I made another pass over my custom farming field. Six hours to cover 50 acres with a 13ft harrow and 12 ft cultipacker. I have one more pass to go. I will probably have to make two to get it right. I only bid enough $$ to pay for four passes. I've done three already. However, it is costing less money than I thought so perhaps it will be fine. It takes me 40 to 50 gallons of diesel to cover the 50 acres and 6-7 hours to do it. Fuel consumption is around 7 gal per hour. Not as bad as I feared. Not as good as I had hoped for.
It rained today.
We didn't get the teff baled. I checked the weather repeatedly for the last week. I thought we had one more day of nice weather. The day started out warm but it the showers started about the time we were ready to rake.
I kind of think my hired man took off early yesterday. I check the moisture at 5:30 p.m. It was very close. There was a good east wind blowing and I told him to try baling again at 6:30 or 7 p.m. I think he finished picking up the bales and went home. The moisture tester was still hooked up and sitting on the fender in the rain.
Oh well. What is a couple thousand dollars lost on rained on hay?
There has got to be a better way to make a living.
Will someone just hand me a million bucks? I promise I won't waste all of it-at least not right away!
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You need to go down and learn more from you neighbor to the south! I think he is about the lone ranger on no-till though. You guys sure like to work the you know what out of the ground...
ReplyDeleteHi Ed,
ReplyDeleteI'm working a field for a neighbor. It is a heavy clay soil-sort of like concrete. It was disked a year ago with a 25ft heavy disk. Then they didn't get it worked further or planted. So they turned their cows out on it in the spring. The cows packed it and made it bone-jarringly rough. Plus, then it came up to wild carrot. I've just been working it with our 14ft Bushog disk and an International 914 cultipacker with the teeth down. Took me 3 passes at different angles to work up the carrot.
I did one pass over the real bad stuff with a wheel harrow behind the disk. Then hooked the wheel harrow and culitpacker together. I'll make two passes with that combination. I actually was able to pull down the 2-155 with the harrow loaded with dirt. Otherwise I could pull the harrow/culitpacker combo at 7.5 mph. Fifth over!
Bet you don't have dirt like that!
If I wasn't going to use the No-till drill on it I would probably have another two passes with the harrow before it was ready to plant grass.
I think I'm going to go find a heavy flat roller and skip the final pull with the culitpacker. Then I can take advantage of the tillage action of the no-till drill.
What I wan't to know is the pH of the ground. Bet it need a couple ton of lime but I guess that is not my problem...