Corn Cob Jelly

One of my favorite things to do is try new foods.  Obviously.  One day my Mother-in-law told me about a nice lady in town who makes jelly.  She started to list all the the types of jelly she makes and as she was going down the list she said corn cob jelly.  I'd never heard of that before so I said we should try it. 

It turns out that during the dust bowl one of the only things that the farmers could use to make jelly was corn cobs and most weren't lucky enough to have even that.  The recipe that was used to make our jelly was a family recipe from that time period.

When I tasted the jelly the first thing that I thought was that it tasted like honey.  The other more interesting flavor that I tasted is hard to describe.  Corn harvest has a very distinct smell to it; it's kind of like dusty corn and straw.  The smell of harvest is what the jelly tasted like.  If I had to choose between corn cob jelly and another more common type of jelly like strawberry, I think I'd choose the strawberry every time.  If I was a hungry farmer in the thirties, I think that corn cob jelly would have tasted like best thing I'd ever had.

I'm not going to act like I'm a cook, I'm not.  For the people that are out there who are interested I found this recipe on Food.com.   If anyone tries to make it let me know what you think!

-Farm Foodie Ryan

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