This is the kind of life I'd rather lead

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First ya got to have a bit of land........

Yes a great clip.

Tom... :smiley: :+1: :coffee: :australia:

They sure make it look nice.

Don't have cows, but have a lot of horses. Got head-butted a couple days ago, but just a small bruise on my face. Got stepped on this morning because one of us wasn't paying attention to where my foot was, but at least I wasn't barefoot.

The thing I remind people of when they wax romantic about this stuff is to remember that you also have to go out and do all this even when it's -20F and snow is blowing horizontally, and the troughs have 3" of ice on top of the water, or if it's 95F and 90% humidity and the air is absolutely still and you can just watch the sweat dripping off your eyebrows.

But yeah, it has its moments.

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I would rather come back as my Cat.

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One side of my family are mostly farmers and the other side mostly lumberjacks, both in the NE corner of the USA up on the 47th parallel.
Hard life only begins to describe it, but most of the land is free to roam and before the warming and coyotes arrived we ate wild game and had beautiful places anyone could roam that you don't get so much of where the weather is nicer. You could be in a vacation spot in an hour or so at most and it wasn't over-controlled or crowded. That makes the work more than worth it compared to so many easier places I've been in.

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Do you feed horses tree hay?
Agroforestry goes back at least 14,000 years in Europe.

I don't know what tree hay is but we don't use it. Mainly grass and alfalfa.

The trees at the north edge of your field can provide fodder with nutrients that hay doesn't have, even 8+ months after cutting.
The trees can be made to grow loads of it and you can see how livestock go for different leaves even on the trees just by bending branches down. I have seen 4 tree families recommended; poplar, ash, willow (partly medicinal, the tannin is anti-parasitic, deer eat it but only so much) and mulberry).
Hazel should also be good.
Your ground can be more productive.
The new branches grown have been traditionally been used for weaving of all kinds, even for wattle used in wattle and daub building -- old-time rebar and cement!
There are many videos on the subject, some region-specific.

It should provide variation in livestock feed and cost only effort.

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