This week’s Farming Update from Ben

You know, if he was gonna leave the excavator here for a week, the least he could’ve done was leave the key in it. He even locked the door. It’s like he doesn’t trust me. Or maybe just that he knows people like me….

Graduation season and the local newspapers have been highlighting the top graduates at the four High Schools in Rochester and you read about the achievements of these kids and where they’re going to college and what they’ve been involved with and double majors and even one triple major and pre-med and you look at their pictures, (We were all that young once!) plus I’m struck by how senior photos have changed. Nothing formal in the studios anymore; they’re sitting in the grass or leaning on a railing or holding a basketball, anything they want. One kid in shorts that I thought to myself I could hear my mother‘s voice “you can’t have your picture taken in shorts!” 

Here’s a sub question, what do you think of that, good or bad they get to do what they feel like in the photos?

And how about those kids working two jobs? Supporting their families? Working a job, going to school, raising kids or supporting their parents, and just trying to survive? Too bad they don’t get celebrated in the papers more often.

I realized the other day we didn’t get any lilacs this spring. We have a row of lilac bushes 75 feet long and there was one branch on one end that got a few blossoms and nothing on the rest. I expected them to be coming and all the ones in town blossomed and ours are always a week later than that and then the other day I realize we never got any. They must’ve frozen off at some point. And then we have that one tree that does it in the fall and I don’t know what’s up with that either. But I miss the lilacs. 

Let’s see, on the farm, the Oats was sprayed with fungicide, it looks really good this year and it should be heading out I’d say in a week.

Corn was sprayed last week with herbicide, the weeds are starting to get bad in places. Over on some of the rental ground there’s a neighbor that is not a fan of the spraying so the Co-op can only spray there when the wind is out of the north, or there’s no wind so there’s no drift around their place. Plus I asked the Co-op to leave an extra buffer around their place. And that’s not a problem, I completely understand where they’re coming from, it’s just tough to find the right weather conditions. It got sprayed Friday morning.

Last week I took the back off the chicken coop and have the fan going in there.

On Tuesday I had a contractor fill in a gully and dig in a tile line out in the pasture. This one area is what started all of this work I’m having done with SWCD this year. Soil & Water.

I was just gonna put a culvert there in the gully and fill it all back in but they said we should really get to the root of the problem which was a much better idea. There’ll still be some work to do on the upper end of this, building a small dam once the oats is off (because some of the dirt they’ll need will come from a field where the oats is). It’s sort of two problems: Some erosion at the top end, and springs on the bottom end where they put in the tile, which will take the spring water underground down to a swampy area, and then the other work up top will prevent further erosion. The excavator mentioned above was used to dig in the tile line. The work was inspected and approved Wednesday morning and I got it seeded down Wednesday afternoon. Just needs a little more rain than the .2” we’ve been getting. I also seeded down another area. It’s a long slope and I’m having a grass headland area created, with two small berms to help direct the water off to the side. Hard to get a good picture of the work done, but Humprhey approves. 

Wednesday night Padawan and I went to the opera movie. I can’t tell you what it was called because I can’t pronounce it because it was all in Spanish. But it was about the day of the dead and the artist Frida Kahlo and her husband Diego Rivera. I was gonna go with Kelly and then she ended up with a work thing, so Padawan said he’d come with me. I let him leave at intermission. Which was longer than I expected him to last. 

Thursday I spent a chunk of the day navigating one of the chloride trucks applying chloride oil as dust control on the township roads. It’s an annual thing. 

Friday Padawan and I returned some left over seed, picked up some parts, and got a ton of egg layer ration. At the feed store, I saw a 50 pound bag of ‘Garlic Salt’. For cattle. They say it helps deter biting insects. It’s a natural way of stopping horn flies or face flies. HUH!

We also stopped at DQ.

Then when home, we went out in a corn field and measured out 175’, which is 1/100^th of an acre. Other years I’ve talked about measuring 17.5’ , 1/1000^th of an acre, and counting the plants, which gives us a ‘final stand’ count. A colleague told me yesterday, measuring 175’ is a much more accurate count. As I was riding around the township in the chloride truck, doing 2 mph up the road, I was looking at the corn “singulation”. That’s how well the planter does placing ONE kernel of corn EXACTLY where it should be. Not TWO kernels, or not SKIPPING a kernel, but ONE KERNEL ONLY EXACTLY THERE. My corn planter does a lousy job of singulation and it shows up in the rows now that it has emerged. They look terrible; lots of skips and doubles. Newer planters do better. But even at 99% singulation, when you look at a seed every six inches, and moving at ten MPH, it’s still gonna miss one every now and then. So I planted at a rate of 32,000 seeds / acre. Final stand count is between 28,200 and 30,500. Obviously, the better final stand count, the better crop.

I put some of the new purple LED lamps in the planter monitor.

I replaced some bearings in the corn planter gauge wheels. The bearing presses into a hub. I put the bearings in the freezer in the shop, to shrink them a bit, then press them into the hub.

I heard a YouTube farmer say, “You can fill one hole with two gates, but you can’t fill two holes with one gate.” And as obvious as that sounds, anyone who has dealt with cattle knew exactly what he meant. We’ve probably all been in that situation. 

I was sweeping out the feed shed before putting in the new pallet of egg layer. I have this broom in there. 

I had to laugh. I must have a handle I could put on this. But the building is only 8’ x 12’. And I only sweep it out once or twice a year. 

Are you ‘Making Do’?