Steve Mendez

In the mid nineties when we first discovered how to spawn Bullfrogs; the dragonflies decimated our first couple of tadpole crops.  We could see the Bullfrogs in the spawning pens catch and eat dragonflies and thought "oh cool, another natural food source".  We failed to realize that the dragonflies were laying eggs of their own. The dragonfly nymphs which were hiding in the muck on the bottom of the pen ate a big portion of our tadpoles before we figured out what was going on. Straining the nymphs out of the muck and covering the pens with 1/4 inch plastic mesh solved the disappearing tadpole problem but another problem cropped up when we excluded the dragonflies from the pens. The nymphs had not just been eating  tadpoles but also mosquito larvae. We had to develop a skimmer apparatus to send the mosquito larvae down the drain to the settling pond until the tadpoles grew large enough to eat the mosquito larvae.
So yes I would say that dragonflies are definitely predacious.

There is a not quite abandoned 100 year old cabin in the mountains south of our town. It's still mostly weather proof inside and there is a table, a couple of chairs, a wood burning cook stove, and a cupboard stocked with some canned goods. I talked with a guy who claimed that he stayed overnight in the cabin a few years ago when his side by side broke down during a hunting trip. He waited there for a day until someone came along and gave him a ride back to town. There is no cell phone service in the area.
I took this pic last October during an Elk hunt.

We purposely declined to take any public funds for research, construction, and operation of the farm. We were actually offered several sizable grants early on when we started having some success. My professor and mentor Dr. Herschel Boydstun cautioned us that if we took public money, we would be obligated to share any of our Bullfrog farming discoveries with the public. There is quite a bit of proprietary information concerning our Bullfrog farming methods and that is what we sold (with an NDA) when we retired from farming. We don't reveal any proprietary info to the public.  

I recently read the book The Light Eaters by Zoe Schlanger. This well researched book makes a case for many plants to be at least conscious communicating individuals who can express joy and stress (pain?) to other plants through the air and through the soil.

In winter at our farm we would leave for up to ten days, by first informing our customers a few weeks in advance of the days that we would not be shipping. The day before leaving we would bypass the warm water straight to the drains, raise the water levels a bit, and turn the cold water down to a trickle. Before leaving town we would make sure the Bullfrogs and tadpoles were in torpor on the bottoms of their troughs.
Several times, upon returning there would be a skim of ice on the surface of the water in the troughs. Our animals suffered no morts or ill effects once they were slowly warmed back up.
In warmer weather we had a renter who was happy to spend an hour and a half a day feeding and cleaning in return for a $75.00 per day discount on his rent.  

What are your reasons for purchasing this property?  Is it in California or Nevada?

We planted Kentucky Wonder and Blue Lakes pole beans. Both varieties would have probably grown to 20 feet if our trellis was that high.

I don't know anything about feeding sheep, will rust harm them if they ingest a little?

Be careful using it on a garden.
In the summer of 1978 we bought a huge 100 year old brick church building in a small town in far north Utah. In the evenings large numbers of bats would swarm out of the eaves. We thought they were just living in the eaves and weren't too concerned.
We cut a hole in the 15 foot high ceiling to gain access to the attic and discovered an immense colony of bats living in the rafters and on the wall at one end. A bat expert from USU came out to investigate and identified them as a mother colony of Little Brown Bats. We wanted them out of there so we could expand our living space into the attic. He told us that there was no way they would move until the babies were raised.
That fall after the bats migrated we shoveled out enough guano and mummified bats to cover the 25 foot by 50 foot garden space several inches deep. We tilled it in in the spring with big expectations of a bountiful garden. Nothing grew except for a few bedraggled weeds. The stuff was so hot that it sterilized the soil. We rototilled in truck loads of rabbit dung in the fall and the next spring and for years after we had a very productive garden.
When the bats moved out we sealed up the access points and installed a large bat house under the eaves at the peak of the roof and had a bat colony for the rest of the time that we lived there.  

What a nice and informative game for kids.
Back when I was farming Bullfrogs and Tiger Salamanders I gave a lot of presentations at schools and other venues, part of my presentation involved passing around the various life stages of the animals in water-filled zip-lock bags to students sitting on the floor. It would have been wonderful to have been able to leave a game like this with the teachers to further the learning experience for the kids.
Well Done