We finished harvesting the 21st of October.  Actually one of the earlier finishes for us.  Only two real breakdowns with the combine and they were small ones. One of the hose clamps on the air inlet pipe on the turbocharger broke. The other was a drive chain on the corn head.  Semi’s were a problem early on, but the old 99 International once it was running ran great.

Oh by the way, this is Judi’s lessor half posting this, she is still trying to get caught up from being part of ” #occupycombine in #harvest11 “.  She also has been helping me with fieldwork for next year’s crop. We did get one of our new wells hooked up to the house.  Great to have “enough” water.  We also added to the kids show string of heifers this last weekend, more on those girls later.

She is really a great combine operator and she does look for the last row of corn or soybeans every year.  Found it two Fridays ago.  I took her out to our favorite Italian restaurant last week. We celebrated and then went home and went back to work.  She is just really busy right now, getting caught up with the kids and house stuff and computer stuff, and well the life of a farm wife/ farmer.

She would  say she is just glad it is over for this year.

Antique Tractor Club

Jack called William to ask if we had a field where the Vintage Ag Assoc. could run their old tractors and plows. The group’s members look for a place every fall to give their equipment a work-out.  Just to show every group has its tensions. Some antique tractor members say that other member’s tractors aren’t old enough. I wonder when the cut off date is? Here are some of the pictures I took and a quick video.

Massey Ferguson

FARMALL B

Minneapolis-Moline

Massey Harris

Oliver

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Some would think that when a husband asks this question to his wife over the phone, he’s being frisky and hoping to get lucky later. Nope. During harvest when a farmer asks his wife that question it means: How fast can you come out to the field to run the combine while he runs to do ______. (fill in the blank) Farmer is thinking: How long will it take her to change into her jeans & tshirt? not I wonder if she is wearing something slinky and see-through.

That is the call I got tonight. When he asked What are you wearing, I smiled and said “Why do you want to know?” William said, “Because I want you to come out while I run the truck back to the bins.” Smile gone.

So goes the farm life of a frustrated farm wife.

I am at the point in harvest where the days are all running together. William keeps talking about “when we get done with this field, we’ll go to that field. Then we’ll switch to beans and haul the bean head to another field.” I hold up my palm and say talk to the hand. (not really) But I did say, “Whoa, stop. It’s going to be a few days before we are done in the current field. A million things could go wrong in that time changing everything. So I’m not listening.” He’s counting loads and acres left. I’m just driving ’til I run out of fields. Different mindsets to the same end.

So the harvest update is fairly redundant. I have lost track of how many days we’ve been in corn. I’m seeing rows of corn plants being shoved into a feeder house in my sleep. I’m not complaining really. As long as the combine and trucks are running, we are getting closer to the prize.

The combine did lose some power today. William thought it may be the fuel filter, since we just used the transfer tank for the first time in awhile. But Russel across the road, who used to be a red IH dealer says the air filters need replaced. He was right. I took out the filter and it was crammed with dust. We’ll replace both sets of filters tomorrow. Tomorrow more corn.

 Ag-Business 201

Every fall there is at least on obstacle/problem/issue/hair pulling event that keeps us on our toes during harvest. In the past the drying bins have been a hassle to keep running properly with their motors, heaters, stirators. Last year the combine had to be hauled to the dealership to be worked on. There are certain size service trucks you don’t want to see in your field. I won’t even mention the harvest of ’09. You can read summary post titled I Almost Cried.

To get to this year’s current set back; our truck hauling situation is causing us to make decisions that would have Dr. Winter’s farm management class weeping in their textbooks. (I took Dr. Winter’s class. I know he doesn’t teach it any more. Come on, let me be a little dramatic.) I don’t think I’ll get into the details of the events that led up to now. I’ll just state what the situation is as it stands. We will be picking up the semi that is at the shop right now and bringing it home. The semi we just bought will be fixed and sold with our flatbed truck as trade-in on another truck yet to be determined. William gets to do his wheelin-n-dealin trading trucks which he is pretty good at.

This all comes into perfect timing since the bins are just about full. We will be hauling to the elevators for the duration of harvest. Having two semis should speed up the hauling process tremendously. Just praying that we can keep them running.

We missed the rain again this weekend. So hauling water for the houses and cattle will continue. But today it drizzled enough to keep us out of the field so I can catch up on my blog posting of harvest. I am continually trying to come up with interesting things to share since driving a combine back and forth in a field is pretty mundane. The following videos pretty much sum up the last few days since my previous post.

Day 7

The boys will be extremely happy when we finally get all the bins full of corn and we move on to some fields away from home. We fill the drying bins. Then once the corn is dry enough we transfer it to the regular bins for storage til winter. Then we move the auger back to the drying bins to fill them up again ’til the corn is dry and repeat. This is the first year that they have spent so much time at this process. I try to warn them that it’s the beginning of many many years.

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Day 8

In these two videos taken today, I tried to show the fields after they were harvested. Then the GreenStar monitor shows the yield maps for each field.

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took this picture tonight with my cheap camera

This morning William and I met someone who is going to drill a well on some ground we own west of us about 2.5 miles from our house. Hopefully they will be able to get the well in soon because driving 16 miles to haul water everyday really sucks.

We finished filling another bin with dried corn this afternoon. Then once we got everything moved around again and after we ate supper, I fired up the combine again. Started another field that was testing 25%. We are trying to get the corn out; so we can build fence around a stalk field we drive through. The pastures have given out because of the lack of rain for 3 months. Once we get them on the stalk field, we won’t have to feed so much of the winter hay.

The skys were cloudy this morning. We transfered more corn from the drying bin to a regular bin. William had mowed 5 acres or more of corn stalks to round bale. We use them mostly for winter bedding but the cows do like to munch on them some. So they will help with the amount of hay we will need to feed. After I raked the stalks up, William started baling. He baled up about 40 bales before it started raining. Topping off the bin, we all were soaking wet. We called it a day after putting everything away and covering the auger hopper with a tarp. It was the middle of the afternoon by this time. We decided to go to a movie. No harvest today.

It is definitely a love/hate relationship with the GreenStar. But I did add my first flag to a map today. But I don’t know how to remove it. I was on the end rows dumping into the grain cart just figuring out the flagging. And I did make a new home page with the flags in the layout. I should have taken a picture of the screen. Will do that tomorrow and show you. William didn’t seem all that impressed with these accomplishments. He just said, “But you don’t know how to remove the flag.” He didn’t score many points today.

Event of the day: Our first breakdown. The chain that drives the right side of the corn head broke. You know about this problem quickly when you start plowing rows of corn. This is a messy fix since the chain is in a sealed oil bath. We got it fixed and running again. I ran the combine ’til about 5:30 when we had enough wet corn in the bin. Next we moved augers and wagons to transfer corn from the first drying bin to a regular bin with a fan. William will fill that bin tomorrow morning.

William fixing the chain on the corn head.

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Not taking it too fast yet. The corn is still a little wet at 24%. It is still averaging 175 bushels/acre. I would say we took out about 35 to 40 acres today. The guys switched to another drying bin after filling the first.

I am having a little difficulty getting the GreenStar screen to display the info I want. I got the acres for the individual fields to show but now I can’t zoom in and out of the map. Will be pecking away at it again tomorrow. There are some tile risers I want to flag on the maps. So I put out a tweet asking how to do that. @AaronBokeck was nice enough to tweet back the steps. Thank you. I was thinking that if I had auto steer on the combine I could tweet a lot more.