BALE OUT!

The lack of moisture this year has created a very high demand for cattle feed because all the grass on the pastures is gone.  Feedlots and ranchers like to feed corn stalks with a high protein source to fatten up their cattle.  Since the demand has been so high we decided to take advantage of the cornstalks that were remaining after our corn harvest this year. 

In order to bale corn stalks we used a power rake to create a windrow.   A windrow is a long pile of straw, hay, or corn stalks. When a baler runs over the windrow it picks up the corn stalks and begins to roll the bale inside the baler.  When the material that is being baled reaches the specified size the baler monitor beeps and the tractor has to be stopped to allow the bale to be wrapped.  Once the bale has been wrapped it gets ejected like in the picture below.

The bales can be held together by twine or net wrap.  Net wrap is kind of like the green grass you get in you Easter basket as a kid only a lot stronger and it is formed into a net to hold the bales together. We use net wrap in our baler because it does a better job for the materials that we bale.  You can see the net wrap roll in the back of the baler below:

In the sixty acres of corn stalks that we baled we made about 350 bales.  When I was operating the baler I would make a bale about every 50 feet. 

The closest thing that I can relate to operating the baler is driving in stop and go traffic on the highway.   You stop and start and stop and start.  The cool thing about baling though is that every time you stop its like making a deposit in you bank account.

-Bale Roller Ryan

Hungry Hungry Heifers

When people ask me what my favorite thing to do on the farm the first thing that usually pops into my head is herding cattle.  I'm not sure what makes it so much fun but flying around on a 4 wheeler and chasing cattle is awesome. 

A couple months ago we had several pastures that we kept our heifers on all varying in distance from about 2 to 15 miles from our house.  Since the cattle had been out on those pastures since spring we were starting to run out of grass and it was time to move the cattle.  We decided would be easier to transport the heifers from the farthest pasture with trailers, but the rest of them were all moved with a good old fashion cattle drive. 

 

The first thing that has to be done when you are starting a cattle drive is round up the cattle into one big group and get them heading toward the gate.  The problem is that they know that there is an electric fence where the gate was so they don't want to get anywhere close to the fence.  Getting them going usually involves tricking one or two of them to go through the gate and once that happens they all just follow the heifer in front of them.

When you have them on the road you mainly spend your time keeping the cattle from doing their favorite things which include: eating, drinking, and peeing.  If you've ever tried to heard football fans toward the game and away from a tailgate party you've probably experienced something similar.

After the first 10 or 15 minutes all the heifers started to get tired and instead of running they just started walking until we got to our destination.  We ended the drive in a irrigation circle of corn stalks, and some wheat stubble.  After we got them there, I could tell they were all happy to be left alone to do their favorite things again. 

-Cowboy Ryan
 
My Grain Headaches Suggested Reading:

•  The Last Cattle Drive: Robert Day - This novel is about a Eastern Kansas guy who moved to a rural area in Western Kansas.  Sound familiar?   It's a lot of fun to read and I've found some parallels between the main characters story and my own.

Corn Cam: My Harvest Headaches...

The corn has reached the final stage of growth and it is fully matured.  One way you can tell that the corn plant is done filling in the kernels of corn is to check for the black layer.  The black layer is a layer of organic material that seals the kernel off when it finishes growing.  After you see the black layer form it is just a matter of time before the corn drys out enough to harvest.

Before we harvest any corn we do a moisture test on each field.  We can do this two ways; the first is to run the combine through the field and do a moisture test on the corn in the bin or we can grab some ears and hand shell them and do a moisture test.  Hand Shelling the corn usually means that the moisture content is a little lower than if it was run through the combine.  So hand shelled moisture needs to be adjusted for this.  If the moisture content is around 15.5% the corn is ready to harvest.  This percentage is important because with a moisture content higher than 15.5% we incur a dock from the corn purchaser. 

Before we even start up our combines we have to figure where we would like to take our corn.  The price of the grain is determined by the futures market but there are other factors to consider.  Basis points are a main factor when determining where to sell the grain.  A basis point is a variance off the Chicago Board of Trade or market price.   For instance: The local COOP is buying corn at the market rate of $7.65 per bushel, but they have to pay for their expenses.  So the COOP buys the corn at $7.65 minus $.10 or 10 basis points.  So we would end up with $7.55 per bushel of corn.

 

Another factor that we have to consider is the doc rate.  If you have corn that is over 15.5% moisture content you can wait to harvest the corn, or pick the corn early and take a dock on the price of your corn.  Between the basis points and the moisture dock there can be a large difference between corn purchasers.  Depending on the year and demand for the grain the basis points can actually be in our favor and buyer pays over the market the price.  Since this year's corn yield was below market demand a lot of buyers in our area are paying over the market price for corn.

If I had to describe this corn harvest by a phase it would be: Hurry up and wait.  Below are some of the things that held us up:

1. High moisture content corn 
2. 60 mile an hour winds - This knocked a bunch of corn onto the ground making it almost impossible for us to harvest
3. Installing a device to the top of our corn header that helps get through down corn, because of the 60 mph winds.  You can see the device in the above picture.
4. Snow
5. Combine Repairs
6. Snow again
7. fog
8. Grain Cart Repairs
9. Semi Repairs
10. Rain
11. Annnd More combine repairs

Something that didn't hold us up but was obnoxious; I got sick during harvest.  Fighting a cold while inhaling dust off of corn is not very fun.

Even though this harvest was a pain, it is satisfying to see the pot of gold at the end of the corn season rainbow.

-Farmer Ryan

East Bound and Down

Well I drove the semi on the road for the first time last week.  I know.  My father-in-law is Brave.  I have to admit it was a lot different than I though it would be. 

The weirdest thing to me is that you don't use the clutch to shift through the gears after 1st gear.  Then the second weirdest thing is that there are two ranges of gears.  The 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th turn into the 6th, 7th, and 8th and 9th gears all with a flip of a switch on the side of the shifter.  So when you have a loaded down trailer you have to shift a ton to get the semi up to speed.  If you don't have anything on the trailer, you can throw it into 6th gear and go from there.  I have to admit I haven't been able to get this to work. Yet.

In the below picture I've circled the switch on the side of the shifter. 

I'm not going to say that the semi was a sports car but when you give it some diesel you feel the acceleration.

-Trucker Ryan

P.S. Maybe now I'll become an Ice Road Trucker...

Wheat Watch - Season 2 - Episode 1 - THE PLANTING

We finished planting our irrigated wheat circles a couple of weeks ago.  We've started to plant our dry land acres and we are about half way done.  The ground is so dry that we are not able to get the wheat seed to moisture, so at this point we are doing what I like to call: A plant and pray mission.  We are planting wheat and praying for rain.

Below is a picture of us planting wheat in one of our irrigated circles.  In the background you can see another tractor.  After we harvested our wheat last June we ran our disc (basically a huge tilling implement) through the circle.  We ran it through again a second time before we planted and when we went to plant we realized that the ground was too loose to plant the wheat.  In order to resolve this issue we ran a packer over the ground to pack the dirt and make the ground nice and flat for when we planted.

On the irrigated land we planted about two bushels (120 pounds) of wheat per acre.  So I spent just about half of my time filling the drill and the other half planting.

 

In the below picture I'm trying to finish the circle so that we could let the sprinkler run over the freshly planted wheat.

As soon as we planted the circle we started the sprinkler up and we've been running it ever since.  Below is about one week of growth:

Below is about three weeks of growth:

It was funny to me when I started filling the wheat drill for the first time.  We did a bunch of work to get the wheat out of the field and now we are doing a lot of work to put it back in.  It's like the Lion King's circle of life, but for farmers. (Queue the Lion King theme song)

-Farmer Ryan

What do Professional Athletes, Rappers, and Farmers have in common?

We make it RAIN!  Although farmers don't use dollar bills they use center pivot irrigation systems.  In Western Kansas you will hear these systems called a lot of different things: pivots, sprinklers, circles, etc... 

I discussed our irrigation wells in one of my previous posts, but the wells are only half of the irrigation equation.  After the water is pumped out of the ground it has to be delivered to the crops.  We do this by using sprinkler systems.

Most of our sprinklers have anywhere from 6 to 10 sections.  Each section has a tower with a control box, cabling, and a section of pipe with hoses and nozzles dropping down.  Below is a picture of the bottom half of a sprinkler tower.  I have circled the electric motor that moves the tower section.  All of our sprinklers use 480 volt three phase electricity to power the electric motors that move the sprinkler towers.  The electric motors have two drive shafts on either side attached to gearboxes which turn the wheels of the sprinkler.

One of my first projects on the farm was stripping all the wires out of sprinkler control boxes and completely rewiring them.  In the below picture there is an example of a control box.  I rewired 8 of these for one of our new sprinklers.  It was kind of like hooking up a new TV and surround sound 8 times except that I didn't get to watch a movie afterwards...  I'd like to report that after rewiring all the control boxes and hooking them all up.  The sprinkler ran like a champ the first time we fired it up.

This season we setup three new sprinkler systems all during one of the hottest and driest years on record.  We had an irrigation contractor leave us high and dry (pun absolutely intended) with some of the wiring and underground work that needed to be done but we were still able to get them setup in time.  This year some of our best corn is growing under the new sprinklers. 

Being a farmer has changed my perspective on a lot of things.  I never really though it would change my perspective from 30,000 feet though.  Now when I fly over farmland I spend my time checking out other farmers' circles: "That circle is HUGE!  That guy has four 1 section sprinklers right next to each other; he must have great water."

Wow.  Who am I?

-Rain Maker Ryan

Corn Cam Part IV

The Corn has reached the R5 stage of corn development.  The ears of corn have fully formed and some of the kernels have developed dents.  

Dent corn or "field corn" is the majority of corn that is grown here in Western Kansas.  It is used to feed livestock, create ethanol, and high fructose corn syrup.  Dent corn is not like the corn you get from the farmers market and eat off the cob.  If you were to try to boil this corn and eat it you would regret it, because it only has about 1/5 of the sugars that are found in sweet corn and it is high in starches. 

We had to call in Air Support to spray our corn for the second time this year.  Our corn is being attacked by spider mites, which eat away at the leaves of the corn plant.  I actually snapped a pretty cool picture of the crop duster.  I think he is about a foot off the top of the corn.

It's pretty fun to watch these planes spray the fields.  They fly under power lines, dodge sprinklers, and fly about 1 to 5 feet above the corn.

-Farmer Ryan

Well, Well, Well

The person that is usually in charge of checking our irrigation wells just went on vacation.  So for the next couple of weeks I'm going to be checking all of our wells.  We have several different types of well engines, and motors and they are all over the place.  Below are some examples of our natural gas well engines.  All the engines we use are all big block Chevy's that have been modified to run on natural gas.   These engines pull the water from the well and they also generate three phase electricity.  The electricity is used to power the center pivot sprinkler systems.  It will take an entire blog post to explain sprinklers so you'll have to stay tuned. 

Below are some examples of electric well motors.  The electric motors run on three phase electricity.  There are two ways to get three phase electricity; 1. Have three phase ran to the location of your well (this can get EXPENSIVE) 2. Setup what a RotoPhase to generate three phase out of standard electricity.

Every morning I go out and check each well to verify it is up and running.  I also check the well engines to verify that they have the correct amount of motor oil, check the water pressure on the water coming up from the well and I check that the drip oil is dripping at the correct rate.  Drip oil is oil that is "dripped" down the well shaft and it keeps the well shaft lubricated.

There are times when I pull up that the wells are not running.  That's when the troubleshooting starts.  Most of the time the wells have been shut down by the safety switches on the Sprinklers.  The sprinkler systems are wired to shut down if they get out of alignment.  There a lot of other things that can cause these well motors to shut down. So every time I pull up to a well that isn't running I know its going to be an adventure.

I had a person ask me how much work it was to run irrigation on our fields. I told her all the things we have to do to keep them running.  She said that it sounded like it was as much work as having kids.  To which I replied -That makes me not want to have kids...  Just kidding Mom... Stop freaking out...

-All's Well Checker Ryan

Corn Cam Part III

Our irrigated corn is plugging away in spite of the heat and it has reached the R1 phase stage of growth.  The R1 stage is when the pollination occurs and during this period it is very important to have enough water and cooler temperatures.

The next two pictures show the tassels on the top of the corn plant and the silks coming out of the top of the corn cob.  The pollen from the tassels falls down and it pollinates the silks.  Once pollination occurs kernels of corn start to form on the corn cob.

Tassels:

Silks:

As I said in my previous post there are some farmers who are cutting silage out of their dry land corn.  The below picture is a silage machine and it is in the process of chopping up some drought stricken corn in a field by our farm.  Silage machines have tons of horse power and they offload all of the silage onto a truck.  Since there isn't any storage on the silage machines there has to be a steady stream of trucks to keep the silage machine running.

On a positive note the corn prices have risen dramatically in the last couple of months.  We are usually done harvesting our corn in November so the futures price that we watch is December corn.  If you would like to track the price as well you can use the following symbol @CZ2.  

It's pretty fun to watch the price of corn to go up this much, but at this point I'm hoping that our irrigated corn will actually produce some corn to sell.

-Farmer Ryan

Corn Cam Part II

We are entering what I have started to call the CORNTASTROPHE phase of 2012.  There have been some extreme temperatures; one day during harvest it was 115 degrees outside.  We are also about 4 inches behind on moisture for the year.  It was so dry during corn planting season that we didn't plant any dry land corn.  The below pictures were taken on a neighboring farmer's field.  

As you can see this corn isn't going to make it

At this point in time most of the dry land corn in this area is going to be tilled into the ground or cut into silage.  Silage is used to feed livestock and essentially is just chopped up plant material.  The problem with using this corn as silage is it can be high in nitrates that actually kill cattle.  So the dry land corn out here is pretty much a bust. 

We do have a decent amount of irrigated corn and I've got some pictures below.  The corn is about six feet tall and most of it has reached the V15-17 stage of corn growth.  Water is very critical at this stage and we are running our wells as much as possible to keep our corn growing.

The finger looking things coming out of the bottom of the corn plant are called brace roots.  They help to pull nutrients from the top layer of soil as well as you guessed it... brace the plant.

Because the drought that is hitting us is actually hitting the corn belt as well, corn prices have risen dramatically in the last month.  I heard a report that stated that the USDA has dropped expected average corn yield for the United States by 15% in the last week alone.  After driving around North West Kansas I feel like they should have dropped it more than that. 

If anyone reading this is taking orders for rain.  I would like to put in an order for about 4" of rain over the course of the next week, and then have temperatures of less than 90 degrees until the corn is ready to harvest.   Thanks!

-Farmer Ryan

I've been training my whole life for this...

Lately I've been spraying herbicides on the summer fallow fields.  A summer fallow field is when farmers don't plant any crops on the field over the summer.  This allows moisture and nutrients to build up over the course of a season, in this case summer, and give the next crop in the rotation the best conditions for production.  The only way to maintain the moisture and nutrients in the fields is to stop any weeds that starts to grow.

Spraying is probably the most fun and stressful thing I've done since I started on the farm.  When you spray you have to determine which chemicals are needed in order to kill the species of weeds that are growing, then calculate how much of each type of herbicide is needed.  If you mess up your calculations you can cause serious issues that can affect crops for seasons and even years.

Once you have all the chemicals needed you have to load the tank in a very specific order.  Some herbicides don't play well with others and can gel in your tank.  If that happens you get the wonderful job of trying to clean those out. Yikes.

The sprayer I have been using has a 90 foot boom on it that sits about 30 feet back from the tractor.  Here is were some of the stress comes in; imagine trying to get a boom right next to a fence when its 75 feet away from you and not hit the fence.

SWITCHES!

The fun part comes with the spray boom controls.  There are 9 switches and 1 hydraulic lever that I use to control the boom.  These switches control the how the boom moves.  The boom can move up and down, it can tilt on the right and left side, and it can swing open and closed.  The boom needs to be about 3 to 5 feet off the ground depending on the weather conditions and the topology of the field.  There are also 5 switches that allow you to toggle the 5 different spray sections on and off.  This allows you to select only certain parts of the boom to spray at any given time.

 

On the spray tractor there is an Autosteer GPS Guidance system.  This system drives the tractor while I control the spray boom.  It also keeps track of where the tractor has been so that you don't over spray or miss any areas on the field.  

The end goal of summer fallow fields is the below picture.  Nothing is growing and all the moisture and nutrients are being conserved.

A lot of people are surprised when I tell them that I have been the one that is spraying the fields.  I've just been telling them that I've been training my whole life for this.  I would like to thank Nintendo, Sony Playstation, and Xbox for the countless hours of training.  

-Weed Death Engineer Ryan

Wheat Watch: Harvest Edition

We made it through the first week of harvest and we completed about 1200 acres of dry land wheat.  I have been operating a combine for about 10 to 12 hours a day. We have three combines running this year.  The two newer combines we had spent the last couple of weeks getting ready, and an older one that Brent had one of his guys work on as a side project.  We also had one of the four wheel drive tractors pull a grain cart.

Everyday before we get started I spend about 1 to 2 hours greasing all of the bearings on the combines, blowing out the radiators, and fueling up.  In IT we used to say things like "this software has a lot of moving parts..."  Working on a combine everyday kind of makes that sound stupid to me now because there are literally moving parts EVERYWHERE on these combines.  

Brent has gotten a lot of really great pictures of harvest.  Most of these are from his camera:

The grain cart is a pretty awesome to have during harvest.  It allows you to keep cutting wheat while you are unloading the grain that is in your bin.  Every time I unload while I'm cutting it reminds me of the of the jet fighters getting refueled in the air by KC - 135 Stratotankers. Except instead of loading with fuel, I'm unloading grain.

The below picture was taken last night when we had about 10 acres left to cut and the sun was going down.  I am unloading my combine into the grain cart:

This is another perspective of offloading into the grain cart while cutting wheat:

On a side note it was a little hot this week...

- Grease Monkey/Combine Operator Ryan