Spring may be here on the farm and I am spraying with the Gator

I have been listening to the "Sand Pebbles," while farming.  The book has really given me pause for thought. It is a story about a group of US Sailors on a riverboat in China at the time of the revolution.

I have a theory that popular fiction tells a more honest story about a time in culture than any text book ever will.  The novel is unabashedly biased. The author is playing off popular beliefs or activities of the time to build the dramatic effect. I feel this is most true for adventure stories or detective novels.

The actions of the Chinese in rebelling against the colonial powers and the effectiveness of the bolshevik influence are pretty interesting in when you look at the political climate today.

It is pretty hilarious to see soccer moms who have never had a thought about trade wars or tariffs suddenly posting on facebook and protesting in the streets against Trump. Or claiming to understand Fascism and causes for the Second World War when back in college they were not especially deep.

I am not real confident that Tariffs are the answer to financial wreck our past politicians (supported by the idiots who voted for them) have gotten us into. However, there are limited ways to control the deficit and printing lots of money to devalue the currency lower the value of the debt was not real helpful.

I suspect raising money though tariffs vs raising taxes may have advantages. Raising taxes must become counterproductive at some point. It is driving certain groups into a barter economy. Having lower taxes for corporations seems like it could attract them to the US or at least keep the businesses here.

Many people in the agricultural sector have a wait and see attitude, but I am no super optimistic. I wish Trump would keep a close eye on which people are getting deported as if it were not for the hispanics who came here to get away from gangs, he may not have been elected. I get a little tired of all the law and order Republicans who might be getting a little perspective when the nutcase liberals take over next election.

Speaking of nutcase liberals...

My former employer cannot boost enrollment and so is cutting staff and programs. Apparently while getting rid of anyone who knows anything and then virtue-signaling your way to success seems like a great idea to a certain class of people, it may not always work. 

I was talking to a friend whose daughter attends and he was irritated with the apology for stolen land tagline on every piece of University correspondence. 

"How did you last for ten years at that place, Man we were starting to worry about you," is a comment I get frequently.

I went to lunch with a work friend and then helped him remove a rusted bolt from a pump in one of the mechanical rooms. I mostly just encouraged him to get out the welder and apply heat. I also pounded on stuff. It was a success. His supervisor gave me the most excellent coffee and a fine time was had by all.

I really liked the people I worked with. It was nice to be part of the group again. The people who actually get things done. I didn't hang out with the paper pushers...

We welded a washer and nut onto the broken bolt. My friend had broken the easy-out off in the bolt. He was able to weld the nut onto the easy-out and unthread the easy-out. Then he drilled and tapped the old bolt out. It was hard work all the way.

I have been spraying with the gator-sprayer. I had to do 20 acres with 15ft booms. I have foam makers but it is hard to see the foam when you are low to the ground and in tall barley stubble. I need a new cord to go from the Novatel antenna to my computer as the com-port wires are damaged at the special connector. Then I remembered that the Smart-Ag has bluetooth. So I was actually able to use FarmerGPS for guidance along with the foam. This made things much better.

I sent my old friend from work a picture of my sprayer set up as his department was instrumental in me getting the gator when it was scrapped. He did not think my sprayer setup was going to inspire a lot of confidence in the quality of my equipment. Apparently, it is old.

My previous century farming setup. Which worked amazingly well.

Later I no-tilled peas. This was another long story. But it all ended well.

Life on the farm, pellets, failure, speculation that we no longer exist, whatever

 I am definitely going with the theory that the world ended in December of 2012. We don't actually exist but our minds couldn't accept that fact as our concept of existence is based on the relationship of consciousness vs nonconsciousness.  With out that conflict, we don't know if we exist or no. In fact probably all the real Christians were raptured and us chronic procrastinators, trash talkers, inappropriate, losers are all left behind.

However, without the rules of the Universe holding everything together, or "The Hand of God," random and crazy things happen. There is no longer order.  It it is all falling apart. 

Or not.

My wife finally got her knee replaced. She set it up in advance, she applied for medial leave, (which the State of Oregon has screwed up-because that is what the State of Oregon does) and was going to go to work Monday. However, work is slow and so she is being laid off until it picks back up.

I suspect this will result in even more paper work and confusion and possibly problems for her employer and us. You can't collect unemployment and state paid for medical leave at the same time. Having the medical leave paperwork filed and then being laid off before getting an official medical release to return to work will undoubtedly confuse the system.

In other randomness, the local weather people were convinced we were going to have wild thunderstorms, hail, possible tornado. My former supervisor texted me to make sure I stayed safe. I was running this large forklift. (see below) There was no thunderstorm, hail, 60 mph winds, but it did rain for a couple days.

I am not sure that alarmist predictions by the US Weather Service is going to say them from the crazy cost cutters. I have gone so far as to disable the weather alarms I used to get as not a single one of them was accurate. 

I am looking for the thunder clouds which didn't appear. It was a dramatic sky. No hail. Just rain showers.

My nephew adapted a junk loader to this junk tractor. I think it actually may work. I suspect the key to happiness is just lowering your standards for success.

I have been making feed pellets. This is 1/3 alfalfa hay and 2/3 oat seed. I sold like five tons and now I can't even give them away. I actually have progressed to where I am making a decent pellet. I got a tip on adding apple juice at the roller instead of just mixing molasses into the mixer grinder. The sugar liquid at roller makes more friction and thus a better pellet.

My neighbors are convinced I have a genius plan have given me lots of encouragement. However I am going broke at it,

I even resorted to filling bags. I was going to buy a sewing machine and do 40lb poly bags but decided to try burlap first. They do look rustic as heck but weigh 70lbs. 

The bag with the double xx has a little hemp bud in it. My neighbor's goats have been getting out so we decided to get them stoned for a couple days and see if it helped. No word yet.

One of my neighbors has a business of selling plastic totes. Sometimes they have material left in them and he has to pay to dispose of the material. I am seriously thinking of dumping this in my molasses tank.

I have been attempting to spray. This whole gator sprayer was a dumb idea. Now my GPS cable has failed. My computer died. Farmer GPS won't return my calls. Probably because Johannes H. is worried Trump will invade Stoney Plain, Alberta.

I need this weird Tyco connector. It is for a Novatel Smart 6L antenna. This should be the same as maybe an Ag Leader but I haven't found anything. Doesn't really matter if FarmerGPS only will run in trial mode.

My neighbor hit the train last week. 

He spent the night in the hospital and was back to work the next day. He has a neck brace. Making jokes about not completely swallowing his Viagra Pill and getting a stiff neck causes him to laugh which then affects his neck which makes him laugh more. This never gets old. I suspect this guy is the only person who has hit a train because he had Sandi Patty turned up too loud on the tractor radio.

It is now time for me to build up the fire and get my wife another ice pack and a hit of OXY. Hope all three of my loyal readers have a nice day.

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.