Snow Day

Every time a farmer sees a blizzard coming through, he smiles to himself and dreams of higher yields for his crop the following spring.  Every time anyone with livestock sees a blizzard coming through they pray for it to miss them.  Being that we have livestock and farm I guess I was smiling and praying during our 36 hour blizzard last February.

We had just moved half of our cattle to corn stalks about 10 miles away from our farm when we saw the forecast for the blizzard coming in.  Most of the time when we see this type of forecast we take it with a grain of salt because the weather service tends to be wrong in this regard.  Sorry weatherman relatives and friends...  This time however the blizzard was bad; 12 inches of snow and consistent 50 mph winds with gusts as high as 70mph.

When the blizzard was going full blast and I was stuck in my house I spent a lot of my day trying to not think about what was going on outside.  When the weather is that bad there is nothing that can be done for the cattle.  We had already done everything we could trying to prepare for the bad weather and we hoped it was enough.

The day after the blizzard was over I was ready to get out of the house and inspect the damage.  So I promptly got stuck in a snow drift.  I actually figured I wouldn't make it through but how do you know the limits unless you go too far sometimes?  I was planning on using the tractor we had parked at my house to pull my pickup out of the drift but when I tried to start my tractor the belts that power the water pump on the tractor engine broke because they were frozen together.  Hooray!

The good news was that my father-in-law had three tractors and a pay-loader plugged in "in case we need them".  We plug in our tractors because they have engine block heaters that keep the diesel engine warm and it makes it easier to start in colder temperatures.  So, if you got excited about a Tesla plug in tractor we don't have one of those... Yet.  The best part of the blizzard was when we actually made it to the field with our cattle and found them healthy and inside the fence!

On March 12th I've officially been on the farm for 4 years.  I've been telling people that I've completed my bachelors of farm management and now I'm starting on my graduate degree.  This is also the first year I'm primarily managing the farm and it is as fun and overwhelming as it was when I first started on the farm.

- Officially the Manager of Chaos Ryan

One Billion...

Us humans have trouble comprehending a billion of anything and hearing that we could win a billion dollars in the lottery sounds pretty cool.  So what would a billion of something look like?  I don't have a billion dollars to show you but I do have LOTS of seed wheat.

 

Seed wheat comes in many different varieties and each variety's seed is a little different in size.  Farmers like to look at this size difference in terms of seed per pound.  The variety that I am going to use in my example is Winter Hawk.  Winter Hawk has approximately 18,000 seeds per pound.  18,000 seeds per pound times 60 pounds in a bushel gets us 1,080,000 seeds per bushel.  On our farm we have a 1964 Chevy tandem axle truck that can hold approximately 500 bushels of wheat.

500 bushels of wheat times 1,080,000 seeds equals 540,000,000.  So a couple truck loads of seed wheat is a over a billion kernels of wheat.  Being by this truck has more visual impact than just seeing pictures but now when I think about a billion of anything I think about it terms of 1964 Tandems.  So when I heard the lottery could be up to 1.5 billion dollars I thought of three trucks of wheat.

-Seed Wheat Billionaire Ryan

P.S. - Every time I wrote the word billion in this post I heard Dr. Evil from Austin Powers in my head.