Farmers do a lot of recycling. It’s amazing sometimes how much scrap metal we seem to come up with in a year. Between used up sweeps, points, discs, chains, and more from field equipment to stuff that has become junk there’s a lot of metal out there. Do we just dump it in a woods or ravine somewhere? No, we take it to town to be recycled and we get a little money back in return. But this isn’t the only way we recycle.
We also recycle all our used oil. With all the oil changes we do on tractors, trucks, and other vehicles we manage to fill up 4-5 55 gallon drums a year with used motor oil. Whenever we fill a drum it goes to our John Deere dealer and we pick up an empty drum from them. They in turn, use the oil to run all the heaters throughout the showroom, offices, and shop areas.
Last winter we took on another recycling project. We built a brand new shop and office to work in. How does building a new work area result in recycling? Well, we spent a good deal of time last summer tearing down our 30+ year old hog buildings. We don’t raise hogs anymore, so we tore the buildings down. The new shop was part of our existing toolshed that we walled off from the rest of the building. In order to put interior walls up inside the shop we had to add studs to the existing walls and build a new wall on one side. The new wall and all the additional studs were cut from the lumber we pulled from the walls of the hog buildings. So we used a bunch of good wood, and didn’t have to buy anything new except the rafters for the office. The railings for our storage loft are actually the gates that we used to contain some of the hogs. We just cleaned them up and painted them (John Deere green of course).
The rest of the materials for the hog building were sent to either to the recycling place in town if it was scrap metal or sold at a consigment auction if the items were in good shape. We’ve sold a lot of gates, feed bins, and trusses from the roof of each building. When we were done building, scrapping, and selling all that remained of the old buildings were the concrete manure pits which were just recently buried where they once stood with the approval of the Natural Resources Conservation Service.
