Where The Wild Things Are

One of the perks of being in a tractor all day is the view.  I get to see all kinds of wildlife and scenery.  The problem is actually getting a picture of animals before they take off. Below are the best wildlife shots I could take in 2013.

A fox:

Some Mule Deer:

My favorite wildlife experience this year has been watching Swainson's Hawks follow my tractor around while I planted corn. When I was pulling the planter I would disturb rabbits and mice from their hiding spots and the hawks would dive bomb them.  One morning I saw a hawk grab a mouse off the ground and throw it up in the air and catch it in its mouth.  That pretty much made my day.

Happy New Years from the farm!

-Wild Thing Watcher Ryan

Hi My Name Is...

Hi.  My name is Brisket.  I am a blue heeler, and I like to chase things like tennis balls and cats.  I was picked up from my last home about a week ago.

In the last week I've learned to sit, and ignore other commands. My humans like to put me on a leash to go on walks, which is a bunch of crap; I'm a farm dog. 

Maybe someday I can help my humans herd cattle, but for now I'm pretty happy chasing cats.

-Brisket

P.S. -  I also like to eat cat fur and poo.

Corn Cam: Season 2 - Harvest Edition

The corn harvest of 2013 finished on our farm a couple of weeks ago.  For the weather conditions this year our yields were good and overall our harvest went well.

 

This harvest I spent most of the time driving the grain cart or I like to call it the Harvest Chariot...  The grain cart's main job is to allow the combine to offload on the go.  Most of the time in the grain cart is spent driving back and forth from the combine to the semis. 

 

Depending on the condition of the field there are times the grain cart operator has to wait.  So I brought a long my favorite farm publication along with me.  Farm Industry News focuses on new farm technologies and how they work.  Basically, it is a great magazine for farm nerds...  So I guess you could say it's perfect for me.

Finishing fall harvest feels a lot like the last day of school; excitement, relief, and the beginning freedom.  Once all the crops are out there is great deal less to be concerned about.  The fields are clear the wells aren't running and the equipment is cleaned and put in storage.

After corn harvest we focus our energies on the business side of farming.  Book work, taxes, and tying things up for the end of the year.  We also spend more time with our cattle because they are no longer at there summer pasture and need more attention. 

Throughout the year I also keep a list of all the things that I want or need to learn about in order to be a better farmer.  Obviously this list goes on FOOREVER, so I try to focus on the things that will benefit our farm the most.  You will probably get to hear about some of these projects this winter.

-Harvest Charioteer Ryan

What is that?

What is a Bushel?

When I came to the farm I knew what a bushel was academically, but I never really knew what one bushel looked like.  So after cleaning out one of our wheat drills I decided I wanted to measure one out.  Below is an approximation of volumetric bushel of wheat.

A bushel can be both a volumetric measurement as well as a mass or weight measurement.  Typically in agriculture the bushel is measured by weight.  For instance, a standard bushel of wheat is 60 pounds whereas a standard bushel of corn is 56 pounds. Of course the weight and density of a grain depends greatly on the moisture content of the grain.

-Bushel Bucketer Ryan

Wheat Watch: Season 3 Episode 1 - Wheat Drill Edition

We are almost done planting all of our wheat.  We thought we were going to be planting into dust like we did last year but we actually got a decent amount of RAIN.  The fields were too wet for us to plant for a little over a week after the rain.  I've never experienced this type of delay before.  I can't say that I was very upset about it though. 

The implements we use to plant wheat and other grains are called drills. 

Depending on where you are from you might have an image like below in your head when you hear the word drill.  The drills we use to plant wheat are actually 30 to 40 feet wide and hold anywhere from 50 to 100 bushels of wheat for planting.  There are two different types of drills that we use to plant our wheat; the disc drill and the hoe drill.

The below disc drill uses two discs to open the soil so the seeds and fertilizer can be dropped in.  After the seed is dropped in a press wheel covers the seed up with soil and packs it into the ground.  This type of drill is best used in a field that has little to no tillage because plant residue from the previous season will not get hung up in the planting process.

The below hoe drill uses a shank with a point on the end that splits open the soil.  The seed, fertilizer and press wheel all work in the same fashion as the disc drill.  In order to plant effectively with a hoe drill the field must be tilled and have little to no plant life or residue.  If there is too much residue it will get caught in front of the shank causing the drill to not plant correctly. 

I planted wheat with both types of drills and they both have their advantages and disadvantages.  The condition of the field, the farming practices used over the previous seasons, and moisture in the soil all help us to determine which type of drill we use. 

Below is one of the first fields we planted and the wheat is looking great.

The other day I heard a farmer say "Getting that rain sure makes me look like a better farmer..."  It's amazing to me how true that is.

-Drill Instructor Ryan

Unknown Substance

Farmer's Log - FarmDate - 13-9-2013

We have encountered a weather event unknown to this area. There is a mysterious substance that has fallen from the sky for the last 2.5 days.  The local population has had issues with transportation as well as communication.  Despite this, they have reached a state of euphoria.  Further investigation will need to take place in order to identify the exact nature of the substance and what caused this weather event.

-Farmer Ryan

OH HAIL NO!

Well the weather threw us another corn curveball; we got hit with hail on some of our irrigated corn.  Hail is bad for a lot of reasons but the main one is that it destroys the leafs ability to harvest energy from the sun.

It might be hard to appreciate just how bad the hailed corn looks, so below is a picture of one of our healthy corn fields.

A couple weeks after the corn was hit by hail I went back to look at the ears of corn.  Below is an example of a corn ear "tipping back".  Tipping back is when the corn plant aborts some of the kernels of corn because it doesn't have the energy to sustain all the kernels on the ear.  Typically a farmer looks for some tipping back because it shows that the population of corn plants in the field is correct.  In the below example, more kernels were aborted than normal because of the hail damage. 

Hail also directly damages the ears of corn.  You can see below where a piece of hail actually hit the ear and destroyed some of the kernels in the ear of corn.  A secondary problem that occurs is that the damaged kernels begin to rot and will rot out the rest of the ears of corn.

Every year the seed corn companies develop corn that has a resistance to a pest or a disease.  I told my father in law that maybe we should look into hail resistant corn next year...

-Hail Hater Ryan

Deep Pockets

Before I commute to work walk outside the house, I fill my pockets with stuff that will help me get through my day of farming.  Below is a list of the items I typically keep in my pockets:

1.  Cell Phone -  I use this for the obvious stuff like phone calls, texts, and emails.  It comes in handy when I want to obsessively check the commodity markets or the weather.  I also have a flashlight app that is useful when I'm working tractors, trucks, or whatever. 

2.  iPod and Headphones - I use these when I spend a lot of time on a tractor.  I also use my ear buds as ear plugs when I am working on loud equipment.

3.  Grid Paper Moleskin and Pen - This is where I take notes if I learn something new.  So as you can guess this book obviously fills up fast.  If I need to fabricate something, I use it to draw out plans before I get started.  The only problem is that the years of IT have made my penmanship look like something like cursive hieroglyphics. 

4.  Pliers - I use these pretty much every day to tighten and loosen nuts, bolts, hoses, etc... I use them as a hammer a little bit too often, which is something I've had to get used to on the farm.  In IT it's never a good idea to hit something in order to fix it.  When you're working on the farm it is pretty much always is a good idea.  Even if hitting it doesn't fix the problem it at least it makes you feel better.

5.  6 - Way Screwdriver -  I'm the only one on the farm that actually carries a screwdriver with me at all times but I use it everyday.  It comes in handy when I test our electric cattle fences, and if I need to hot wire a tractor.

6.  Box Cutter Knife - I would like to say that I carry a nice pocket knife around with me, but how much these tools fall out of my pocket it's just not worth it.

7.  Work Gloves -  I wear these when its really cold or really hot.  My tools sitting in a black tool box on 100 plus degree days (who's dumb enough to paint their toolbox black?) get pretty hot. 

8.  Safety Glasses - I use these when I'm working on things that could blow up in my face, literally.  Most of the time though I just use them for sunglasses.

9.  Farm Hat -  We get these for free from the companies we buy seed, chemicals, and farm equipment.  By free I mean they are the most expensive hats we will ever buy.

-Swiss Army Pants Ryan

Wheat Watch Season 2 Harvest Edition

It's been kind of hard to get excited about writing about wheat harvest this year because most of the wheat we planted failed; the drought killed it.  I know, blah, blah, blah you are sick about hearing about the drought.  Frankly, I'm sick of writing about it.  I have asked around to see if it really does rain in Western Kansas, and I was assured that it does.  I guess I've just been lucky enough to get started in the dry years.

The irrigated fields we harvested were not as good as most years even thought they had the moisture and fertilizer they needed.  They were impacted by two freezes within a week of each other.  The freezes occurred when the growing point of the wheat was out of the ground.  The growing point is the part of the wheat plant that turns into the wheat head that produces the wheat kernels.  These freezes caused the wheat to bronze which as you can see below basically means it turned the wheat a brown/bronze color.  You can think of it as freezer burn for wheat

We only had one dry land field that made it to the harvest stage of the wheat growth cycle.  It got a couple inches of rain that the rest of our wheat missed out on.  It ended up making about a quarter of what our wheat made last year, but at least we had something to harvest.

Even thought its been another disappointing harvest, there is always next season and next year.

-Aspiring Optimistic Farmer Ryan

Let'er RIP

After we plant our corn there is another step we like to complete on our irrigated fields before turning the sprinklers and making it rain the rest of the season.  After the corn has grown to about the v4 stage (four leaves on the plant) of corn growth we like to rip the soil.  We use the below implement called a "ripper" for this operation.  His name is Jack.

There are actually two things that can be done with this ripper: it can cultivate, and it can rip.  Cultivating is when you use the arrowhead shaped blades, called sweeps, to cut the roots of any weeds that are growing between the rows of corn. 

 

This is very useful for volunteer corn which doesn't get killed when we spray for weeds in the fields.  This is because the corn that we grow is roundup ready, so the next year's volunteer corn is also roundup ready and resistant to the chemicals we spray.   Below is a bunch of volunteer corn that is a good example of why we have to cultivate some of our irrigated fields.  Corn requires a lot of care in order to produce the amount of grain it does.  If we were to have let this volunteer corn grow it would have not produced hardly any corn and it would have sapped the water nutrients and light from the corn that we planted this May.

When we rip we just use the bars with barbs on them, called ripper shanks, to fracture the subsoil and allow water to more easily flow into the soil.  This allows our corn to get more of the moisture it needs to produce the maximum amount of corn. 

Once again I got to use my Russian Satellite corrected guidance system.  We were able to use the guidance lines that we created when we planted our corn and modified them to work with our ripper.  This allowed me to rip and cultivate at much faster speed and have much more accuracy.  Not to harp on a subject, but why don't we have better satellites than the Russians.  I mean, what happened to us winning the space race?

-Ryan and Jack the Rippers

Corn Cam Season 2 Episode1: Planting

For most of May we were planting corn like crazy.   We had a lot of acres to plant in a short amount of time, mostly because of weather delays (including snow in May... bleh).

We have a 16 row corn planter that we use for all of our irrigated fields, but it wouldn't have been enough to get all of our of our dry land corn planted in time so we decided to get two tractors rolling.  We didn't have a second 16 row planter, but we did have 2, 8 row planters.  So my father-in-law and I did some "farm engineering" and now we have a second 16 row planter.  Having two different planters pulled by one tractor can have its difficulties, but we were able to plant a lot of acres with that setup and our fields are looking great.

 

We bought a tractor last December and set it up with a new guidance system.  We hadn't really had a chance to try it out until we started to plant corn, and it was a lot of fun to finally get to use it.  Something that I thought was interesting about this system is that it uses Russian positioning satellites to improve the accuracy of the system.

Can you imagine the response I would get if I traveled back in time to the cold war era and told a farmer that I had a tractor that drove itself and that it used Russian satellites to help steer... ?

-Planter Man Ryan

Why Would You Want To Do That?

It's Official.  I've sold my house, my wife has quit her job and we've moved all our stuff to Western Kansas.  For those of you seeing my blog for the first time, let me fill you in on what's going on.  In March of 2012, I moved to my wife's family farm in Western Kansas and since then I've been farming with my father-in-law.  You can see my first blog post by clicking here.  I wanted to try out farming to see if I liked it enough to uproot my life and transplant to a new location.   From the beginning I loved being a farmer.  After getting a taste of the freedom that I found on the farm, I don't think it would be easy for me to move back to the city and the IT world. 

Why would you want to do that?

I want to farm for a lot of reasons, so many that it's hard to list them all.  When I started my blog I hoped that I could try to answer that question.  However, if I am forced to try to succinctly state in a few words why I want to farm I'd have to say: excitement, education, and tangibility.

I've realized that in order for something to be exciting there has to be some uncertainty.  The fabric of farming is wove with many threads of uncertainty and excitement.  It' hard for me to think of anything on the farm that isn't a gamble in one way or another.  What to grow, when to plant it, how to harvest, etc...  That's not taking into account the weather, which in Western Kansas, is as volatile as commodity markets.  Both of which, decide how much money you make or lose in a year as a farmer.

When I was in primary education and even some in college, I had trouble believing that I would ever use the information that was being presented to me in class.  On the farm, I've had to dust off all kinds of facts from my schooling: biology, chemistry, geometry, accounting, physics, the list goes on.  Most of the things that I experience on the farm I've read about in books or I've learned from a class.  The difference on the farm, is that I actually get to see the things happening.  I get to experience them on a completely different level.  For example: The cell walls of plants cells are rigid.  I knew that fact when I was in junior high school but actually seeing the damage that a freeze can cause on our crops by rupturing the cell walls taught me in a real sense why that is important.  Just about everyday I experience something like that example and I love it every time it happens.

On the farm we produce tangible goods that are used for food and fuel.  Just about everything we do on the farm has a physical reality.  When you plant your crops you get to watch those crops grow.  When you help a cow have her calf, you get to see the cute little thing running around two days later and mature.  After sitting in a tractor all day, you look over your shoulder when the sun is setting and there is an order to the soil that wasn't there before.  When I was in IT there wasn't any tangibility in the work I was doing; you can't hold a log file or smell a Unix process.  There is so much more satisfaction for me in seeing and holding the goods that I've helped to produce. 

I've just celebrated my 30th birthday, not by going out with my friends, but by spending all day in a tractor planting corn.  I hope that this next year I can watch the corn develop and have fun harvesting it this fall.

-Farmer Ryan

P.S. - I still don't like country music.

trans MISSION

One of our four wheel drive tractors had an issue with the transmission: when we checked the hydraulic oil it was black.  Since hydraulic oil is supposed to be clear we knew we had an issue.  Unfortunately for us taking out the transmission is kind of a nightmare.  The good news is that my father-in-law is a mechanical genius and so are the guys that work for him.

In order to get to the transmission we had to take off the cab of the tractor:

Then we had to take out the transmission which is about half the size of a refrigerator and weights about a half a ton. 

After all that fun then it was time to take apart the transmission and try to find the problem.

It turns out the transmission was ok, the black oil was actually being caused by the pto clutch assembly.  It burned out when there was too little pressure on the clutch plates which caused them to rub, get hot and turn the oil black.

I know what you are thinking.  And you're right - It does look like a city in the introduction of Game of Thrones...

Once we figured out the problem we rebuilt the transmission and we put all the bigger pieces together. 

The scary part about doing all this work is that there is no way to test the transmission unless you get it all back together and start it up.   Once we got it all back together the transmission worked great.  We are officially ready to start pulling heavy things again.

-Trans Mission Specialist Ryan

Forecast

The forecast for the next week:

Seriously Kansas....?

-Meteorologist Ryan

Shafted

My pickup started to make an interesting noise when I was driving down the road.  It turns out the u-joints on the drive shaft started to fail and I needed to replace them.

Like just about everything I do on the farm this was a new experience for me.  In order to get the u joints out of the drive shaft we had to heat up a plastic seal that held the u joints in place.  There are little holes on the side of the u joints that allow the melted plastic come out.  After the u joints were heated up and the seals melted we replaced the ujoints and reinstalled the drive shaft.

-Mechanic Ryan

Skid Marks

We've been hearing how much other farmers love their skid steers, and we saw one on eBay for cheap so we snapped it up.

I know. It's hard to believe it isn't green, but it came with a John Deere key chain...

When we got it home I tried it out.  It was the first time I operated a skid loader but they are pretty easy to use and I can see how it will be very useful for our cattle operation.  I'm also thinking how cool it would be to build a bike or 4 wheeler ramp with it....

-Skid Steerer Ryan