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