I should have bought stocks. Case/New Holland, AGCO, Ford, all are way up. I didn't. Of course this may have been because I was broke rather than I figured the world was going to end. I'm not altogether sure we are out of the woods yet.
I have been grinding feed. We do have lots of good ideas. We grew an acre of soybeans as a test. We combined some corn as a test. While we do have good ideas sometimes we fall short in the execution of those ideas.
The soybeans were pretty much a failure. Just after I planted them they skys opened up and we got three inches of rain in a half hour. I have heard that this is not good for soybeans. Then I tried to break the crust after the rain with a rotary hoe. This really didn't work. I think I did something wrong. I did run over my hat and put a hole in the bill. It was a new hat.
Then there was the corn test. The standing corn combined with no problems. Aside from the massive plug-up with the straw chopper. The corn that was knocked down by the irrigator and skipped by the custom silage chopper didn't pick up so well and we ended up with a lot of dirt in the tank. Then there was the moisture problem. We needed to transfer the combine tank load of corn between a couple different bags so help dry it out. It didn't happen. So the corn is moldy.
I sold the corn to a fellow who wants to feed it to his free-range chickens. He wants me to mix it with oats and wheat and triticale.
So I ran the corn and beans through my old Minneapolis-Moline hammer mill. The belt keeps flying off. I can't keep it tight, it has a rip in it, the hammer mill plugs up, adding triticale and oats is not getting the moisture down. I filled a big bag with the mix of corn, soybeans and whole oats. The moisture was 19 percent. I think I will spread it out in a truck bed and see if it drys down. I need to get the guy a sample to try out. I don't want to mix the good feed with this stuff if it is going to spoil.
Then I discovered that I forgot to save any barley.
Last year I sold a lot of barley and oats for feed. I totally forgot to save any barley this year.
This may been one of the reasons I am not a sucessful farmer...
Perhaps my daughter will marry well...
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I'll leave a comment at requested. I didn't know MM made a grinder. We had a U302 growing up. I seem to recall it as not being so great. We traded it for a 1750, which I loved. This was then replaced by an AC 7000, which I didn't particularly care for. Then the 80's hit and dad sold off the machinery, leased out the farm to a neighbor and I went off to college.
ReplyDeleteRussell,
ReplyDeleteThanks for the comment. This an old hammer mill. (I think 1949) It is driven off a flatbelt on my Z of the same vintage. We are not talking real high capacity. I would have thought a U302 would have been a pretty decent tractor. No real high horsepower but it should have been nice to drive. I can't remember if the U302 had power assist steering, I know the U302 Super had full power steering.
But, then again, I am somewhat of a MM collector so my opinion my be suspect.
We were 100 percent MM powered till I bought a White 2-155 five years ago.
MM G1355, G1000 vista, M670 Super, 3 old M670s, G706, a couple U's, a couple R's, my Z, a Jet, you get the idea I guess.
Your dad probably did the right thing...