Farm Week in Pictures is really changing now that harvest is over. Right now we have several projects happening at the same time. We are managing water on one field, tilling other fields, improving my truck, and we even bought a farm!
Harvest Finale
Some of the final results of our 2013 harvest. On Monday we set out to cut our field of double crop soybeans. Double cropping for us is when we plant a late soybean crop after we harvest our winter wheat in early July. Normal planting occurs in April or May. After hearing of some neighbors trying their beans at around 20bu/A and over 20% moisture (that’s pretty wet!) we were very pleased to average 33.30bu/A at about 15% moisture. With the 91bu/A wheat crop this should easily be our most profitable 78 acres.
Looks Like Work
Finally got that shiny new tractor dirty!
Early Snow
Had a dusting of snow stick around for a few hours this week.
Lined Up
I had Line-X bedliner applied to my truck this week. Looks great! Now I need to install my gooseneck hitch and some trailer wiring in the bed.
In the Trenches
We’re still hard at work on our drainage project. This isn’t our machine as we hire this work out, although we do help out a bit. You can see a spool of tile rides on an arm attached to the front of the tractor. The tube feeds through a few rollers into a boot behind the trenching machine. The trencher is powered by the tractor’s PTO while electronics and a laser hold the proper grade for the tile to drain the field properly.
Here I am using our tractor to draw a digital map of the new drainage. Our installer has purchased some new equipment that will replace his laser and use GPS-based information to hold grade. It’s not 100% yet, so we asked he stick with the laser system. He will also be able to plan a tiling project on a computer much the same way we program seeding rates for our planter to follow before we ever hit the field. And when finished we’ll have a nice GPS map of the installation.
This is what a run looks like when the trencher is done. In the background you can see more tile ready to go and our 4630 is getting ready to fill in the trenches.
When you dig you get rocks. This large one we just moved over to a grass ditch bank. It’s too big to lift over and drop into the dump truck without doing damage. Speaking of damage……
The framework the lift cylinder pushes on to dump loads cracked while we had a full load of dirt on board to fill some holes. A little backhoe work and some shoveling got the truck cleaned out. It goes to the welding shop on Monday.
With the truck on the injured list we are just piling up the rocks for now.
All the runs of tile we are putting in now are being added to the project we started last year. Each run needs to be tied to the main line we installed last year. Here the main was right under the black dirt. It’s obvious where the main in buried because you can tell where the subsoil has been disturbed. The black dirt also contained 2012 corn stalks that would have fallen in the trench last year.
What do you think of what we are up to?
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Saw a John Deere 8360R at the 2013 Ohio Farm Science Review with the same setup that the Challenger you have pictured here