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

Wheat Watch Season 2 Episode 2

Below is a picture of out dry land wheat, and there isn't very much to look at because of the drought.  We actually have a couple problems with our wheat - The first problem is obviously the lack of moisture.  The second problem is that the verity of wheat that we plant in Western Kansas requires a hard freeze after the wheat sprouts.  The process that is required is called vernalization and it is what allows the wheat to flower and produce grain.  So even if we do get some wheat to grow at this point, it will probably not have had enough cold weather to allow it to produce grain.

 

 We dug around a little bit and found some more wheat that was trying to sprout.

On a positive note our irrigated wheat is coming out of dormancy and has started to grow greener and taller.

We recently got a decent amount of snow around the farm.  It was nice wet snow and there was about a foot of accumulation.  Since there has been some cold weather to go along with the moisture there may be a chance that we'll actually have some dry land wheat to harvest. 

-Farmer Ryan