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

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

 

The New Breed

At the beginning of February we sold all of our bred heifers and unfortunately the amount we got for our heifers was pretty disappointing.  So when a farmer or rancher stops making money it's time for a change.  So we've switched up the operation and bought some older bred cows.  We are now running a calf-cow operation.  Which is when we calve out our cows and raise the calves to weaning.  Weaning is the time when the calf is pulled away from the mother cow. 

When we were breeding heifers we would only purchase Black Angus.  This year we have Black Angus, Red Angus as well as some Black White Face cows.  The Black White Face are a crossbred of Black Angus, and Hereford cattle.  When raising cattle for beef production there is an advantage to having crossbred cattle.  The cattle that are crossbred have a greater genetic diversity, and they typically outperform cattle that are purebred in things like calving birth weight, weening weight, etc...  The technical name for this is performance improvement is heterosis and it is also known as hybrid vigor.  We have about 30 red cows and about 20 white faced cows the rest of our herd is Black Angus.

So far we have about 25 calves and we have only have 1 black white face and 4 red calves.  The rest of the calves are all black because it is the genetically dominate trait.  In order for the calve to have red coloring both the sir (father) and dam (mother) both either have to be red or have the recessive gene for the color red.  This is true for humans as well; the red hair gene is recessive and it only appears when the parents are both carriers of the gene. 

Everyday we go out and check our herd for new born calves.  When we find them we tag their ear and if they are a bull we castrate them.  We do this in the open pasture and sometimes it can be interesting getting the calf away from the cow.  The more protective cows will come after you and you have to keep an eye on them through the whole process.  The guy that works with the cattle the most on our farm has told me that there have been times when he had to roll under his pickup to get away from an angry mother cow. 

I think I've learned more about cattle in the last month than I have in the last year on the farm.  Taking care of the new born calves requires a lot more time than the heifers, but it's worth it to see all the cute baby calves running around. 

-Ear Tagger Extraordinaire Ryan

• My Grain Headaches Suggested Reading: Storey's Guide to Raising Beef Cattle - If you are considering raising cattle or would just like to know more about cattle breeds, genetics, handling techniques, and calving I would recommend reading this book.