I plant oats and we have an incredible thunderstorm

Twenty years ago I farmed twice the acres and I generally got things done.

This year has been a struggle. You would think I could plant 40 acres in a week before getting rained out.

Friday we had thunderstorms. I didn't really believe it would rain. The sunset Thursday was spectacular.

 

You think the nice weather will never end, until it rains, and then you think the rain will never end.

I plowed the 35 acre field that is getting 20 acres of alfalfa, and my nephew worked it down. I fought with the no-till drill. There was nothing wrong with the drill. Other than one little thing after another.

I have experimented quite a bit with planting wrenches and drill hardware. I can never get a reliable yield. Maybe the pH is off...

 

The extra ground plus another 10 acres is going into oats for hay. I had 3,000 lbs of Baylor oats that I got from my neighbor for feed. They were out of the bottom of the cleaning bin and were like 20 percent dust. I just rigged up a fan and dumped the bag into a bin while blowing air on the stream. This was sort of successful. Successful in covering me and the forklift with oat dust.

I figured if I had 20 acres to plant and 3,000 lbs I would set the drill at 150lb and all would be fine. I was going to put 8 gals of 10-34 fertilizer on but when I called for a price I discovered 10-34 was over $4 per gallon. 

But, we had a plastic tote with 150 gallons of greenish liquid that smelled like ammonia so I put 200 gallons of water with that and decided to pretend that was 10-34. It did make me feel better.

Of course the fertilizer rate controller would not work. I got from no-flow up to 20 gal per acre and the drill wouldn't lift. I fought with the hydraulics, switched hoses, then the fertilizer pump started leaking. Fresh rebuild so apparently I ran it dry... Ace POS pump...

Finally I checked the nozzles on the fertilizer boom. I am probably the only person on the planet who still uses a Blumhardt boom. For some strange reason I had a mix of blue pink and purple! I think the blues are drilled to purple so what ever I was doing I was putting a lot of fertilizer on. I have absolutely no idea...

I replaced with yellow and suddenly I was metering at 8 gal per acre with no issues at all. Other than the by switching hoses I manage to get the down pressure not to work properly.

I powered through.

The last four acres took most of Friday. I ran out of oat seed. Apparently there was a little more dust than I expected. I found a bag of Cayuse Oats from Derry Warehouse which was very clean. Cleaner than what we put into storage. 

I was using a dry fertilizer bin from Valley Ag to fill the drill. When I climbed up to look inside it was full of dust. So I dumped they Cayuse in to maybe dilute the mess. It sort of worked. I think I ended up planting about 250lbs per acre of the Cayuse. 

This is what happens when you don't check the seed rate. This is also pretty sad as I have a population monitor which I paid no attention until the "low seed  row 8," alarm would go off.

Oregon State University may not agree with me but, 250lbs per acre is actually an idea rate for Oat hay. I do not want thick stems. High Population should give skinny stems and more leaves. Or it will just get extremely rank and lodge and make crappy, wet, yellow, nasty oat hay which no one will buy and mill attract rats...

But, I digress... 

I rebuilt the middle valve on the stack, about four times. Finally I mixed in parts from my spare valve and it started working. But I also took the pioneer quick connect apart so who knows what fixed it.

You can almost completely rebuild the hydraulic valves on a pre-twentyfirst century White tractor without removing the valve stack. I wonder if the valves leaked from the factor... I have never seen a non-leaking White tractor.

 

I cleaned out the drill and went looking for my nephew who was rolling the worked ground. I found him just has the points came out of adjustment for the fifth (5) time on his Minneapolis-Moline Z. We put the flat roller on the White 2-155 and he took off to see his girl friend.

I rolled the no-tilled ground with the double corrugated roller as while they were calling for showers this week, I never really believe the weather man any more. I was one pass from finishing when the clouds opened up and we got rain. 

I managed to leave a trail of mud down the highway, which was promptly washed away.

My pickup was sitting in the worked field with a trailer containing a rather heavy air compressor. It took all my years of getting stuck experience to get out of that field without leaving too many ruts.

It was a nice day... 

The rainbow ends at my sort of well off neighbor's place. Or does it began?

We had a double rainbow which was complete with both ends. Wouldn't fit the iPhone viewfinder. The end is missing the shed with my pellet mill and the bags of Super Chick N that were being hit by the sideways rain blowing into my shed. Story of my life... 

 

Life on the farm seems to be a series of minor crisis followed by sore muscles

 

A couple days in the life of a crippled farmer

Today I am still in bed and it is 9 a.m. I have ice on my leg. I decided to take a break. I can hear everyone working like mad outside. I think my brother just loaded up the bin-on-a-trailer with more barley so I suppose I really need to get to work. I am truly the Lazy Farmer.

Maybe one more cup of coffee...

A baby calf appeared!

I am raising dust

I figured out how to load the drill with a broken leg. (Hint, it involves use of a forklift)

Then I went back to working ground. Or since I am taking the photo, my brother took over working dirt and I started planting

When the GPS works properly it is a beautiful thing

I planted ten acres without knowing I had lost two V-openers. There may be some seed on top of the ground

The service Gator uses very little gas and has very little horsepower.

Herschel has cheapened the bearing assembly on their openers. I am sad. Try installing a rubber hubcap when your hands are freezing!

Of course the fertilizer pump failed!

Some progress was made...

Planting Belford Barley at 50 degree soil temp and 1/2 to 2" deep. (Long story there) The goal is 120lbs per acre. My copy of The Doanes Farm Management guide, which I keep under the seat of the tractor says 90 lbs, but I figure with inflation I should plant more. The seed company went a little heavy on the seed treatment and the barley keeps plugging up the seed tubes. After hearing that beep and the screen saying "low seed rate row 4," I was suffering from mental fatigue so I now I am one hopper short of a full field.

Sometimes it happens

Fall planting season photos

Mayor Bloomberg and I blame global warming. Floods and droughts and famine and pestilence. All due to global warming. The abomination of the infernal combustion engine and the fires of Mordor.
I kind of figured that after 100 plus days of no rain, it would rain. It just won't stop.
I am on a 150 acre no-tilling job. It is on a former Christmas Tree farm. Meaning hills that are really too steep for most of the local farmers. But I always find the clever ones who have a plan that no one else has yet to figure out.
And so I am no-tilling hard red wheat into a heavy red clay soil on steep rolling hills. No-tilling into bent grass, moss, and wild carrot sod.
Here is a photo...

I must say I am fairly impressed with the Great Plains 1500 no-till grain drill. I seem to be able to plant into just about anything. The sheer volume of mud has gotten to be a bit of a problem. It does tend to plug up the press wheels every hour or so.

This is a photo of the presswheels when thy are still turning. They are not even plugged up yet.

Above is a view out my windshield on Friday afternoon. The sun came out and the field was almost dry enough to actually plant without plugging up. Then there was a cloudburst. The hood is actually white from the sleet.
Below is a screen view of my GPS. I use FarmerGPS which is a program which runs on a tablet PC. Gives me a low cost alternative to the $2,000 Raven system everyone else uses. Plus, the customer service is pretty excellent.
When I dropped my Tablet at the beginning of the week when I slipped on the step and fell out of the tractor cab, I emailed FarmerGPS for a new unlock code for my backup computer. I not only got the code but when I discovered my backup computer wouldn't run the newest version because the graphics card couldn't handle 3-D, they emailed me a previous version of the program that would work. It arrived overnight in my email. It was very helpful.
Below is a screen view of what I have been doing this week. The different colors are the different days I worked. It has been pretty slow going.

But, tomorrow is the start of a new week and I am sure all will be grand...

I acutally worked

I actually planted some 45 acres yesterday. It was a pretty good day considering I didn't get a very early start.
When I arrived at the field the farmer had left for more oat seed but he had in fact filled my drill for me. It was still a little wet and soon got a lot wetter. It poured on me. It was a long drive home so I took my fishing pole down to his creek and lost my Mepps # 5 spinner. I am a terribly bad fisherman.
I retreated back to my drill and started greasing and oil chains and otherwise fooling around.
Then the farmer's daughter brought me cookies and I of course pretended to think she was 22 instead of 26. I have often resorted to flattery to continue my supply of cookies. They were good cookies. They were chocolate cookies. They went good with coffee.
Then I got the genius idea to go look at the field.
The field was less than a mile down the road. It didn't rain there.
So away I went.
I finished in the pouring rain at 9:30 at night.
I love my FarmerGPS program.
You get free upgrades after buying the program.
The latest version gives you a 3-D view like you are driving a video game and it lets you measure fields by clicking and dragging the pointer pen on the screen. (If only it had auto-steer.)
It was raining so hard and there was so much mud and it was dark and I finished the field driving by instruments. I hope on the last pass I did not offset the drill 12 feet and leave a 2 foot unplanted strip a half mile long due to GPS drift.
Without the GPS I would have been completely blind. Of course my foam marker was not working properly. They never work properly for more than a half hour.