I don't know how to make pellets

Somedays are better than others.

I have a fellow who wants five ton of oat grain/alfalfa hay pellets. Nothing will work...

First off a chain broke on the mixer grinder. Fortunately I have a forklift which will lift the full mixer/grinder off the ground so I could get to the chain.

Now the pellets won't stay together. If I switch to the 4mm die I drop from 800lbs an hour to 500lbs an hour and I can't just wander off and leave the mixer running.

If I run the pellets through a second time they look good. That is not real cost effective. I don't know how to add heat. I did add molasses but that just made the material less easy to flow out of the bag I am using to fill pellet mill.

I need a bin to feed the mill and a cooler to cool the pellets and more production.

Or I should quit.

Quitting might be a better plan.

A Snow day and pellet making

We have had several days of snow and freezing rain. This is an exercise in frustration. The combo of snow and freezing rain essential shuts the area down for the day. 

Hardy midwesterners laugh at us until they attempt to drive and pile up in a ditch. Driving on wet ice is not easy and it is better to just stay home for the day.

My wife threatened to keep me inside due to last year's misadventure. But I opined that I certainly was not about to do it again.

The grass was covered with snow so I attempted to pull my daughter on her snowboard. This was a failure as any attempt to turn cause the snowboard to dig into the mud under the snow and down she went. We did try the gravel farm road with more success, until I pulled her through a snow covered mud puddle. It was all somewhat of a disappointment.

I have been making an oat grain/alfalfa hay pellet mix. Oats are at a pathetically now price right now, if they are selling at all. So I have been mixing a 1600lb bag of oats with 800 pounds of alfalfa. It is making a crumbly pellet and I can only get 600lbs an hour. So I am selling a pellet that costs $.26 for $.23 and making up the loss with volume. 

If I buy this pellet mill for $10,000 I can cut my cost from $.15 per lb to $.07 per lb for pelletizing. However that would cost $10,000. I am not a good businessman.

As soon as the snow and rain started I got commentary from my old job. Despite many emergency warnings, the college did not start apply ice melt until it started snowing and then it didn't seem to be working. I got a laugh out of that one. I kind of don't care. But, I could imagine the discussions.

I am somewhat sad to have wasted eight years of my life at the school. I appreciate getting the retirement but I feel my daughter suffered from me not working with her summers. If I was going to get an off the farm job I should have gotten a job that paid the most I could make. But, it is what it is...

Speaking of depression, I have been enjoying the comments I have been reading from people who pretend to be concerned that Trump voters are having second thoughts. 

There is a dedicated group of farmers that attend all the farm meetings and went to Oregon State and participate in all the programs and testify at the legislature and influence policy. They are great people.

Then there is the rest of us. We try to avoid involvement with gubment at all costs. Many of us have observed the change in NRCS and other farm agencies from being a "helper group," to being an enforcement group. We don't get subsidies and we avoid the small farmer workshops and farmer's markets and we just muck about selling to Mexicans on Facebook marketplace and we are happier for it. 

The fewer granola ladies in natural wool sweaters asking if my alfalfa is GMO (I lie) the better. They are going to bitch about something anyway. 

Trump is firing people left and right and it is cutting the ranks of bureaucrats and scientists alike. I am sure it will lead to problems down the road. But, to quote the Australian emigre who bought hay from me yesterday and might buy MuddyValley's tractor and disk tomorrow, "Yeah, me may be screwed, but the alternative was a feckin eejit." (Note, I looked spelling on feckin eejit and the web says that is an Irish idiom. So maybe I didn't hear correctly. However, I took it to mean that he felt the last administration and "Harris for President," was pretty much Looney Tunes)

In other commentary I got pretty much the same response. My friend Jose was drinking coffee with us the other morning and was asking about what I thought about Trump.

He pointed out that many of his friends and relatives voted for Trump to "keep the bad peoples out." Jose and many other Mexican people came across the border two reasons, economic opportunity here and crime at home. The reason they came across illegally was the United State's utter failure to manage planned immigration and work visas. They came here illegally and then worked hard to get citizenship. They don't want criminals, gangs, child molesters, Venezuelans, Cannibals, or any other undesirable people following them here. Many would (and do) maintain property in Mexico and would be happy to come to the US and work, and then return home again. 

It is pretty simple and I know I am right. I have heard people try to explain this to Lars Larson, I have tried to explain this to the Liberal idiots at Linfield and they all go off on stupid tangents. Lars whines about them breaking the law, the Liberals talk exploitation. Thing is, none of these people actually have coffee or eat lunch or do hard work with anyone who is outside their little world. 

I am pretty sure the Republicans will totally screw up the immigration issue and completely lose the hispanic/latin/Mexican vote which comes from people who I feel I have a lot more in common with than many of the douche cleverer-than-you-oh-you-are-an-oppressor-this-is-stolen-land idiots that run this state.

Making feed in the snow. The snow blew in on everything. I need a better building!

Rosco was happy. Of course Rosco is always happy if there is a chance to run.

The Pellet making process

Rosco and the snow

Planting and losing things

A year ago I broke my hip. 

I slipped on ice in my driveway and fell hard.

It is amazing how much difference a year can make in your life. I was in pretty good shape up till last January. 

I am not complaining about my recovery. I got better really fast. Up to a point. Now I just seem to be sore all the time. Maybe I should start doing exercise on purpose instead of by accident.

I find it hard to stay positive.

We have had a long run of cold weather with a fair amount of sunshine. I took the opportunity to replant a small field of rye.

I no-tilled the rye in October at 120lbs per acre. The rye sprouted and looked like a really good stand. Then it started to disappear from the center of the field outwards. It is only a six acre patch. 

I applied slugbait two times and found dead slugs. But the damage seems to be already done. So I replanted.

The plan was to plant at night when the ground was frozen as when the sun comes out the ground gets sticky. This did not work.

When I went to get my GPS computer, the box was empty. I have no idea where I put it. My idea was to use last years field record to find and plant the field in the dark. So I got up early with the intent of planting at daybreak. Of course things went wrong. It takes as long to set up a 5 acre field as it does to set up for 100 acres. 

It was a beautiful day for planting!

No-tilling without GPS in daylight is not a big deal. It would have been nice to lay out the field with the computer as I wanted to go at an angle to my last planting.  But it all worked out fine in the end. Other than the field being 6.5 acres instead of five and I ran out of seed with 1/2 a pass left.

I imagine the computer will turn up somewhere. My daughter thinks she saw it in my pickup. My helper thinks he saw it on the bench in the shop. My wife says I left it on the kitchen table for a long time. I thought it was in my pickup. Who knows... Unfortunately FarmerGPS is not responding to my repeated emails requesting a new activation code for a different computer. Of course I did buy the program 15 years ago.

I was really hoping that the nice weather would generate some no-till planting jobs but it could be that my no-till planting business is over. Different times and different farmers.

I did find a set of keys that has been missing for several years. It was under the seat of the pickup!

In an other direction... I see that there is now a big push to promote stories of disappointed Trump voters. I was sent a video in which an angry guy was talking about farmers (Trump voters) worried that their tomatoes will rot in the field because they can't find cheap undocumented labor to pick them. 

That seems to be a stretch. My experience with Occupational Health and Safety has pretty much frightened me enough to doubt there are farmers making a serious practice of hiring undocumented workers. Also, Trump was pretty clear that his first goal was to shut down the border and ship back the illegals. So if you were depending on exploiting illegal labor for poor wages and living conditions and you voted for Trump I would have to laugh at you.

I feel much of the liberal mind set on farm labor comes from reading "Grapes of Wrath," in eighth grade.

But what do I know?

It turns cold

Its a beautiful life. Just wish there was any money in it...

A rambling discussion of New Year events

I ended 2024 properly. I spilled hot soup on my phone and ended the year with the rainbow screen of death.

It was a fitting end to a depressing year.

I feel worse about the soup than I do the phone. 

I have been regressing on iPhones. Every time I kill one I find an older one somewhere. No sense in throwing good money after bad.

I say 2025 will be better. Or at least that is what I said in the spirited lecture I gave my daughter and her friend she invited to the farm for New Years eve. I need to work on a ceremonial prayer. I just tried to mention things that were important and relevant. They seemed to appreciate my effort.

I cooked a couple steaks on the gas grill and the lovely and gracious wife made the rest. It was a nice dinner.

I asked my daughter why in the world her friend would want to come to the farm and spend New Year's with old folks. She said explosives and vinyl records were the draw. I am well versed in both those areas.

Her friend had just bought a newer stereo and wanted to set it up. It was new enough that I knew nothing about it. It was a modern Marantz amp and Bowers and Wilkins speakers. He seems to feel I am an expert which is a myth I hate to dispel. 

He also had a box of LP records he wanted to clean. I have a SpinClean record cleaner which does a good job. I loaned it to him last year but I used warm water and it warped his records. This seems odd to me but i am not going to try it myself after hearing his story.

We hooked his amp first to my Technics SL-J2 Linear tracking turntable. It is pretty neat as you can skip songs or repeat sides and it is fun to play with. 

No sound on one channel. I didn't mess a lot with it as I had my old Dual 1019 set up to play Christmas Music and it was easy to hook up. (The Dual has a Shure HiTrack, I think it is an old V15.  I splurged and put a JICO stylus on it. (However, they were not $300 15 years ago) I think it is nice sounding cart. The Dual is pretty quit although grounding is always an issue.)

The guy is currently into 1960-70's prog rock  which is not a genre I really appreciate. But it was fun.

I was a little disappointed with the Bowers and Wilkins speakers. They are the modern style bookshelf speakers that are narrow and deep. Simple design with woofer and tweeter. The were very clear and I would say accurate sounding. But I didn't find them very musical. They sounded really good in the midrange. But I am probably not a good judge. I really prefer warm sounding audio and "warm sounding," is essentially distortion.

I am listening to the same album (Dire Straits) that I used to set up his stereo on same turntable using an early 1980's Yamaha amp, DCM Timeframe 100 speakers, and it sounds brighter with more depth on the low range. Of course we are talking a serious difference in size of speaker so it doesn't directly compare. It is just an interesting difference in sound. Not sure which is "Correct."

Later, we blasted a whole series of mortars shots into the heavens greatly distressing all the pets in a mile square and including our own. I had to spend a half hour with Rosco but he seems to have forgiven me by this morning.

Rosco is very lonely when his humans go on trips and he becomes my dog.

Today my wife and daughter went somewhere to watch something with her sister.

I put together an old table. One of her sisters borrowed our "dining room" table and we have been sitting around the living room eating like Philistines off our laps. I think maybe spilling soup on the me, my phone, and the floor might have inspired a directive for me to dig another table out of storage. 

I can't believe this table made it from 1919 to 2025 without being painted some odd color by a frustrated housewife! It is a bit wobbly and took quite a bit of oil but it is not that bad.

It is a 100 year old piece of crap but thank the Lord no one has painted it grey or black. It was taken apart for storage. I tried to set it up yesterday evening but I couldn't find proper screws. Last night I woke up from a sound sleep with the idea to wedge match sticks in the old holes and use modern phillips head deck screws. It actually worked.

So that is the first day of 2025. Not an adventurous start but probably adequate...

I put license on the 1966 Ford again. If only one could return to 1966 or 1970 or just 1990. It was just better times.

An interesting Christmas

I wish a Happy Christmas to my thirteen faithful readers. It has been an interesting year.

I haven't been posting as I had a major change in my life and haven't really had the opportunity or perhaps the motivation. 

My daughter moved home from the big city and most of my time has been spent with her. This is a good thing. 

I am thankful for a lot of things. Most of all I am so glad to be away from a job/institution that seemed to be draining my very soul. 

I am thankful I am working with my nephews. 

I am thankful I can walk. 

I am thankful I sold a ton of hay and one bottle of hemp tonic yesterday.

I am thankful I didn't go broke this year.

I am thankful for friends who supported me when I was injured.

This morning Rosco the dog was waiting at the door. He isn't my dog but seems to like me.

I suppose this should have been a New Years post but Christmas is more of a time for Thanksgiving I think.

Honestly, I have been a bit down. It has been an interesting year. I picked the wrong year to go back to farming. However, this last month I have been thankful to be unemployed. 

I have developed a lot of even stronger opinions than I had last year. These involve the utter pathetic uselessness of a liberal arts education, therapists, liberals in general, and fake positive reviews on Amazon. I also have found out that many of my observations made on this blog were pretty dang accurate regarding my former employer. 

So, I hope you all have a great Christmas. I am not sure I have confidence in the New Year but life is one step in front of the other...

progress...

I deliver hay and do farm stuff

The other day I stopped by the Farm Service Agency to find out about low interest loans for on farm commodity storage.

The nice lady was quite happy to see me after eight years of me avoiding the place. She said I was still in their computers! 

It was a little disconcerting to hear her negativity on the farm economy for next year. However, she was encouraging with our plan to focus more on selling small bales to horse people. It seems to be the only bright spot lately. 

We need to add storage to house another four semi truck loads of hay. (around 2,400 bales of 14" x 18" x36" @ 65lbs each) Storing it outside under a tarp is not working. It makes a mess when it rains.

It sounds like we will be a shoe-in for the loan program. Three years ago the estimate for the addition was $40,000 ready to move in. It seemed a bit expensive then. Who knows the price now.

I helped my nephew haul a load of hay earlier in the week. I haven't been moving a lot of hay in the last few years. This was 110lb three tie bales. It wasn't too bad. 

The delivery location was not great. Tight location. Nephew just finished rebuilding the bed on our machinery transport truck so we decided to try it out. He loaded up the Skid Steer with hay grapple and I drove the old Ford Louisville tandem and we kept coastal traffic at 45 mph for a few miles.

I did feel a little guilty about taking two trucks and not just stacking in the barn. I have had worse barn stacking jobs. I was happy to see the roll-back deck worked flawlessly. 

Unloading truck with skidsteer and hay grapple. Worked pretty slick. The grapple also rotates to facilitate stacking.

Not a great picture but it is proof of life

The next trip with the truck will be to help Muddy Valley move his farm equipment. Probably next week.

Down the highway... My ears are still ringing! Lots of gears to make it to 55 mph.