Beans beans the magical fruit...

No no not those kind of beans...I wouldn't be blogging if I wasn't talking about the farm - I'm talking about soybeans! We spent Saturday planting our soybeans. Which meant that wifey here "got" to help shuffle 50 lb seed bags from the grainery to the truck and then again from the truck to the drill. And she "got" to stand upside down on her head to help clean beans back out of the drill at the end of the day. Seed handling is not my favorite part of being a farmer's wife...it almost makes me want to stay home and cook! But where would J-rod be without his co-pilot?

That time of year again

Life is getting real busy real fast on the farm now. Better get my blogging skills sharpened so I can get it all recorded! Harvest is only several weeks away and the wheat has started changing colors. Memorial weekend was full of farming (and a little fun too). We started on Friday night with the baling. This first cutting of alfalfa was this|close to being rolled up without any rain on it. Rained Wednesday night so we raked it on Thursday and by Friday it was dried down again and ready to be baled.

This was our first crack at alfalfa with our new (used) baler. We checked it over real good last week, made sure it was oiled and greased and ready to rock. There's so many moving parts and pieces on a baler that have to work in unison - so many places you can make adjustments if needed - it's hard to know where to start. Good thing he knows his equipment because me reading that technical manual wasn't much help. :-)

First Good Snow

Started in on the winter routine (daily chores) about a week ago, and didn't barely get 2 nice days before I had to start chopping ice! Today we had our first real good snow and I had fun taking pictures on my morning trek to pellet the calf crop and feed/water "Gimpy."

We don't have any bottle calves this year, but we've got "Gimpy" isolated for the time being while her hoof heals. I-magine she'll end up the sale barn when she can get around good again. She was a good cow and she's not that old, but she's not holding up her end of the bargain right now with no calf and a bum foot preventing her from breeding back again. All our cows get 2 strikes before they get culled, but she chose to take both her strikes all at once! Swelling in her foot is going down, so hopefully she'll make a full recovery from whatever accident she had in the pasture that caused her hoof to tear!

Here are my snow pictures for the day:

Fall Farm & Dog Update

Spent a good majority of the weekend driving the diesel around, shuffling people and seed and fertilizer tanks. Helping hook up to this or unhook from that. It isn't the most exciting job on the farm, but it helps keep the tractors and combines rolling efficiently if they will get me involved doing the little things so they don't have to stop so much. We're about halfway done with the wheat planting. The last of the beans will be cut this afternoon if the little shot of rain in the forecast holds off a little longer!

I had a few minutes here before I have to go pick up the farmer man again, so I came home and gave the dog a bath. He found a glob of grease while we were unhooking from this and re-hooking to that...and smeared it all over everywhere. So he's clean now so I figured he was worth a few quick pictures with my new little point and shoot camera. I think he's about as big as he's gonna get now. He's got a strong protector personality when he's on his home turf (and once in awhile on someone else's turf), he talks a lot of talk, but he's a lover underneath all the barking and growling. He'll put his ears and tail down and come to you all crouched down and excited to be loved on!

Spring/Summer Farm Projects (part 2)

The 2 new grain bins are finally done - just in time for harvest!

This is where we will store the wheat seed that will be used to plant wheat again in the fall. My honey coordinated this whole project, from the dirt work, to the concrete, to ordering the bins and picking them up, to assembling them piece by piece and finally getting them uprighted onto the pad. The guys (and me too) worked many long hot days to get these assembled. I took a few pictures the first day and then I stopped by this morning, snapped off a couple pictures of the finished project, walked the dog down the country road and then it started raining! We've had close to 3/4 of an inch so far this morning. Hopefully the sun will shine again and we will be harvesting in the next couple days!

Spring/Summer Farm Projects (part 1)

I haven't kept up on the blogging well at all this year. It's almost harvest time again and that makes me remember why I started blogging 2 years ago about this time of year! So that means I have to try harder to make the time to record the craziness that happens this time of year on the farm...

One of the projects we've been working on (in addition to the regular workload of working normal jobs and keeping up with the normal farming/ranching) is rebuilding the catch pen (cattle loadout/working facility) at Jarrod's Dad's place. If you know me, you know I'd rather be out working with the boys than hanging out in the kitchen. The guys could tell you I did do some actual work on this project!

I didn't think ahead and take a "before" photo so I dug through all my old photos and found a couple that show what the crowding tub-alleyway-working chute-loadout area looked like in 2003. It was made of railroad ties and wire cattle panels and it did its job for a good long while before I started helping out I'm sure.
































(these are not my best photographic works for sure)

Now, the new crowding tub, alleyway, and loadout are finished. We still want to put a different headgate on the working chute. In the last few weeks, we've done our usual spring cattle chores using the new homemade facility (now made of sturdy pipe, sheet metal and more scrap metal and designed after something you might pay big bucks for at the farm show). We've run calves, cows and heifers through it and I think Jarrod's Dad is happy with the way it turned out. Here are a couple pictures I snapped off last night before we worked the calves and heifers and sent them all off to pasture for the summer. We are relieved that this chore is finally done! Here is what she looks like in 2009:

Between the Sirens...

Tornado sirens fired twice in my neck of the woods today. Once about 7: 30 this morning and once again in a nearby town closer to noon. Neither translated into an actual tornado creating damage on the ground, but we are thankful that technology has improved enough to give us warning when it's likely that there is rotation in the sky. Of course, we do live in Kansas, so most of us run outside and look to the sky for the signs of severe weather when the sirens fire, as opposed to taking cover like we should. Between the 2 bouts of excitement, we went on a crop tour and fed our cattle. Here are a few pictures:

A couple "yup's" & and an "ok" and next thing you know...

we bought a tractor?

I attended a "Women in Ag" meeting this last spring thinking I should be participating in these sorts of things since after all, I could be labelled as a woman who participates in agriculture. One of the speakers that night was giving us ladies some tips on improving communication with our other halves (who tend to be of the minimal-communicating variety). She started off by telling the story of being around the breakfast table one morning, thinking she was participating in the daily board meeting. The guys were talking in their usual farmer code - "well what'd ya think of it?" "I think it'll do." "Spose we should go on and do it?" "yep I spose." Come to find out the decision had just been made to buy a combine! I don't tell the story as well as she did, but I certainly understood the point she was making. That conversation did NOT say anything specifically about combines, machinery, purchasing anything, or spending money. And I would think a farm wife who makes decisions WITH her husband would want to know when the farm was about to undertake something as big as buying a combine!





It's taken me years to learn how to decipher the farmer-code conversations that take place between my husband and his father and uncle. I have to listen really closely to the "yups" and ask questions promptly if anything is not clear. I have to make them be specific and I have to expect I will get a surprise once in a while when they forget that I want to participate in the farm decisions too! Luckily, I'm married to a man who's willing to explain and explain and explain EXACTLY what's going on on the farm and lets me help him make the decisions that involve our end of the deal.

So when I tell you we just upgraded our tractor, you can rest assured it was not a snap decision and it was not made by a couple "yups" and an "ok" around the breakfast table one morning! We've been deliberating for more than a year as to how badly it was needed and if we could afford it. And the right opportunity finally presented itself so we did it. So here are a few pictures of my baby and his new toy. He really is like an ecstatic little kid playing in the dirt and it shows in these pictures! I'm thankful and inspired that he has been able to maintain that enthusiasm for the thing he loves the most and not become jaded when life throws him curveballs.