Something new to rc

[Lil Giants]

No Bo, I don't think anyone ever gets used to it, some are able to deal with it better than others... me not so much, low blood pressure = poor blood circulation - hands & feet get cold quick!

Cabin Fever was a great event in 2012 & I'm sure it's gotten better every yr since, but that's quite a hike for me to get there! I'll make it there again someday... reminds me that I need to re issue my passport for such travel.

[Lil Giants]

Well the month January has been rather quiet, grain prices have been lower than Fall, so I haven't made any deals lately, still have about a third of my 2016 crop to price yet.

I get a call from my neighbor last night that his turbo blew mid afternoon, sitting out on the road just off the hiway a few miles from the country elevator, can I come him a hand tomorrow & bring my trk to empty his & tow him to town? Sure!

Last 3 weeks have been like Spring with Sunday's temps @10C, this morning cool off to -15C & with 30 - 40km/hr wind, windchill was like -25C. DAYUM it was cold!!! Even though we had to hand shovel the trk, it was still difficult to keep warm, for me anyway.





Neighbor in tow @about 50 - 60km/hr, 50 some km to get it to a repair shop. Whole trk was covered in oil, squirt some windex to try to clean windows & it froze in seconds.



Anyways, it was good to get out & do something different today.

Last week, same neighbor was at another neighbor's for a visit & bought that guy's B train hoopers, old trls, but didn't have a tractor to pull them home. Couple days later he takes me trk shopping to help him pick out a trk, he settled on a low mileage 2001 9900 International w/ 550hp ISX Cummins, 18spd, 4.10 46's, pretty sweet workhorse, very clean & everything felt tight. I drove it home for him & picked up his trls along the way cause he doesn't have a cdl. So I guess now this Friday I'll drive his semi to finish hauling the last of his malt barley, 10 mile haul. I'll drive there loaded, he can drive back empty & get some practice.

[Lil Giants]

Talking to my neighbor today, the shop said the turbo grenaded & sent all kinds of metal into the engine! Oil filter is half full of filings. Had 20% of its oil left in the pan. Needs an inframe @$20k or a reman @$23k.

[Efroeh]

That's some shitty news for your neighbor **** repairs can break a person. One thing I do miss living in the city is you always could depend on a neighbor for help any time and for anything in a small town. I do miss the farm life.

[Lil Giants]

Spent the day out in the farm shop working on a lil mini project.



















With the external cross-box auger in place, the only way to clean the corners out is to climb into the box, not fun! And trying to get enough fertilizer on the trk box for 2 fills, usually means having to climb in to shovel the corners out too.

The pup trl's center door is two piece, so I can open upper door separately to shovel out corners, works pretty slick.

Find out later this week how well the lil 2,5 inch flighting auger works when I haul home a couple hundred tonne of fertilizer for this yr's spring planting.

[Lil Giants]

Auger runs like a champ!

Using the 1/2 inch impact didn't work, there's enough initial resistance that the impact goes into ratchet mode & hammers away at very low speed. A 2 spd drill worked great. Use 1st for a minute, then 2nd for another minute, cleaned the corners out to about shovel on each side.

[TRUCKMAKER]

Should have used the dozer to clean the corners out, a little work, a little play, a little work,

[Lil Giants]

Ahhhh........ hmmmm........... steel tracks on a steel floor.... might be all day to clean the corners on one load,

Got done hauling fert this morning, and spent the afternoon cleaning the salt out of trk/trl & auger, then did an oil change on trk.



2015 I had major problems with fertilizer gumming up my drill & causing irregular seeding rates... today, seeing this build up on the auger flighting of the auger I used to fill the bin is quite concerning. 5yrs ago this never happened, flighting was virtually clean polished steel. Added time every day during seeding watching for signs of trouble.

[frizzen]

Is the fertalizer salt just too moist, or is there more to it?

[Lil Giants]

No, the product is dry, and the humidity Wed - Thurs was low 40's. The formulation of how it's produced is somehow different. In 2015 the fert build up was a brown colored oily mush that gummed up my drill in the seed rolls, throughout the air tubes and primary heads. This yr the fert build up on the auger flighting is different in being hard white stuff, not oily at all. I don't know what to think, It's just the last 2 yrs that this has become an issue.

[Lil Giants]

Heading 3 hrs north of home to pick up 700bu of yellow flax seed...



It's spring like weather since March 20th, took a week to melt & dry up, been servicing trks, tractors, augers, air drill, getting ready for spring planting... weather permitting, I hope to start spraying burnoff late next week & then start seeding durum April 24th... long range forecast doesn't look good for that to happen, but perhaps it's wrong.

[Lil Giants]

I went about 1hr north of home yesterday to pick up a (new to me) conveyor with a farmer invention shaker screen attachment on it... in the past it was a painfully slow process to gravity screen fertilizer from the bin, more than an hour to put on 10mt 2 - 3 times a day. Last couple yrs I've had help to take the time to do it while I'm seeding, but no help yet this spring, I didn't want to waste 3hrs a day loading fert trk. Now with this shaker screen AND 15 inch conveyor I can load trk in 10 minutes. With over 200mt to put through the drill in a season, that's close to 30hrs time saved.







I was gonna start seeding today, but wet weather started at 7am this morning & forecast don't look good for tomorrow either... so far it's been a bit of a drizzle. The fields are crazy wet, gonna be a lot of butt puckering next couple weeks.

[Lil Giants]

Unofficially finished planting May 18th, the last 300ac had too many wet spots throughout & I was hoping they would dry. May 23 - 26 the wind blew up to 50mph everyday, the wet spots seemed like they dried & I tried to finish planting May 27... I didn't go half mile & sunk my drill on the side of a hill First time in my life of farming that I had to split the cart from the drill to get out of the mud hole... that was about 4hrs of not fun











Where I buy my fertilizer & chemical in town, they also have specialized equipment to rent like this Valmar... I filled it with fertilizer & was hoping to broadcast on the surface the last I was trying to seed & with just seed in the cart it'd be a lot less weight to drag around... just about sunk it 3x Gave up, done seeding!





With that Valmar, I broadcast the last 20mt of fert on the land I seeded, don't want to store fert till next season anymore b/c I went thru an exhausting wreck this spring from fert I kept over from last yr.

A half section that was a swamp last yr that I never got seeded meant 20mt of fert left over. took it all out of the bin, put floor dry in the bin bottom to collection any moisture that might accumulate at trap... added 60mt on top last week of March this Spring... May 3rd when I just started seeding, couldn't get the fert to come out of the bin.. beat on the slopes of the hopper with a fence post & using a hockey stick to poke from the bottom for 2hrs by myself with no success... phone fert agent, two guys come out with a big plastcic sledge hammer & a vibrator snake... two more hrs go by & we kinda got it to flow, but the fert was coming from around the edges & that started a corkscrew effect that started to literally crinkle the hopper slopes & dents appearing up the side of the bin so we quit... and I go to town to get 10mt of new fert so I can atleast get some seeding done that day.

Next morning two guys come again with a picker trk & basket, and a gen set with a big hammer drill with a home made 5ft drill bit... essentially a half inch rod with sickle sections on the end with 1/2 rod stubs welded perpendicular on the 5ft shaft.

I managed to get the manhole cover on hopper slope open the day before & we worked the hammer drill through there for better than a hr AND THEN THE FERT DROPPED!!! It was a bit of struggle getting that manhole cover slid back in place, maybe half tonne hit the ground.

Put 15mt on the trk, go fill the drill, take another 15mt out, looks like we got it, the workers leave. Next day take another 15mt out & it flows ok. But after that the last 45mt to come out was a lumpy mess that took better than an hr each trk load. That wreck cost me more than a day's worth time of hard labor over the period of the week of seeding durum... never again store fertilizer through summer, fall, winter!

That shaker screener/conveyor was a god send, it would've been 10x the job if I was still using my screw auger.





Land rolling peas, took 2 days to go over 650ac



Pick rock football size & bigger b/c the land roller aint pushing them in the ground.



This is why I spray ahead of seeding... somehow I forgot a small area in the middle of the field... probably tank went empty, went seeding rest of day, next morning spraying again in a different area, didn't check "plane" view on monitor when finish the field



The swamp half I didn't seed crop on last yr, it's bottom ground that has several square miles of higher ground of water run off that goes through; the last 7yrs the quality of soil has been diminishing with the ten feet of rainfall accumulation, plus whatever the winter snowfall amounted to; I decided last yr to seed it this spring to a forage grass blend of alphalfa, brome, crested wheat grass... cut/bale next summer for 7 - 10yrs, then maybe rent it for pasture after that or could farm it again... though I won't be farming anymore in 10yrs.

I put my 9390 on the little grass seeder, tractor is 21ft wide, seeder 33ft wide ...but I did find a couple of spots that I did get some wheel slippage ...the Ford FWA would've been stuck!!!

[Lil Giants]

As wet as it was this spring, now it's gotten incredibly dry with about a half inch total rainfall throughout entire month May, but the biggest kick in the nutts is the strong winds last 3 weeks that has dried out the surface & created a 2 inch gap to moisture.

My durum on gumbo land, it was so wet when seeding that the drill compacted the soil bad!!! A good soaker rain anytime after seeded would've cured that problem, but the high winds turned the clay into brick hard & my durum on a 1000ac has come up patchy, 7 - 10% never germinated... for Kriest sake - one extreme to the next!

And my yellow flax is shallow seeded at about 1/2 inch, same problem, surface dried out - patchy germination.

Got a boomer last night, 3 tenths in the gauge... it'll help, but not sure if it's enough... plus it's kinda late for the majority durum that germinated 5 weeks ago, a 2nd growth now, gonna cause problems come harvest

About 20% done in crop spraying... lack of crop growth also means lack of weed growth ...probably take all month... whatever, go tinker in the Lil Giants shop.

[Rimrock]

Looks to be quite big investments in equipment in order to run a farm this size. Quite some maintenance I would guess) Do you hire people now and then to help with maintenance, and general work on the farm, or you manage most of it your self?

[Lil Giants]

The most important tool on the farm is a grease gun Oyvind, it virtually eliminates most any other additional maintenance

Half my equipment is a few yrs old, the other half 20 some yrs old & primarily operated by me alone - never abused.

Other than my combine that goes to town for a yearly post harvest check up, I do my own wrenching/service/welding on machinery.

Good - experienced help is hard to come by nowadays. I do the majority of the farm work by myself... everybody wants big $$/hr wage, but won't do any heavy labor or long hrs when needed. I don't have time to babysit & train somebody new every yr, nor can I afford to let just any idiot try to operate a half million dollar piece of equipment applying $100+/ac ag products... 6 more yrs after this one & then it's FREEDOM 55

[frizzen]

That sounds like its shaping up to be a rough year.

I hope the land starts playing nicer. Ya might need to buy stock in companies making high floatation tires

[Lil Giants]

Starting out to be a less than ideal yr frizzen... as nuts as it was last fall with the crazy wet weather, crop under snow for a month, crop riddled with disease & trouble with the help; some of the price deals I made afterwards with durum ($422/ac) & yellow peas ($450/ac) were at the right time & I managed to do alright. Next week the grain cleaner is coming to the farm to clean brown mustard, try to get the sample to the buyer's standards so he'll honor the $0.36/lbs contract I have with him... hopefully be another $250/ac to add to the pot.

Alberta has had some decent rainfall so far, but Saskatchewan, Manitoba & much of the mid-western USA is drier than normal, price of wheat has risen 30% in the last couple weeks... a lower yielding - higher quality crop is cheaper to harvest & easier to market.

I've never played the stock market, I figure I gamble away enough with just farming

[Lil Giants]

Painfully slow, maybe 75 bushel/hr, but it's getting all the crap out

Could be 120hrs to clean these two bins 17hr days x 7

[Lil Giants]

Finished 1st bin mid afternoon, 50hrs in 2.5 days. Moved to next bin, up & running by 5. Crazy hot today, I think it's peak was 36 40 - 60% chances of rain next couple days, haven't been in the Lil Giants shop for 10 days.