Lots more happening on the farm this week. Take a look!
New Iron
Our 475 riding mower mows the yards of three houses and all the roadsides between them has 775 hours on the engine. It’s still a great mower and has no problems, but this brand new 730 that was delivered this week is pretty sweet! I’ve never been happy with the Husqvarna rider I bought new when we built our house a few years ago, but I do know I like the 475 so it will “retire” to my house. In the past that mower has seen 100-120 hours of use each year. It may only see a tenth of that at my house. While looking through the service records I noticed that during the 2012 drought the mower only put on 50 hours even with mowing season starting a month early.
On Probe-ation
Each load of grain we haul gets probed and tested for various things. Among them are moisture, damage, and foreign material. Each terminal has it’s own set of parameters that could reduce or even raise the price of your load over the market price.
Wait for It
After being weighed and probed it’s time to unload. The ethanol plant was pretty busy this week.
Dumped
Here’s my corn dumping into the pit. Soon it will be turned into ethanol and animal feed. This plant will also extract corn oil soon if they don’t have it up an running already. I don’t believe at lot of people realize that a kernel of corn doesn’t leave an ethanol facility only as fuel.
Three Men and a Cab
We test drove a couple of backhoes this week. We made a decision on whether or not we will be keeping our JCB 1550B. Stay tuned to see if we bring it back home or something else…….
AgNerd Work
Here I’m getting ready to do some digital drawing of tile lines we laid last fall with my big green and yellow marker. Thanks to Boucher Farms for telling me just what to do so I only had to do it once!
Here’s a video of me drawing with the tractor.
Plotting
One of our seed reps stopped by with his agronomist. They want to run test plots on several farmers to gather data on how their corn hybrids perform over various soil types. This spring they will come out to help us fill the planter and clean it out between varieties. In the fall they will take our GPS based yield data and lay it over the soil map you see here. The program will then create a spreadsheet showing how each hybrid performed across different soils.
I’m taking a long weekend with the wife while our son is having fun in Indianapolis with my parents. What are you up to?
