Working for chicken feed and planting radish

I have created another semi-failed business for myself! This would be good if it was winter, but making feed when it is over 70 degrees out is not that much fun. 

Earlier in the week I got calls from my two (2) steady pig feed customers. They were running low!

I have been on a 150 acre planting job so have not really been thinking about pig feed.

I want to get all the 1000lb bags out of my hay shed and get ready for hay. 

Thursday and Friday I made pig feed. My method is not the best for safety but it is moderately effective. 

I have a big bin and set it on a homemade scale. Then I dump large bags into the bin and recored the weight. I put the info in a spread sheet and it calculates the percent protein. (I don't pay attention to other important values because no one I sell to cares.)

It is essentially 1/3 peas, 1/3 oats, 1/3 barley. Then I add Canola or Flax or Clover seed, or more peas to reach 16 percent protein.

Then I suspend the bin over the New Holland 358 mixer grinder and let er rip. I have to be careful not to add more than 5,000lbs as the mixer over flows.

The problem was that I put in too much oats and it all would not fit. So I had to unload a ton and then balance the mix for what fit in the mixer. I ended up with over 8,000lbs of material. This is fine as it all fits in a bin and I won't have to make more feed this summer.

Or so I thought...

The next step was to make pellets for my second customer and also for Chicken feed sales. Pig feed and chicken feed are the same. However, the chicken feed needs to be pelletized so it is not dusty and the chickens utilize it better. Plus, pellets are an excellent way of getting rid of Buckwheat which nothing will eat if it is not mixed with something. Rats don't even like buckwheat seed. 

It took me five hours to do 2000lbs of pellets. There were distractions.

One of my customers got lost. I had to go find her. It would seem that her GPS took the setting, "Avoid Busy Roads," quite literally and sent her on gravel roads for 60 miles. This is pretty hard to do on the 99W corridor coming from the Portland metro area. But it can be done.

I set up my bagging system as customer really liked my 80lb hand tied bags. I decided to make extra and sell chicken feed so I fed the pellet mill by five gallon bucket. This lets me throw in sunflower seeds which the chickens love.

Unfortunately, I did not look at my messages until I had bagged up 1000lbs and discovered I had made 95lb bags instead of 80lb bags.

My Customer decided on 40lb bags and she wanted twenty. Fortunately, I had made 1200lbs of bulk pellets already. So I bagged up the smaller bags. I got 23 bags out of 1200lbs. This meant they were 50lbs!

In the mean time I got a new customer. A lady drove two hours for my delicious oat/alfalfa pellets. 

Her and her husband turned out to be very nice country folk type people and we had a great chat. I gave them some CBD pellets to try with their nervous horses and they bought 1000lbs of bulk pellets and decided to try 150lbs of pig/chicken/goat feed.

I can't believe no one thinks my pigfeed label is funny! I think it is a hoot! Of course I do have a recording somewhere of HR telling me that people do NOT think I am funny. I really am a meanie.

Things a GPS does not steer you around!

Earlier in the week I planted 100 acres of hillside ground to tillage radish. The water table was so close to the surface when I went back the next day  the no-till openers and maker slots were running water.

You really can't tell how steep the hillside was from this video. Actually, I have planted worse. I had a nice view. I just put it in fourth gear and shifted the three-speed. The biggest problem is that my good GPS antenna died and I had to go back to the old Raven 210 that I only use for speed. I like to use the GPS with the mechanical markers to keep me straight. The 210 would drift from one end of the field to the other on the hillsides but was adequate on level ground.

In other news...

My former employer has a new president and a new budget. In 10 years they have not been able to balance a budget. They are running a deficit of 4 million a year.

They have sold off ground, become a University, rebranded the place, built a new science center, offered generous retirements to get people to quit, and raised tuition and added an apology for stealing land from the Indians 100 years ago to every piece of University correspondence. 

No wait, they have done more... They have added pet friendly dorms and also managed to recruit a number of Trans students and Furries. 

There is now another round of voluntary separations going on. This time they are offering to continue the free tuition for students who parents will retire.

This is of course a genius plan which has proved so successful in the demise of many businesses that have lost touch with their customer base and are going broke.

What I find especial hilarious is that these are the people who HATE Donald Trump but yet their only solution, aside from virtue signaling their way to success, is to use the Trumpain business model of getting rid of the best employees and selling off assets.

Apparently, it is hard to get students to spend $50,000 on a liberal arts education at a third tier University when you can go to a tradeschool/community college/ state school for practically free and even possibly have actual JOB PLACEMENT.

It is really kind of sad as there are so many local opportunities for this University and yet it continues to be somewhat of a local joke. 

If I had $120,000 (average four year tuition) for every person who has said to me, "I can't believe you lasted 9 years with those freaks," I could in fact, balance their budget.

I suppose no one from Linfield secretly follows my blog anymore, but if they did they wouldn't have a clue.

Yeah, be more Trans friendly, that will bring in the local students! Raise tuition! Great idea! Raise tuition and include $300 per book class materials in tuition so you can raise your student debt even higher! That is a great plan taking the pain out of raping students with over priced text books!

Encourage all the long term employees to retire, cut class options and departments in stead of recruiting, rename a street after a local Indian tribe!

Also, two words... MORE FURRIES!

Edit/Update: What is really funny about the current school crisis is they act like it just happened. I just read an editorial in the local paper. The new president is proposing almost exactly the same solutions as Miles K. Davis. In fact what he is quoted as saying in the editorial is almost exactly what MKD said when he first came to Linfield. MKD was hated for his efforts to cut spending. Now they are acting like all these cost cutting measures were never tried before.  

Selling off assets and cutting programs/staff won't help without a plan to boost enrollment. Such a shame...