[graycat]

WOW. Thanks. The images I saw showed the houses as nearly all log cabins where the logs were not painted, and I didn't see anything that looked like electric power lines. Can get Internet from just cell phones although of course need a source of electric power to charge the smartphones.

Maybe those areas of Europe are catching up, in the technology that is worth having, with England, the US, etc. I wish them well and hope so.

[nottorp]

If you look at TFA there's a photo of a haystack in front of a small manor sized brick house :)

The photos of traditional wooden cabins are more for tourists, or in very remote areas.

Edit: come to think of it, wooden cabins aren't so traditional outside the mountains.

https://gatzi.sunphoto.ro/case_traditionale_romanesti

This looks more like the traditional poor peasant's houses (photos from 1933) and they're made of mud bricks (not sure what the english term actually is) with some wood reinforcement in the walls.

[graycat]

There's more on how to harvest, chop, store for the winter, and feed cattle in

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucVnbKqvZOw

The end of this video shows feeding the silage to a herd of cows.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GkLC61rFIxA

No use of barns or hay lofts!

Store the silage in silos or on the ground covered with plastic.

Scale is nicely large: In total for the one farm, to store on the ground, cover an area maybe the size of a football field, 100 yards by 40 yards, maybe 10 feet deep.

All of that is in productivity per person way above what I saw as a child or young adult in visits to US farms.

[graycat]

"TFA" means WHAT the heck?

I just followed the URL given in this thread and commented on what I saw in LOTS, dozens, of pictures and compared with some of what I know about how the US has solved the problem of gathering and safely storing summer hay for winter animal feed.

In the URLs I followed, nearly all the houses I saw were what in the US are called log cabins and had old logs and no paint.

I didn't see any "mud bricks".

From what I saw, there was no sign of electric power. Thus there would be no "land line" telephones either; from that I concluded no "telephones" -- I didn't think of the old satellite phones, cell phones, or the new versions of phone and internet via constellations of satellites.

Maybe everything I saw was just for tourists. Okay. I saw a LOT of pictures; maybe they all were for show.

In that case, John Deere should open some branch offices (if they haven't already) and sell some of their terrific, highly computer controlled, automated farm equipment, in particular for converting hay fields into bails of hay. Or for planting, growing, and harvesting wheat, corn, or soy beans.

But John Deere can change the culture of a farming community: Their equipment can be highly productive but also highly expensive. The pair can mean that a father and his two sons can run a farm of 5000+ acres. E.g., my father in law's farm was just 88 acres. He raised a family on that (40,000 chickens per batch) and got all three of his children through college. And as electric power came along, he led in the effort and became the head of the local electric utility and lobbied in Washington, DC for the relevant legislation (REMC -- rural electric membership cooperative). He did well: One of his daughters was Valedictorian in high school and Phi Beta Kappa, Summa Cum Laude, Woodrow Wilson Fellow, NSF Fellow in college, and high end research university Ph.D. One of his grand daughters was Valedictorian in high school, Phi Beta Kappa in college, got her law degree at Harvard, started as a lawyer at the high end New York City law firm Cravath-Swaine, got an MD, and now is practicing medicine.

But the 88 acres doesn't work very well now; what he did was tough; it would tougher now. Due to progress in productivity such as from John-Deere, there has been massive consolidation of those little farms into farms of a few thousand acres operated by remarkably few people, for growing wheat, corn, soy beans, or grazing cattle for milk or meat.

So, maybe Romania is doing the same, the hay stacks put together by hand with wooden tools are just for the tourists, and John Deere is getting a lot of business. Good for Romania.

[bigbillheck]

> From what I saw, there was no sign of electric power.

You should consider looking again, I count electric power lines in no fewer than 6 of those pictures.

[graycat]

No way are we looking at the same pictures.

[bigbillheck]

First one with power lines is the 11th one down, "Image Credit Flickr User Camelia TWU".

And in #16 there's https://www.flickr.com/photos/horiavarlan/4884236029/in/phot... and those sure do look like power lines to me.