YouTube Farm Equipment Maintenance Videos

With the rain we've been having I decided to take care of a minor issue that didn't start until after we completed the winter maintenance items.  Our John Deere 4440 tractor was leaking hydraulic/transmission fluid around the PTO seal.  Not a big deal but it was dripping oil everywhere it sat and was wasting fluid.  I think that I came out on the wrong side of this bit of maintenance.  To do this repair you have two choices: drain the rear end fluid into clean buckets and pour it back in when the repair is complete, or park the tractor pointing down-hill to move the fluid toward the front of the tractor and away from the repair.  I chose the hill only the hill wasn't steep enough and about $120 of fluid was lost.  It would take a life time of dripping fluid to make up for that!
I tried to do as much research on a repair as I could before attempting the fix.  One thing I've come to expect is to find just about any type of maintenance instructional video online.  But unlike maintenance on cars, trucks, even guns and robots, farm equipment maintenance isn't very available on online.  With all of the yearly maintenance and do-it-yourself repairs that farmers do you'd think there would be libraries worth of online maintenance videos but there isn't.  So I've decided that any tech manual level maintenance that I do I'll put online in our YouTube channel. I did an FX-2000 hay moisture sensor install in my John Deere 567 round baler and posted that to YouTube over the winter.  This time I recorded the PTO oil seal leak repair and posted that as well.  Maybe I can start a trend...

The asparagus has been growing and selling very well.  But now the weeds are starting to get the upper hand.  It's difficult to manage the weeds in asparagus, which is why most people use herbicides now on their asparagus.  We try to avoid herbicides and pesticides so we are on the cusp of doing something to try to get the upper hand back.  We haven't decided exactly how to handle the weeds yet, but we'll do our research and do something that sounds logical to us.  As a side note it's Sharon's birthday today and we're going to Rabab's Neighborhood Bistro tonight to celebrate.  We'll get to sample our own asparagus cooked in an upscale restaurant by a chef.  I can't wait!

The asparagus was growing out of control!  We had a 92 degree day early this week and it sent the asparagus shooting out of the ground.  We caught up just as it was cooling down later in the week, and now we're ahead of it.  Sales were great and it moved as well as we had hoped.  We've been checking back with our asparagus customers to get feedback and to make sure that everyone is happy.  We saw the first corn popping up on Wed. on a neighbor's field.  With the cool weather and the late start that our area saw I was surprised to see it up so fast.  We're expecting more rain and cool weather for the next couple of days and then we can get back to work.

Whew!  We got rain and severe storms last night and were getting showers this morning, but I'm not complaining. The farm work was pushing everyone to their max and we needed a day to stop and regroup.  The asparagus was growing faster than George and Sara could cut it.  We finally had to put all hands to harvesting the asparagus just to catch up.  It looked like we were going to be overwhelmed with asparagus but we sold out of it as quickly as we were harvesting it.  With everything else like field work, preparing for another set of chicks, and Sharon still home schooling the kids, we really needed a rain day.  The sun will shine soon enough!

Last week was a busy week.  Some fields were plowed, some were disked, and some were planted.  We had the elevator come in and air seed about 38 acres to orchard grass, clover and oats into alfalfa that wasn't completely killed out when we planted beans.  With luck the plan is to use the oats as a nurse crop that will help to keep the weeds down.  The oats will be cut before it forms oat heads and bale it as hay.  Then the orchard grass, clover and alfalfa will be left as hay.  We've had so much interest in horse hay that that isn't strait alfalfa that we decided to service that market more than our small field of brome grass hay.