B4Boots

Posted By Bill on January 8, 2012

Hay nets again. Hay nets are a ton of work and can be quite a pain. If you just throw them into a field, the critters will move them, play with them, stomp them into the mud, and otherwise trash them.

We have both horses and goats, and we found a couple of neat approaches to keeping them a little neater and easier to find.

First, for the horses. You can buy plastic pallets with fold down sides. Brand new, these things are incredibly expensive, but like all things related to shipping they often get beat up to the point that the shipping companies will sell them off. I bought ours at a local auction.

We have two types, some have a solid bottom, so I drilled a drain hole in them, the others have a waffle style pass through bottom. For each of them we tied a couple of ropes with snaps on them to help hold in the Hay nets.

Here is another shot with one full hay net inside it. We put two nets in for overnight

For the goats, we do things a little different. We take a plastic food grade barrel and cut it in half long ways. We put a couple of boards on it for feet, drill a few holes for drainage, and attach at least two ropes diagonally across, or one at each corner with snaps on.

These keep the hay out of the mud, reduce the amount of climbing the goats do on the hay, and even be used by a horse. The problem with horses is that every now and then they will pick it up by the net and carry it somewhere.

I’ll leave you with one last construction photo showing the holes and a rope with a snap.

Have a great day!

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Posted By Bill on January 7, 2012

This will be the first of a number of Hay related posts. Because of last summers drought in the south, Hay prices are fairly high.

We are in Ohio, and it’s not as bad as it is elsewhere in the nation, but prices are still significantly higher than just a year ago. Both Bonnie & I are frugal people so we have done a few things to get the maximum amount of hay to our horses (and goats) for the least amount of money as well as the least amount of waste.

Recently TheHorse.com posted an article about a study of hay feeding techniques emphasizing loss. The one common concept was that hay nets help you reduce hay loss.

We like small hay nets. We don’t have a tractor or a loader. We buy hay at the best price per pound that we can find, so this means we often are buying round bales. Since we can’t load a round bale into a full size net, we find ourselves “reprocessing” the bale into our small hay nets.

At best this is a tedious (and often back-breaking) chore. We have built a simple tool to help make it go easier

Meet the barrel net filler. Small hay nets are great for small square bales. Slip one or two over a bale, cut the strings and tie the nets. Awesome. When reprocessing round bales, that’s not so easy.

With this critter, you set the net into the barrel and it helps keep it open while you load your nets. From use, you may want to put something under the barrel to make it easier on your back as you load it.

Here are a few more views of it in ‘action’:

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Tags: boot, feed, hay, horse, net

Posted By Bill on February 27, 2011

We have an older horse. I used to do endurance on him. Mark will be 25 this May (2011). He’s toothless pretty much. He lives on a diet of soybean hull pellets, distillers grains, supplements and . . . chafe hay.

In the past we would purchase chafe hay, either as “pelleted” cubes or bagged. Looking at our costs, and also looking at the bag ingredients as they got eaten (mostly alfalfa) we decided we could do better for the big guy if we did it ourselves.

It can be a bit tedious, but we thought we would share what is working for us.

First, an overview:

We are going to take a bale of hay (actually we are nearly half done here) and feed it through this 2002 vintage leaf vac. Twice. Its late February here in Ohio, so it’s low 50′s (Fahrenheit) The snow is melting and things are WET. The setup is so that we can keep the shredded hay as dry as possible while we work on it.

Hay is about $2 a bale here this winter, so we are also using this as a feed supplement for our other 7 horses, our 5 goats, and even a little goes to the chickens. Doing this saves us about 5 gallons of our regular feed (nearly 25 pounds) daily. One full shredded bale will last us nearly a week as a feed supplement for all of those critters!

And before I forget. That bit of HVAC galvanized steel on the front is to re-direct the engine exhaust away from our heads. That bit of plywood of the chipper funnel is to reduce the amazing amount of noise that comes out of there!

Step 1

Get a leaf vac. No Joke. We got the one you see on craigslist for about $100. That was a rare deal, they seem to mostly be about $250-$375 as of this post tonight (I’ll say why I was looking later). Clean it and put in (or get) the smallest “Screen” you can in the grinding part.

The grinding “Screen”:

The one on the right is the original, the one on the left I “acquired” from a friend by trading my coarse one for a “fine” screen. Seems all he wanted was shredded leaves and did not care how fine the result was.

Step Two. Pick your hay:

We are using a grass hay. It’s what we feed to everything here. We’ve set things up so that we can slowly (key word!) feed the bale into the shredder. For future note, the heavier the bale, the less you can feed in before you fill a plastic tote like we use. In these pics (and hopefully videos) We are shredding about 1.5 to 2 full flakes of hay per tote.

This part is a tedious monotonous task, yet somewhat soothing. You need to feed the hay fast enough that you are not wasting fuel, yet not so fast that you are bogging down the shredder. Bonnie (here) tends to do it in large handfuls, I tend to try and peel off a “tube” of hay. It’s not really important which way you do it, so long as the output on the other end is consistent. They key is to listen to the shredder, and if it slows down, let it catch up. Really, try not to even let it slow down for the best consistency.

Step3. Dump the first shred.

OK, so if I could get another shredder (Remeber my craigslist  comment earlier?), I’d own a second shredder, this would all be up on a table, and I’d be feeding a big 55 gallon plastic barrel, not a little tote.

I don’t have that. So, when you shred your 1.5 – 2 flakes of hay, you shut the shredder down and dump the hay like this:

The goal at this point is to not shred any more than your receptacle (in this case a tote) holds. Please note we have the shredder up on a pallet. Prior to his we were not only shutting the shredder down each time, we were disconnecting the bag. Pallet made the bag removal/reinstall go away. Big plus.

Here is the finished volume for what we shredded this round:

Step 4. Shred it again.

Yep, if you are shredding for a toothless animal, or as a feed supplement for smaller critters, once is not enough. We are looking for a 1″ to 1.5″ long grass piece when we do this. You will also get MUCH smaller pieces and seeds. Not a problem if you wet your feed, but it could be if you try and feed this dry.

So you close the bag, pick up the tote, restart the shredder, and feed it back in:

Step 5. Dump the bag again.

It’s not rocket science. Keep it clean, keep it dry, keep feeding it in till you get the size you want. We were paying $10.99 for a 50lb bag of Standlee “Premium Alfalfa Cubes”, and ONLY feeding that (soaked) to our 25yo stallion. It would last two weeks. This entire bale of hay will feed and/or supplement feed for all of our critters (except the dogs) for two weeks, for $2 plus about an hour of shredding.

I forgot to take a photo of the finished volume, but it’s about half the volume from before.

Thanks for reading folks.

Bill J.

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Posted By Bill on October 31, 2010

This is the first of my posts on local rides we do. I’ll try to include a gps track, for those of you in the area and interested in doing the ride yourself. For the techies, I use a garmin 305, and I upload to connect.garmin.com. Ride track http://connect.garmin.com/activity/55081878 The player http://connect.garmin.com/player/55081878 which is a good way to get an idea of our speeds, and the terrain. This trail is one of many at the AEP Coal lands at Conesville, Ohio. You can get a (PDF) map at http://www.aep.com/environmental/recreation/recland/pdf/Conesville.pdf and you will also need a No-Charge permit that you print and sign. You get the permit at http://www.aep.com/environmental/recreation/recland/permit.asp

This ride was Orange-Red-Orange (to Town Square) Purple-Orange-Blue-Orange to camp.

We rode here last summer for our first time, and promised ourselves we come back and do it again. When we did that first ride, it seems we took some of the most technical, as well as the worst footing trails we could. This time we were a little better educated and played it smarter.

AEP at Conesville is, even on the nicest loops, a bit tricky at times. It does not drain well, and even in the driest of seasons there are mud bogs and holes on trail. You’ll get a nice gait (or trot) going, and WHAM! you have to slow for a bog.

On  the vertical parts as you climb the hills it’s not uncommon to find sand, sometimes hundreds of feet of it. The sand parts often degrade into single-track. So at this point we’ve done gravel, dirt, water, mud, and sand. Since this is a boot blog, I thought I’d give you the obligatory boot pic at this point:

That’s the horse I am on, Red, a TWH.

We’ve been seeing lots of wind damage from the previous week, and while I have shots of that, I kind-of-thought this naturally twisted tree was a cool one.

The sand was on the orange loop going into the orange-red split, and all of the red loop. Nearly as soon as we came off red and back onto orange, here comes the mud again.

It’s a little funny. We were nearly to the river and just past the dam (about the halfway point) and Bonnie gets a call from a customer, who has questions while also out on trail. While we stopped, I went ahead and took some shots of Rather’s boots at this point. You can see this stop as the next pause past the dam in the Garmin player http://connect.garmin.com/player/55081878

And we are done. The shot is Red’s front boots. When we got back to camp, we met some other folks riding that day, and one of them was in boots. We had a nice chat about our boots, then load-em-up it’s off to home.

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Posted By Bill on September 18, 2010

OK, today I changed the links in the side bar to allow all of you to get to the blog. I also made some wording changes to the Sizing/Measurement page for boot, as there seemed to be a large amount of confusion about sizing B4Boots. The boots we designed and sell do not need to fit extra-tight. Think of a pair of coveralls, the straps go up and over your shoulders holding the rest in place – that’s how our boots work. Instead of your shoulders, the neoprene bell holds the straps in place. If you place the neoprene bell so that a finger (or two or three) fits between it and your horse, everything goes well.

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Posted By Bonnie on August 17, 2010

 Took a nice 8 mile ride on Red today. Only nearly died twice, not
  bad really and none of it was Red’s fault.  I can’t believe how fast
  some people will drive box truck on a small gravel road that is only
  one lane wide.  I would have been okay with that one, if car hadn’t
  been coming up behind. I thought they were going to have a head on
  right on top of us. Red stood firm through that. But, he didn’t like
  the truck loaded with junk that was making an aweful racket as it
  went down the unmarked paved road at about 55 mph. They had an old
  house antenna strapped on to the truck with it sticking out over the
  cab and hanging over the pick up bed. Looked like something out of
  Road Warrior. Red was going to run and started to spin, but he
  couldn’t decided which way to go.

  But, that 8 mile ride did not put any mileage on the boots I am
  going to talk about that only put about 120 miles of road work and
  20 miles of trail on the set of boots Red was wearing.

  Nope, the boots I have been using on Red and Rather got their 438th
  mile this past weekend on the Amish Trail ride. I am going to
  classify the rail bed as a gravel road because I have been on gravel
  roads that had less rock and were less abrasive
  These are the new soles that are made in Kalamazoo Michigan.  Some
  pretty tough stuff. These boots have 418 miles of gravel roads and
  some asphalt.  And 20 miles of trail rides make up the rest of the
  mileage.  This is the kind of wear I used to get out of the old
  style easyboots that were made in the USA and Mexico, so I am pretty
  happy.  Those old style easyboots and the B4 boot with sole made by
  Hammond Roto Finish in Kalamazoo are the toughest soled boots we
  have ever used. I have never used Renegades so I can’t say how long
  they would last, but I have used, Old Macs, Old Style Easyboots,
  Swiss Horse Boots, Boa Boots, Epics and Bares.

  Heck, they even have some tread left on them. I am actually amazed.
  I wonder how many miles I could have gotten on them if we had just
  ridden on trails instead of doing most of our conditioning rides on
  gravel roads with some asphalt roads thrown in there for spice.

  Please excuse the look of the neoprene bells and the straps. Since I
  like to recycle, the neoprene bells have been used on more than one
  set of boots. Some of the straps have also been reused.  They may
  not be the prettiest boots, but they do get the job done. And you
  can replace the parts and if the parts are still good, you can put
  old parts on a new sole. This makes me feel really good because I
  really try to recycle as much as possible.

  bonnie

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Posted By Bonnie on August 17, 2010

 Bill and I had heard rumors of a trail that had been dedicated to
  use by walkers, bicyclists, Amish Buggies and Horse Back Riding
  somewhere in Knox County Ohio and in Holmes County Ohio.  Finally
  after some internet searching we found where the trail was, but
  there was differing information about trail and if it was open.
  After some searching, we finally found one of the trail heads in
  Danville, Oh. By the way, we are in and very close to the heart of
  Amish Country in Ohio. It is not unusual to see Amish Buggies tied
  to a light pole in the Walmart Parking lot or even parked in the
  Aldi’s.  We have Amish living on our road and there are Amish
  buggies parked at the Martinsburg gas station selling baked goods
  and sweet corn.  Danville is about 18 miles from us if you back road
  short cut.

  We were both excited about trying the trail. The trail is running
  over old rail road bed. So the footing runs from old rail road bed
  gravel to cinders with a few places that aren’t actually maintained
  yet just dirt.

  We drove up to Danville and got the horses unloaded, tacked up and
  booted.  We had a buggy come by while we were putting the boots on
  the horses(barefoot and booted) and it headed on down the trail. During the day in
  Danville, traffic is very slow because it is nearly bumper to bumper
  Amish buggies. On Auction day, you see Amish buggies hauling calves,
  pigs, goats and poultry to auction.

  As you can imagine the trail is fairly straight. But as soon as you
  got on trail, you had a bridge to cross.  I couldn’t believe they
  had actually put rubber stall matts on the bridge.  We never caught
  up to that buggy, they were hauling ass. More on that later.
  The trail was very nice, and it wasn’t long until we got to the
  longest covered bridge in Ohio.  And yep, it was pretty darn long
  for a covered bridge. We have two covered bridges that we ride
  across near our home during conditioning rides, but this one is over
  double their length. You can see pics of it here
  http://knoxcountyparks.org/mohican%20valley.htm

  And yep, they have rubber matting on the covered bridge.  Red and
  Rather both were a little disturbed by the metal joints even though
  they were mostly covered by the rubber matting.

  It wasn’t long after the Covered Bridge that we ran out of
  maintained trail. If the trail isn’t maintained it seems to be fair
  game for four wheelers which are prohibited on maintained trail.
  But the pack of four wheelers we ran into was fairly nice and they
  got better as the day went on as they passed us several times. Red
  likes four wheelers and likes to chase them, they don’t bother
  Rather at all either. Then we had to cross the main highway (State
  Route 62) without knowing where the trail was except for some old markings from a bike
  race. We didn’t see any bicyclists while riding by the way.
  There were some neat views along the trail, going into the old cut
  through the hills was kind of cool and I wish I had brought a
  camera, maybe next time.  The cut is right through the rocks and
  there has been water erosion on it over the years.

  Did I mention it was hot?  Yeah, about 90 degrees and really really
  humid. But there was shade in most areas. Red didn’t want to eat,
  but Rather said he was more than willing to eat anything Red
  didn’t want and more when we stopped for
  a short break. We then ran into another 4 wheeler who passed us
  twice. The second time he asked for directions but it turned out we
  were both on the trail for the first time.

  We were getting worried about water for the horses when we started
  to hear some noises that sounded like a loud speaker. Bill and I had
  all kinds of guesses as to what we were hearing and were amused to
  get to the town of Glenmont ( which we had never heard of before)
  and they were having a car show and a softball game. We crossed
  another road and then came upon a lovely creek that went under the
  old railroad trestle. Red and Rather were both hot and both were
  drinking and pawing at the water, threatening to lay down. We spent
  some time there in the water and letting the horses graze on the
  grass on the banks. Then we climbed up the hill back to the trail
  that went around the railroad trestle and went on. We had done about
  12 miles at that point and were hoping to at least get in a 25 mile
  ride, but it was not to be. The trail ended at a very small railroad
  bridge that the 4 wheelers could get across but the horses couldn’t.
  The wood was missing in a couple places and looked very rotted so we
  didn’t want to risk it. There was no trail around it and hard to
  make trail because of all the weeds and bushes along the trail, so
  we turned back at about 12.25 miles.

  Going back went well until we noticed the sky getting very dark.
  Apparently the thunderstorms promised on the weather channel and on
  weather underground were coming in a little bit early.  As we got to
  the main highway crossing at State Route 62, the wind really kicked
  up. Rather didn’t like it but at least he wasn’t spooking. The
  clouds were swirling around and looking very nasty. Then the rain
  really started. We were pretty much soaked by the time we got back
  to the covered bridge, and I was not feeling too chipper to say the
  least. Seeing the bridge filled with pedestrians didn’t help. There
  weren’t getting out of the way either and some moron had laid a
  garbage bag on the horse part and small kids were twirling
  handkerchiefs and jumping about. Red and Rather did very well
  though. At least one person made an intelligent comment asking if
  those were rubber shoes on the horses hooves.

  We had about 5 miles to go after the covered bridge and up ahead as
  the rain let up we saw a buggy. This was an open top Amish Buggy
  with a family in it holding a huge umbrella. Bill asked if we should
  pass them, but I said why?  They took off and we never did catch up
  to them although we did pace them for quite a while. Then we had
  another buggy come up on the trail behind us. We were hauling as
  we wanted to get back to the trailer and get out of the rain.
  Red and Rather we feeling better because they were getting cooled
  off. The umbrella buggy turned on a side road crossing about a mile
  from the trailer and then we were back. Soaked and my plan for
  checking heart rates and recoveries went out the window as I could
  barely see through my glasses and I was tired of rain already.
  But Red and Rather seemed fine and were eating and drinking. Thank
  goodness I had brought 5 gallons of water for the horses to drink.
  It was kind of a pain to pull the boots and tack in the rain, but we did.
  Never had a boot even think about coming off.

  You can check out the ride at

  http://connect.garmin.com/activity/44539308?sms_ss=email

  and there is more information on the trails at

  http://www.holmestrail.com/

  Well, if anyone wanted to come check out the Amish Country, we are
  close and we have a place to plug in a trailer.

  bonnie

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Posted By Bonnie on February 1, 2010

Thought I would take our Standardbred gelding Rather Arbitrary out for a ride today.  Temps were up around 35 degrees and the sun was out.  Good day for a ride. I had noticed all the rodes seemed clear of snow and ice, so I put the regular B4 boots on instead of the test boots with Ice Traction Studs.  This proved to be a mistake. Rather was feeling good and very willing to go gaiting down the paved road once we got out of the driveway.  Went to turn right on the gravel road and WHOA, lots of ice to the right on the hill.  Didn’t look promising so we turned left onto the gravel road instead as it seemed to be clear.   We only got about mile down the gravel road when we hit a north facing hill that had a lot of shade on it.  Lots of ice.  So we had to turn around and go home.  By then it was too late to change boots and go back out as I needed to run to the post office and do some other errands.   If I go out tomorrow, I am just going to put the Ice stud Traction boots on as we are supposed to get more snow tonight.    I guess I need boots that have the ice studs that pop out with a remote switch   Rather actually seemed disappointed he didn’t get to go out longer and farther.  I was disappointed, need to ride, but I am not suffering withdrawal so badly that I am ready to ride circles around the pasture.

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Posted By Bonnie on January 31, 2010

Just getting started on learning about this blog thing.  I hope to be putting posts up about trimming, hoof boots, riding horses both barefoot and booted, nutrition, trail rides and endurance rides that we use our B4 boots on.   

A little backround information is probably in order. I started making B4 boots in response to not being happy with the other boot choices that were out there.  At the time I started on this project the only boots available were easyboots and Old Macs.  I have tried most of the easyboot hoof boots and several other hoof boots over the years and they have all left me hoping for something a little bit better.  I want a boot that goes on easily, comes off without any effort  or tools, but will stay on my horse and last a long time even when I do most of my condtioning rides on pavement and gravel roads.  Also, don’t want any rubbing, or damage to the hoof or soft tissues of the hoof capsule when I use the boot.  I want a boot that will let the horses hoof act as close as possible to bare.   I have ridden horses for over 35 years and almost all of them were barefoot. I have also been trimming my own horses for 35 years.  While I know how to put a shoe on a horse and have done so, I don’t like to put them on horses and I have had several horses that have let me know that they don’t like being shod but will happily stand there and let me pull their shoes and put boots on them without a fuss. I have one horse that pretty much demands to have his hoof boots on for riding. 

I am hoping to never have to use shoes on any of my horses again. Haven’t had shoes on any of our horses for 5 years.  And we only shod our stallion in plastic shoes for his 50 mile endurance rides.  Our other endurance horses have completed all of their ride either barefoot or booted.

 I am very happy with how the B4 boots are working for  our horse.  I am hoping to work on improving the boots and offering options of pads, ice/traction studs and perhaps boots that are made just for hind hooves.   STanding back and trying to give an objective view on B4 boots is very hard, but sometimes, I feel like a stranger when I look at them or use them. Almost like I didn’t come up with the idea and make the boots.  I pick them up and put them on my horses hoof and I am amazed at how simple it is to put the boots on. I just pick up the hoof and with one hand give a slight twist and a push and they go on.  Fasten the back of the neoprene bell snugly and fasten the straps. When removing the boot, you undo the two straps and open the neoprene bell and if the boot doesn’t fall off on its own,  a slight push with your thumb or your hand and the boot pops off.   If they are muddy or dirty, I hose them off and sit them in the sun to dry.   So sometimes I just stand there and go “wow, that worked so well,  I would buy these boots” .  Then I laugh at myself and start thinking of things I would like to improve or try on new prototypes.

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Tags: barefoot riding, endurance, hoof trimming, hoofboots, riding, trail riding