Paul Trotter

I was just on on a roundwood building course where they had several Veritas scribes and also hand made ones. Having used both I'd say that the hand made scribe was not problematic to use - the largest difference was how easy they are to set up and calibrate. The hand made version was a pain to set the correct distance between the pencils and tighten sufficiently (so that they wouldn't move throughout the whole scribing process) whilst keeping the scribe plumb. The Veritas scribes allows you to lock the pencils separately which makes accurately setting up much easier. The hand made design only has one pencil angle, and I did find it useful to change the angle of the pencils in the Veritas. The veritas scribes probably also have a reasonably good resale value. For my context the price of the Veritas (while expensive for a manual tool) is probably going to be worth the convenience and time saving. However in a context with lots of time less money or less roundwood joints to make the hand made version could be an appropriate choice. Whichever way you go make sure you can set it up correctly whilst plumb otherwise neither would work well.

What Jeff Marchand said about cattle and sheep loving black locust and then loosing interest in it matches up exactly to the behaviour id expect. As I understand it Black Locust is an established silvopasture crop for feeding to animals (my interest is small ruminants). It has great crude protein levels, but this is counterbalanced by high tannin levels which cause issues with digestibility. The net effect is that is a useful feed crop, but animals may benefit even more from a crop that has a lower crude protein level to begin with, but better digestibility so they can utilize more of it. I'm planning on setting up a silvopasture system so have been reading up on this. I'd recommend Steve Gabriel's Silvopasture book and there are great academic journal papers on research gate and Google scholar. I have not come across any academic work suggesting that black locust is poisonous to small ruminants when supplied as a component in a mixed diet or free choice system. The high tannin levels sound like they could cause problems if you fed black locust exclusively.