale for another day.)

I often tell students- both high school psych students and adult oxen driving students- that you should aim for 90% positive reinforcements and 10% punishments, although, like Mike Mulligan, I "had never been quite sure that this was true."

Monday, I yoked up Brutus and Cassius to move a little compost. I decided to emphasize the reinforcements and count them, while minimizing- and counting- the punishments. I hoped to hit the 90% mark.

I lost count.  

All was not lost, though, as I was also keeping track of how many times I touched the animals with the stick in order to direct them. 

Taps to start walking? Count them. Taps to stop? Count them. Taps for Gee and Haw? Count them. You get the idea.

Brushes for positive reinforcement? They don't count. They are reinforcements, designed to increase desirable behaviors. They aren't directions or punishments. Instead, they are reinforcements if they happen directly after, or during, a desired behavior. If they aren't related to a behavior, they are just called "being nice."  

Two trips around the yard with the cart, stopping multiple times, pivoting 180 degrees twice, standing to load and unload, sidestepping, yoking, unyoking. About 45 minutes total. The total number of taps? 

Zero.  

Lots of brushing. Lots of praise. But zero physical punishment or tactile direction. I did punish them four times. I barked a command to "head up!" when they were dropping their heads while standing. Since the behavior stopped, it's called a punishment. A mild one to be sure, but I still noted it. . . like a psych teacher would.

I'll keep trying to push the limits toward reinforcements. And, come to think of it, I think I'll avoid the other end of the 'bracket' altogether. I'd suggest you do the same. See how many flies you can catch with honey. . .

Flutterbys: The Return

Funny things happen when you let furniture makers build yokes. . .

One of my favorite inclusions in a table top or a large panel is a "butterfly key." Intended to stop or prevent a split, they are usually about a half an inch thick and oriented across the grain of the panel.  Scribe the outline of the butterfly, chisel out the waste, then press or pound in the butterfly with glue or epoxy. That’s the basic gist of it, although there are a couple of tricks: drilling a small area at the bottom of the hole for excess glue to pool and beveling the edges so the butterfly fits more like a cork in a bottle are just two.

I got the idea to use butterflys on a yoke when I brought the mostly-finished, big elm yoke in to the basement woodshop and the super-dry air encouraged a large check. The butterflys looked pretty, but I wasn’t sure how long they would last.

After nearly 2 years and a lot working hours, I can absolutely report that

butterflys work in a yoke. In particularly dry weather you can see the check enlarge around the butterflies, while in the summer months the check nearly disappears. I can't imagine the yoke surviving this long without the keys.

I don’t know if there’s a perfect wood species for making butterflies. The cherry ones are a nice contrast with the elm and the hickory one looks like a bit of a mismatch. Let aesthetics be your guide if you like, but "pretty is as pretty does" in this case. 

A Pandemic Story

 “Never let a good crisis go to waste”- Winston Churchill

I'm up early and getting around to teach Oxen Driving at Tillers. It's one of my favorite, annual signs of spring.  One year ago, it was the last thing I did before the pandemic shut most everything down.  

It was hard. All of it. I'll spare you those details. You've got your own.

But, a year on from that weekend, my oxen are in much better shape than they were last march. As a driver, so am I. Not a little better in either case. Twice as good. Enough so that I am a little embarrassed about how bad we were then- and I would have said we were pretty good at that time.

What made the difference? Time for sure.  Tom Jenkins told me, "There's not too many problems that can't be fixed with more time in the yoke." The other x-factor is commitment to getting better. What Angela Duckworth calls "grit." Not some magical quality of internal drive, but more like dripping water that eventually wears away stone. The recognition that, with time and incremental progress, we'll get better- because it's important.

We still have our bad days, but dragging the pasture last night with Brutus back from a foot injury, they were good enough that it felt like cheating. I wasn't driving them, just working alongside them. In the state that Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls "flow."

Churchill may have been on to something. What's your story?

Remind me to. . .

I often ask Cara, "remind me to . . ." The ellipses could be replaced with anything from "pick up The Half Blood Prince from the library" to "close the garage door."  

She does. Right then. It's our joke. Then I forget to do the task.
  

Why do I mention it? I'm making a new 11-inch yoke from laminated yellow pine.  And I wonder how long it takes to make a yoke, start-to-finish.

I know a couple of things: 1. Dave Kramer demonstrated yoke-making last summer when I helped teach Oxen Basics and, man, is he fast. Jimmy Johns fast. 2. Most people estimate that tasks will take half as long as they do. Really. We'd never start them otherwise.

So far, I took about 45 minutes to lay out the pattern on the first

section. I was working slowly and adjusting the template dimensions and shape a bit as I went. 

Next, each of the center three sections took 10 minutes to cut out with my very sweet Festool jigsaw. (standard MODA Blog disclaimer: I bought it at retail and get no kickback. And it's still sweet).  Add 10 more minutes to move sawhorses, etc. and I have less than 1.5 hours so far.

Remind me to keep a running total of the time.

But don't do it right now. I'll forget.

The jigsaw leaves a smoooooth finish.

Good TV

 If you watch enough good TV*, you'll come across the same few teams of oxen.  When you think about it, it's little wonder. Hollywood doesn't need 100 teams in any given season, so the same animals work in a number of contexts.  

Luke Conner told me that he prefers solid color animals for movie work, since they can easily be 're-used' in multiple shots. I told him that I always joke with my high school students that his oxen were traitors: They clearly fought on both sides in the American Revolution- sometimes pulling British Wagons, others Continental farm equipment in the show Turn: Washington's Spies. Using black Swiss-Holstein crosses made it an unlikely catch by most viewers used to bad TV**.

This fact stood out as I watched some of M*A*S*H*, Season 5 on Hulu.  Within the first few episodes, the same ox was working both as a single and in a span. With multiple owners. The traitor.

At least M*A*S*H* now qualifies as good TV. What else do you watch that qualifies as Good TV?

*  Good TV: TV with Oxen featured regularly.
** Bad TV: TV without Oxen featured regularly

Hay Staging

 All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;

And one man in his time plays many parts,

              -William Shakespeare As You Like it

When words act as multiple parts of speech, I get excited. This week we staged some round bales. "Staged," as in placed them in position to be fed later. But to keep them off the ground and make unwrapping the net easier, we placed them on a "stage," in this case, a pallet.

A lucky guess on where the flat spot would land.

It's a fun task to "stage" round bales- with all that hooking and unhooking.  The basic set of steps is this:

1. Pull the stone boat up next to the bale (in this case, the bales had a flat spot, so we judged where the boat needed to be to have the bale land correctly.

2. Hook a hay hook into the netting and run a chain over the bale.

3. Move the team so they are oriented perpendicularly to the stone boat.

4. Link an additional chain onto the "hook chain" and hitch it to the yoke.

5. Take just enough steps to roll the bale on to the boat. (Normally, I like to leave the bale with the axis pointing skyward right on the stone boat and feed it like that, but it does tie up the stone boat for the next few days and it means you can only move one bale at a time.)

5. Pull the bale to the staging area. (In our case, next to the pasture fence. We peel and feed hay 2x a day.)

6. Throw a pallet down behind the stoneboat.

7. Repeat steps 1-5 to roll the bale up onto the pallet. (In this case, the axis is skyward, making unwrapping easier)

8. Hook to the stone boat and go back for another.

Like I said, lots of hooking and unhooking.  Half the time the team hooks they have a heavy pull, as they are pulling the bale and the boat. The other half, they are flopping a bale, which I could realistically do myself.  That's nice. It makes the team pull "gently," no matter what.

. . . And if the senior Senator from Vermont offers to help, let him.

Penguin Walking

 

Looks fine.  So does a mine field.

When I was in my middle-20's, like everyone else, I knew I was invincible. But an icy trip to the mailbox did its best to disabuse me of that notion. I can still see it in slow motion: One minute I was up. The next, I was down in a heap. All that was missing was the Wile E. Coyote swirls in the air as my feet, no doubt, reached shoulder height.

This time of year, I'm likely to heed to warnings to "walk like a penguin" on the ice. (See diagram)

As a result, I'm always reluctant to get the boys out when it's icy. The catastrophic costs simply outweigh the benefits.  (Warning: the story at this link is gut-wrenching .) Yesterday, though, we were in that grey area between penguin walking weather and skip-to-the-mailbox weather. The ice had mostly cleared, but the lack of snow had frozen the ground just below the surface. Most places were fine, but the few slight slopes were sketchy at best.

As a result, everyone got a lead rope to the hitching post and back. Taking a chance at Zeus's natural exuberance seemed foolhardy. Walking up and down the slopes and on the icier areas, I walked directly in front of the team to keep the pace indolent. We skipped hauling out a round bale, knowing that they'd need to dig in and pull and we'd be walking at a good clip to do that.  

Live to fight another day.  Last evening's snow appears to have insulated the ground enough to thaw the frozen layer, but I'll walk out like a penguin before getting the boys.

Be Annoying

"I'm not touching you!" *Holds fingers inches from your face*

                                                - Every sibling in history

I enjoy bugging the pets. The dogs have to endure photos with costumes and hats. Same with the oxen. I probably have more oxen-hat-photos than you have oxen photos. Really. 

I also make a regular practice of running hands on the cattle.  A hand around a horn sometimes.  A push of a head. Little things to remind them that I intend to hold my status as the biggest, strongest ox of them all.  As long as they believe it, I'm good. Much of that could reasonably be argued as training.  

But I also have a general propensity to annoy the boys. They have to listen to show tunes when I feel like singing. (In my defense, if there is a bright golden haze on the meadow, it bears mentioning.) 

I also often rub their eyes.  If they've got debris in the corners of their eyes, I brush it out. When we stop for a break, I massage both eyes, my hands rubbing each closed eye while they have to stand and put up with it. Sometimes, I think it calms them down. Others, it calms me and they just have to put up with it. I never thought of it as training. But Cassius has pink-eye.

The vet gave him a prescription.  "A 1/4 inch bead in each eye, every 8 hours, for 8 days." With an 8 year-old, 2000+lb. ox, that sounded a whole lot like: "Aim for some ointment to hit the eye while dodging horns and hooves as the animal dances around looking for an escape route with the one good eye not yet affected by the pink-eye."  

But off I trudged, halter in hand to find the boy in the pasture. "Cassius, head up." Up came his head to take the halter. "C'mon," and we walked to a fence post where I tied him pretty short and tight. 

Then came the moment of truth: He squinted a bit, and would have preferred that I didn't try too hard to hold his eye open. But he stood like a gentleman for both eyes.  

A few days into this, our routine has changed only a little. I've taken to putting his halter on, dropping the lead rope on the ground, and stepping on it.  That little bit of tug keeps him in place. I'm 90% sure that he'd stand for me doing it without any halter, but why risk it? If he never learns he can get away, he never learns he can get away.

So be annoying. And the eye is looking better.

A Hay Toboggan

If we both look away, the load must disappear.

 The calves usually get worked after a bowl of sweet feed. With this pair, it has worked out well to feed them, do other chores, then come back and get them out. Yesterday, "chores" was to make a few repairs on an old, wooden toboggan of my in-laws.  

Having done that, it seemed silly not to drag it around on the new snow.  A quick length of baler twine, a small loop made with a, "half-hitch" to hitch to, and we were ready to go.  (Pun intended, but truth be told, it may have been a half-hitch or it may have been a triple granny knot. I am the world's worst knot-tier.)

The toboggan makes a pretty nice work sled for something like this.  It pulls easily, turns sharply without drama, and doesn't run up on them in the wet snow we had by mid-afternoon. We did one lap around the yard, then walked back to the barn for a bale of straw for the big boys.  Another lap, and it was back for a bale of hay.  

We had one small 'running event' for about 50 feet (I could see they would stop
to sniff the hayrake, so I kept up with them and said "whoa" as they got to the rake.), but all-in-all they did well working without using a rope as an emergency brake. Once we got settled down, they stood under voice command while I got the bales out of the barn- out of their sight.

The Hay Toboggan: a nice complement to The Stone Canoe.

The Best Runaway Doesn't Happen

 "We used to figure that every team new to a cart would probably have one runaway" - Dick Roosenberg

Helping with Oxen Basics at Tillers International for years and then teaching the class a few times, I've been lucky to watch dozens of oxen start their careers.  One of the big milestones is when they pull a cart for the first time.  It can be quite a rodeo, but it doesn't have to be.

Reasons FOR a runaway:  

-A cart is "new" to the team.

-Carts make funny noises, dissimilar to chains and dragged objects.

-Carts have a tongue that weighs down the yoke, a new sensation.

-Carts are a visual that is larger and higher than a dragged object, making them appear to be a larger predator.

-Carts get louder as they move faster.

-Carts "push" the animal on the inside of any turn with the tongue.

-Carts "push" the yoke when the team tries to stop them.

-Adding any two of these factors is not simple addition. It's more like exponential growth for a feedback loop.

Dealing with any and all of these things is pretty similar to the approach I described for an adult team here, but with some minor changes, so let's use the original list to talk through ways to avoid a runaway.

Ways to AVOID a runaway:

-A cart is "new" to the team. Everything is new to calves.  They are visitors to the "Everything Else
in the Whole Wide World Museum." Let the team see and smell the cart. Make time with new things to let them see you acting calmly while they explore.

-Carts make funny noises, dissimilar to chains and dragged objects. Everything following calves can be seen as a predator.  Start by having a partner pull the cart away from the team. If you're by yourself, tie them and pull it "parallel" to the team. Cars travelling along the road don't spook animals as long as they are moving in a predictable way.  Same with 'real' predators on the prairie. Make the cart replicate that so the noise is created in a 'safe' way. We trained a pair of Jerseys that followed the cart and would catch it and sniff and lick it while walking along. Not surprisingly, they didn't spook when hooked to the cart.

-Carts have a tongue that weighs down the yoke, a new sensation. Assume that all animals believe that any new thing is permanent.  They fight a halter since they believe that it's new and will always be there. Same with anything.  Reset that expectation with anything new.  Put it on, take it off. Repeat. By the third time the tongue is in the ring on the yoke, it's usually old hat.

-Carts are a visual that is larger and higher than a dragged object, making them appear to be a larger predator. Ok, there's no solution to this, only an opportunity. Forever, the team will need to stand while the objects behind them change size, shape, and sound. Watch a sound team like Kevin Cunningham's stand for a tractor to load manure into the "ox box," and you'll quickly see why it's an opportunity to build soundness and not an obstacle to success. 

-Carts get louder as they move faster.  Step once. Stop. Step. Stop. Step. Stop. Step. Stop. Step. Stop. Step. Stop. Step. Stop. Are you bored yet? Yeah, they are, too. Problem solved.  

-Carts "push" the animal on the inside of any turn with the tongue. Again, an opportunity, not a problem. Working animals need to sidestep.  Practice, rather than genetics, makes that happen.

-Carts "push" the yoke when the team tries to stop them. We probably should have started with this, but start out going up a gentle rise.  When they stop, the cart stops, rather than pushing up against the team with momentum. If you need to unhook and walk the cart back down a few times, imagine yourself as a 'good' trainer rather than a 'slow' trainer. 

-Adding any two of these factors is not simple addition. It's more like exponential growth for a feedback loop. Yes, a lead rope is probably a good idea at first. Yes, the odds are now ever in your favor.  

Yes, you can do all of these things well and have a runaway. A panicked runaway with calves on a cart is something you won't forget. But the team will. Once. Maybe twice. Learning that they can simply run with a cart and get away from you?  That's another matter. And, as we say, a tale for another day.