Farm Week in Pictures 01/31/2015

Whoa! A whole month of 2015 is already gone.  Even though it’s winter the farm is still pretty active.  Last week saw a lot of grain hauling.  We hauled a little more this week, but we also worked on a few other projects.  Check out this week’s photos as we close out the first month of the year.

Farmer Selfie aka the #Felfie

Trying to keep warm while I load trucks this week!  The drive between the bins and tool shed makes for a nice wind tunnel.  Cool in the summer, cooler in the winter!

Farm Trucking

Monday morning.  I’m fueling up while Dad rolls out with a load of corn.The 1994 Freightliner gets an infusion of fresh oil.  Love this little rolling cart.  Comes in handy around the shop for holding oil jugs or tools and hardware for other projects.Dad tightens up the power steering belt on this truck.  I’ve been noticing a lot of squealing around 1800RPM from this one.  Hopefully this was the problem with a simple fix.

Road Tractor

Moving down the road in the 4630.  Definitely a classic tractor model, and there were plenty of John Deeres with cabs like this one.  I do however prefer the unobstructed view of a modern windshield.

Reliving the Past

Ugh. Rotting soybeans from a silo. These are actually 2013 crop.  Sometimes we make mistakes.  That fall we bounced around to different soybean fields because fields weren’t maturing uniformly due to the weather and soil types.  Apparently we got to close to some of the greener spots and they caused problems by the time we started hauling out the crop.  After emptying the silo through the course of 2014 Dad and I climbed a ladder with a scraper as high as we dared in the silo to scrape rotten beans and pods from the walls.  We probably got 100 bushels out that way.  The silo was filled again with 2014 harvest.  After loading out one truck load we climbed into the silo from the top.  From there we could walk around on the soybeans and scrape off the rotted stuff that was higher than our ladder would take us back in the summer.  The rotten beans pictured here we grabbed as they came out of the chute of the silo door.  The last few loads cleared up and we didn’t get docked for quality so hopefully we’ve gotten the last of these things out of there.  A couple more loads and the silo will be empty again so we can see if anymore remains.  Next time we’ll back off the greener beans a bit more than we did in 2013!

Snow Prep

We are forecasted to get up to a foot of snow by Monday morning.  We’ll be loading and hauling corn if the roads aren’t really bad.  Hopefully this tarp will keep snow out of the grain leg.  It’s a pain to dig out.  Dad and I probably spent upwards of 5 whole minutes on this project.

February starts tomorrow!  I’ll be out-of-state for about two weeks (on farm related business) so keep up with me here and on facebook, twitter, and Instagram for a change of scenery.  And temperature!