Sunday did not go as well as I was expecting yesterday when I wrote my blog.
I quit Saturday night out of frustration with my driving I could not drive straight. I could see quite a ways down the field in the dark with headlights and a bright moon but my driving and the GPS did not agree. I was always making corrections.
When I got to the field I could immediately see the damages. The GPS was deflecting around trees and low spots in the field. I think this is due to the extreme angles of satellites being low on the horizon. The field is a long 30 acre rectangle that runs East/West and I have had problems years ago when I first started using GPS.
I had to drive home to get fertilizer. I am mixing a special fertilizer with 10-34. It contains humic and soil enzymes. The people at the Co-Op swear it will make the seed pop out of the ground. I know everyone should laugh at me for spending money on a product that no one can tell me what is made of when really I just need to boost fertilizer rates and add lime. But, it came with glowing reviews from people who are really skeptical.
The kid that loaded me spilled the beans, "this smells like shit..." he said.
I am pretty sure it is a humanure product. It has that stench. I don't think I will use it again. However, Saturday's planting will provide a great test. When I went to check my seed depth and look for plugged fertilizer tubes I realized there was a problem.
I am planting Orchard grass on 15" rows at 8lbs per acre. I am putting on a fertilizer mix of 5 gallons 10-34, 3 gallons of mystery additive, and two gallons of water per acre for a total of ten gallons. However I soon realized I had more acres than fertilizer so I reduced my application rate to 6 gallons per acre.
But what went wrong...
The drill has 7.5" spacing with fertilizer on every row. To get to 15" spacing I block off ever other row of seed and turn off fertilizer to every other row. It is really easy to get the fertilizer and the seed rows mismatched. Somewhere around row 6 I turned off two rows next to each other and continued that way until row 16. So on rows 6-16 the fertilizer is on the blank row and not on the seed row. I guess that is my test plot.
Once I got going and fixed the wandering rows I noticed the path painted on my computer screen showed that my fertilizer rates were going crazy. The Farmer GPS program interfaces with my MicroTrak Spraymate II and changes paint color in relation to the amount of fertilizer applied. It is also programed to offset the drill when planting with every other row so you can plant back and forth.
So imagine row one is turned off and row twenty four is turned on. Going one direction you have two row one rows next to each other and the other way you have two row 24's next to each other. So with the row 1's you have 7.5" spacing and row 24's you have 30" skip. (If I drive perfectly, which I don't)
But, I digress...
The fertilizer pump was acting like the impeller was plugged or spun off the shaft or the hydraulic drive was skipping. So I had to change pumps.
In the mean time I was sent a zoom link to see my Nephew preach. It was pretty funny to hear the moderator say, "I see Uncle "Bud" has logged in. Nephew is teaching at an Accelerated Christian Education school in Colorado hay and horse country. This will be an excellent adventure for him.
I left the phone in the pickup and used headphones so no one could hear me swear and installed the spare pump, made sure all the fertilizer tubes were working and soon I was planting. I finished around 5 p.m. and had 50 acres on the counter. Thirty acres of worked ground and I emptied the drill on 15-20 acres of no-till.
I woke up to rain and like 60 degree temps this morning. Seems like good growing weather to me.
Have a nice day!
Posts
I follow a farmer who grows canola in the middle of nowhere, Saskatchewan. Similarly running vintage equipment, his posts are interesting. https://www.youtube.com/@roosty6 Your post today was interesting but beyond my knowledge level...I'm tempted to ask "how did farmers drive straight before GPS?" but that's probably stupid. "This smells like shit" was appropriate for my fall. If Blogger had a 'Like' button like Youtube or Facebook I'd click it but give that blogger is an app that died long ago I'll just say I 'Liked' the post.
ReplyDeleteRalph Goff is Roosty6 and has the "Mindlessramblings," blog. Blogger is dead, "Long Live Blogger," and before GPS we lined up two objects down the field and tried to remember which land marks we had picked out. If one of those objects was a cow grazing a mile away and the cow moved, so did your line. We set up our lands in the field before dark or farmed in circles.
ReplyDeleteAll this screen stuff and gps auto steer has me thinking I'm just as well off to keep my hands on the steering wheel and keep looking over my shoulder at the drill. Although I will admit that the neighbour's fields with their perfectly aligned one hundred foot passes are impressive.
DeleteIf there was a 'like' link I would click on it.
Delete