Rained out

We started chopping clover silage yesterday and then it rained. After two trucks got stuck I decided to quit. It was a mess.
I should have set up the chopping for Saturday but I didn't. I wanted to finish planting our empty 40 acres and I didn't want to run on Sunday. This is the first field of the year and you always have problems. So...I lobbied for Monday and the farmer whose silage we are chopping and the dairyfellow who is buying the silage actually listened to me. Sooooo... Saturday I actually checked the weather forecast and it didn't looks so good. But, the field was already swathed, or so I thought. Monday was a bit dreary but we moved over and chopped one load. It was really wet so we opted to wait a couple hours. I moved the tractor home and planted some more. We never got back to chop.
Tuesday morning we started at 8:30 or so. Once it started working (it was still a little wet) I called a couple friends and got two more trucks. We really got moving and put out 5 10-14 ton loads before the rain hit at 11:30 a.m. We finished loading two more trucks after that but they were only part loads. I was using the dump box hooked behind the chopper to pick up the wet sections and narrow parts where it was hard to run a truck along side. I was planning to drop the box and chop directly in the trucks as three tandem axle trucks keeps my little chopper pretty busy.

While we were discussing what to do next, a little field mouse crawled out from under the fuel tank and started running around on the hood. I should have tossed him in the chopper. I don't need mice under the dash of my White. This may explain why my lights are not working properly. I took his photo.

This truck weighed 52,000lbs. While it is true that it is a heavy truck, wet silage makes a heavy load...

IMPORTANT UPDATE!!!!!
-The Lazy Farmer (252) has passed up Asian Porn DVD (247) in referrals to The Eye of Polyphemus. Truth and beauty have triumphed once again! The Lazy Farmer fans have squeezed aside Naked Boobies! Hmm, that didn't sound right...

Another day in Paradise...

Today we started chopping silage. Sort of a poor start I might add. It rained last night so the clover was so wet water was running out the bottom of the dumpbox. The reason I knew water was running out the bottom of the dumpbox was that the bottom split open and I thought it was going to drop 7 tonnes of silage on the ground.
I opened the field which put a load on the old International truck. Then I went back home and planted 4 more acres of barley. So you could say I barely planted barley. That would be a very confusing sentence if you were dyslexic.
This is a continuation of yesterday's barley planting adventure. I have had a lot of problems no-tilling the heavy clay river bottom soils late in the spring. They crack and dry out really bad. So, I had my faithful employee disk at an angle and then I planted across the angle with the Great Plains no-till drill. The drill worked the ground up very nicely. Unfortunantly I caught up to the little M670 rather quickly. So, I did a test plot as I wanted to get done planting.
Then we installed the new $345 turbo on the White 2-135. It even rain!
This morning I took the 2-155 and chopper down the road to chop clover for a neighbor.
At coffee time we discussed the Russians turning loose the pirates. See the link to Hyphenated American. I have opinions.

Now I think I shall go to bed. Am feeling a bit depressed for various reasons but I don't really have the energy to share... Look, the bottom is busting out of the dump box! Oh no!

I am linked to by Eye of Polyphemus and I send him referrals

Sometimes I get linked to by The Eye of Polyphemus. I don't always understand why he thinks the posts he links to are "link-worthy." The most recent link was to a photo of a tree and the second installment of my planting on a very steep hill.
Mr. Jeffords has a list which ranks the sites that send referrals to him. The Lazy Farmer has sent 242  referrals and I am listed right below Asian Porn DVD website who has sent 247 referrals.
Don't click on the Asian Porn DVD link unless you want to look at BOOBIES! I don't think it is any kind of joke. I clicked and there were BOOBIES!!!.
So...What is the deal? I guess I should have spent more time investigating but BOOBIES distract me and since I was setting and watching Rick Steves with the family I left the BOOBIE site as soon as possible. How do you get referrals from Asian Porn DVD? Would you want referrals from the aforementioned site? Do porn viewers really go for conservative commentary on science fiction? Do the same folks that watch Dr. Who also love Asian girls with naked BOOBIES?
And... 242 people have gone from The Lazy Farmer to The Eye of Polyphemus.  I guess I should be proud! Please continue going to Eye of Polyphemus. I would really like to get up there ahead of the naked asians!

Take your daughter to work day at the farm

I hate building sickles. Sadie wanted to make some money to buy legos. So, she learned how to use an air wrench and how to make sickles. Some day soon it will be time to swath Meadow Foxtail, then annual ryegrass and fescue and then it will be time to combine and then time to bale and then chop silage again and then plant and then worry about going broke and there will be rain and snow and I can sleep in my chair.

Some things look better wet! I'm talking about old motorcycles...

I took my old Triumph for a ride today. It has been setting in the shed for a year or so. I put a little gas in it. I checked the oil level and it was ok. I took the slack out of the kickstarter and I did this kind of funny weight transfer thing to kick the engine over as hard and as fast as I could. You don't really kick it over, you stand on the kick starter and use your body weight to roll the engine over, you don't really have to be that heavy or that strong to get it to work, you just have to figure out how to do it. It is not really explainable. It took about five good hard weight transfers to spin it over fast enough to overcome a totally dead battery but it fired right up. There is a little bit of smoke from one cylinder but it went away as the engine warmed up. I quickly brushed the dirt and oil off the pipes so they would not loose their nice shade of blue. I suppose that is kind of a waste as there are a few rust spots through the chrome at this point in time.
I pulled the cap off the oil tank and held my finger over the bypass return. This ensure oil flow to the top of the valve covers. The oil looked very clean. I should have changed it but I didn't have any 30 weight nearby.
I pushed it as fast as I could and then jumped on and pulled in the clutch. The clutch always sticks for the first few times you start it. I mashed it into second gear and held down the brake till the clutch released. I gave it a spin past the neighbor's house. It really has a neat sound to it.
Then I washed it.

There was a pretty thick film of WD-40 over everything but it came off and the old bike looked pretty good wet. I took it for a bit of a longer ride. Went past the fellow who gardens in his speedos. He is an older fellow who loves to ride cafe racer type superbikes. He was out in the garden but was fully dressed. I guess it is not speedo weather yet. I thought his head was going to swivel completely around as he tried to figure out what old motorcycle was going by. Kind of funny.
I really should either fix it up or sell it. It is a 1970 Trophy. This is a single down tube frame model. Has a single 26mm Amal carb and a 4spd transmission. It has the amp gauge headlight and the speedometer and tachometer instruments. It is not a very accurate restoration. I bought it at the DJ's Motorcycle swapmeet years ago. It needed some finish work... It has always been a very nice running motorcycle.
It needs- gear oil change, motor oil change, new points, plug, battery, new tires, new brakes, swing arm bushings redone, and a coat of paint. The seat is in good shape. The speedometer is dead.

I plant 4.1 acres of corn and am frustrated

Yesterday I attempted to finish our 30 acres or so of unplanted ground. I needed to do around five acres of corn for the duck hunters and which we intend to combine as a test plot. Then plant three bags of soybeans as a test plot. Plant a few acres of barley. Plant 10 acres of Teff for hay. Figure out what to do with the other 10 acres that is full of poroso millet which will plug up the harrow if I disk it. The seed company wants swan oats in the worst way and would take a 10 acre planting. But, it needs to be certified and the field had triticale and barley in it. I do not want to plow as the ground is a little wet and I would loose the moisture and make golfball sized clods that would never go away. If I no-till I will also loose the moisture. It needs to go into corn.
I strip-tilled five acres Thursday. I had to borrow our strip-tiller back from the neighbor who needed it Friday. It needed to be gone over twice. But, I was in a hurry... By the time I got fertilizer, the planter, then I thought about putting some early sweet corn in, and I had to go to town for seed, and then I had to cash a check so I could make my drill payment, (not the drill cart-just the drill).... We were also trying to finish up spreading fertilizer. There was about 35 acres of grass that has finally dried out enough to get on. Part of it was fertilized earlier and it is not showing green yet, so we put a bit more on. We had to use the 2-155 as the spare M670 had a pto failure. So....
I didn't get to plant corn till 6 p.m. The wet ground had turned cloddy and the seed was not getting covered. The low seed alarm keeps going off on the rough ground. I was too cheap to buy 2 lbs of sweet corn seed at $20 a lb or Ambrosia so I just had a little bit of seed. The white air planter does not like to plant 1/2 lb of seed per row. I put seed into two outside rows and I thought this would give me 4 rows. I of course miss-judged when to turn around and ran out of seed. So, it will probably cross-polinated with the field corn. I also did not change plates so there are lots of skips and doubles. I did mark the rows by dribbling in some gaint sunflowers. Of course no one will actually remember that there is sweet corn there... And the rest of the 40 acre field will be a later variety of sweet corn so I guess it doesn't really matter.
The rest of the grain corn planting was pretty much a bust. I couldn't get the seed covered. The alarm kept going off. I ran out of fertilizer with 1 acre left...
I went home and we have visitors. My wife's sister and family are here to help "organize" the storage trailer. Another job I failed to do. They were watching Avatar at high volume. Someone attempted to make popcorn. Our convection oven/microwave shuts down if you make popcorn. It has done this for the past three years. Just the same, I guess you have to try it again! Hey, circuit breakers reset themselves right? So I went and took my shower. Came back to a dead microwave, but no popcorn in the microwave. If at first you don't succeed, try, try, again. It was kind of funny. I opened the door and let if cool down, then I made my nachos and watched Avatar.
Lots of computer graphics, humans are kind of bad, special effects are great, machine guns can be taken out with really good bows and arrows, if we all work together it is wonderful, nature is better than tech, there was a minor crisis, a major crisis-with a questioning of identity, followed by the main charactors putting on a show then another huge car chase, some charactor growth, and an improbable conclusion and charactor growth and the important message to accept those who are different.
More incredible creativity from people who still can't get over being made fun of in high school.
I am trying to teach my daughter to understand the system. I had one small success last night.
She was sleeping on the couch as her aunt and cousin had her room. She thought she needed a pillow and tried to ask for one. She was completely missunderstood and much dialogue ensued with no attention paid to what she was trying to saw.
In the middle of it she came over to me and said that they really didn't know what she was trying to say but she was just going to let it go. She was laughing. She was just going to take care of it herself.

rule # 5: If you know you are right, do you have to explain it to everyone else?

Have a nice day...

Farm accident drill and planting corn

I planted corn the other day.
A couple things went wrong. Not only that day, but for the rest of the week. I don't even know what day it started to go wrong.
But things were not as bad for me as for this poor straw man who went through the haybine. I guess that is why strawman purchases are illegal...

The fire department called me whilst I was planting and wanted to use some junk farm equipment for a safety drill. Well, why did you call us?! Oh the neighbor said you were scrapping, can we do it this evening. Um... if you would have called a WEEK ago we had two silage choppers and headers but now they are headed for CHINA... So, I had him call my brother.
The brother found a combine header and a haybine and when I got home I jack knifed the 2-135 and disk so they could trap another straw man between the tire and the tongue.
It was interesting. They tried a sawzall on the combine header and ruined two blades. I think the straw dude died. They tried to lift the disk with airbags but the aircompressor wouldn't start. Eventually they used hydraulic jacks to move the disk away from the guy. The fireman in charge demonstrated why you can't move the tractor. First, he couldn't figure out how to get the White in gear as I had put it in park. Then when he moved the tractor he shut the engine off without putting it back in park and it rolled backwards and squished the poor scarecrow once again.
The fellow in the hayconditioner was pretty much declared a goner. They couldn't get the rolls to move. Well, they have not moved in 20 years so that might have been the problem.
The fire department had a good time and got to use their bright lights so it was pretty much a successful training session.
But, I digress...
Back to planting corn!
First of all, I thought the field was going to be ten acres larger than it was so that kind of got me off on the wrong foot I guess.
Then I laid out the field wrong. There were wet spots at one end. The farmer left wide headlands. He is going to combine the corn with a direct cut header. He needed wide headlands. What I should have done was either step off 60 foot and put up flags or make a couple passes empty and start four planter widths from the edge of the field. Then, when I was finished I could just make four trips around the field in a circle. I do this with the drill frequently if I am planting back and forth, but with the corn planter I had my head up my arse.
I had a lot of problems with the markers slowly moving in on one side. That was just frustrating.

I went to sleep and didn't hear the low seed alarm. So, I dug up rows for an hour trying to find the spot where i ran out of seed. I did find some very nice spacing of seeds.

I was trying to get the population up from 34000 seeds to 34400 seeds per acre. I think I looked a the chart wrong and moved the wrong sprocket because it jumped to 44,000 seeds per acre and I ran out of seed too soon. I got that fixed and the fertilizer plugged up. I think I caught that right away.

Otherwise it did a very nice job. I have not planted conventionally tilled fields for a long time. All the no-till attachments really work the ground nice, and the new Keeton seed firmers were really working. There was no seed on top of the ground. I planted about 1 1/2" deep. Right down in the moisture.
NOW-if there are no skipped rows do to me not watching the monitor.... I really need a population type monitor.

 I feel like kind of a moron with my planting. I hope my friend will still speak to me when the corn comes up. I hope the corn actually comes up.
Yesterday I strip-tilled five acres for duck hunter corn. We are planting a 68 day nonGMO variety. It was really too wet but my cousin is going to plant sweet corn in the field and it has to have a separation of three weeks because of cross pollination. This is kind of screwing things up but you do what your landlord wishes I guess.
Then the employee shows up on the 4-wheeler. The turbo is ticking on the 2-135. It is 5:05 and and too late to order a new on from A&I. I tried the internet but couldn't get the dealer code to load. So, I guess I better get the uncle to order me a turbo this morning...
Then, I think I will plant our whoppingly huge 10 acre soybean field. And work the Teff ground with the 2-155. I like to hook and unhook all the wires and hoses on the Great Plains drill for 10 acre plantings. Oh, perhaps I could plant Jose's 2 acres of Garbonzo beans. (Chick peas)