Rolling Dog Farm Blog

This weekend I hauled our chain harrow out of the vehicle shed and began the fall ritual of dragging the pastures.  The harrow has tines that point down and into the ground, and as you pull the harrow along behind the tractor, the tines break up the horse manure clumps and scatter them across the field.  Shredded and spread around, the manure becomes fertilizer for the grass.

You can see some manure piles in the foreground of the photo above.  I took that shot today of our employee Cindy dragging while I went back to office work.

This time of year it's always a bit tricky deciding when to start dragging.  We want to leave the horses out on pasture as long as possible — we usually start bringing them back into the corrals around November 1st, weather depending — and we don't want to drag a pasture until the horses are out of it.  But if we wait too late, we can get caught out by the weather and end up buried under a mid-November snowstorm … and we can't drag the pastures then. 

It's a slow process, because we're pulling the 1,000-pound (453 kg) harrow with the tractor going about 4 mph (6.4 kph), and with 140 acres (56 hectares) of our 160 acres in grazing ground, there's a lot of territory to cover … slowly.  Yes, that thing weighs 1,000 pounds but it isn't quite heavy enough, so on Saturday I added a 6×6 pressure treated post to weigh down the front end and today I put two tires on the back end.  It was riding a little too light before and now it seems to have the right weight on it.

At the moment we are dragging the pastures we had already rotated horses out of earlier in the fall.  If Mother Nature cooperates, we'll get them all done before the serious snow arrives.