Another busy day lined up today. It's supposed to rain tonight (50% chance 40% tomorrow) and the alfalfa hay I cut several days ago is almost ready to bale. The humidity is super high this morning @ 90% so the hay will be too wet to bale until that drops late this afternoon. Then when it does dry down today it will be in the middle of the day and may be too dry, the leaves can shatter when being baled, but that is the management challenge of alfalfa hay. With the chance of rain tonight and tomorrow I can put some fertilizer on the pasture. Dry fertilizer that is left on the ground will actually turn to a gas over time unless it gets rain to convert it to nitrogen in the ground that the plants can use, so timing the rain is important to maximize the investment. I should have done it early in the spring, but things just didn't seem to work out, it's one more thing on my list of things to do. I also am taking one last load of straw to the sale barn this morning, but first I have go to down and pickup the rack that had straw on it the last time I tried to pickup the rack. I'd rather be busy than bored...

First Calf of 2010

We had our first calf of the year a couple of days ago. We were going down to plant the back 9 on Friday and noticed that #65, one of our older cows, was bagging. I called up to the house on the radio and announced that #65 was bagging, so everyone went down to watch. Bagging, which I meant is the water bag, not the udder bagging up with milk, indicates that the calf is about to be born any time and is minutes away. Geo and I continued down to plant while everyone else watched the calf get born. Everything was normal and went well. Sara checked and it is a pretty little bull calf. A couple of hours after it was born I found the calf outside of the string fence in the tall grass and took the time to check it over, ear tag it, and castrate band him. It took just a couple of minutes and while the mama cow wasn't pleased that I was messing with her new born, she didn't bust through the string to keep me away either. Next due is #64 from the looks of things. Time will tell.

Calculating Seeding Rate - Real World Farm Math 101

Our kids are home schooled, so when I came across a great math problem I decided to include the two older kids in the process. It started by reading the implement manual for the JD grain drill. As I was working my way through the manual I decided I needed to calculate the exact amount of seed being dropped by my brother's drill. My brother had said that he dropped twice the amount of seed that he had intended when he used the drill based on what the manual said, so I wanted to make sure that I didn't run out of seed or waste any seed. Each crop has a recommended planting rate based on pounds per acre, and to get the drill to drop the right amount of seed, adjustments have to be made so that the drill meters out the correct amount. The manual has recommended settings based on tire size and turns/revolutions per acre but they also recommend measuring the amount of seed dropped. To measure the seed we jacked up one side of the drill so that the wheel could be manually turned to drop seed from several seed drops with a fixed number of wheel turns. Then we used our digital scale to measure the amount. The original math we used is
10 turns from 3 drops=0.19500lbs
1 drop 10 turns=0.06500lbs
1 drop 1 turn=0.00650lbs
17 drops 1 turn=0.11050lbs
1 acre is 615 turns=67.95750lbs
This is 67.95 pounds to the acre.
But then I noticed that the tire size in the manual is not the same as the tire size on the drill so our information is WRONG!!!
Next we went back to the drawing board and decided to calculate area covered and seed dropped with tire size being a variable. Since all of our calculations were based on 10 turns/revolutions of the wheel, that was our starting point. 10 revolutions of the wheel moves the drill about 73.5 feet. The drill is 9'4" wide so doing length times width we were able to determine that in 10 revolutions of the wheel we covered .016 acres. Then multiplying by 62.5 to get to a full acre we could calculate the amount of seed dropped in an acre from the weight measurements that we made originally and yes, if we had used the original measurements with the wrong tire size we would have dropped a lot more seed than we should have. Also, doing the math also makes me think that planting with a 9'4" drill is going to take forever!

Everyday is a great day to farm but yesterday was an absolutely beautiful day to farm. Cool, sunny and a nice breeze. I finished cutting hay by noon, had lunch, then dropped the hay mower and hooked up the packer-mulcher. The packer-mulcher is made up of 3 tillage tools. It has a clod buster on the front, spring tooth in the middle, and cultipacker in the back. After disking the back 9ac I ran the packer-mulcher over the field to smooth it and get it ready for drilling seed. It looked really nice when I was done but I also noticed at the end that I had a front tire going down just as I was wrapping up. Something is down in the field that slashed the tire, so I ran the tractor up to the yard and spent the late afternoon running to town to get a new tire mounted. Today I'll try planting with my brother's drill. Something new to learn. Hopefully it's not an expensive lesson.

1st Cutting

Yesterday I finished disking the back 9ac so today I cut hay. I cut about 30ac which took me most of the day to finish. I waited until the dew burned off which was about 10AM and cut until almost 5PM. Tomorrow I have another 20ac to cut. Cutting hay makes for a long day but for me it's one of the most enjoyable things. I can't describe how enjoyable it is so I'll just say that my very best day doing tech work never came close to a day cutting hay.

Like a starter pistol going off, this week is really going to be a busy farm week. The weather is dry and the fields are just about dry enough to get back into them. I have hay to make and summer grazing to plant. I'll disk where I'm planting the cover crop/summer grazing on the back 9ac this morning and if I have time I'll cut my alfalfa hay but it probably won't get cut until tomorrow. One of the cover crop/summer grazing areas is also one of the alfalfa fields to be cut so I'll have to wait to plant that until the hay is baled. When I moved the cows this morning it is hard to imagine that some of the cows can get any bigger or their udder's get any fuller. They look like they could calve any minute but nothing yet. I think we'll try to move the calving forward a little for next year if we can now that we've got the cows calving at random times.

Farm Excitement - Bull!

The boys and I came home from town this afternoon and noticed a large black object in the alfalfa field. That's unusual! George said "It's the bull!" I said that I didn't think so but grabbing the binoculars out of the farm truck which proved George right... again. My first thought was I have a bull laying down in a field of alfalfa and that isn't a good sign. Bloat is a real concern with ruminants eating green legumes. Green legumes build acid in ruminant stomachs that produce gas bubbles which cattle can't pass. As the legumes continue to produce gas bubbles their stomach eventually crowds out everything inside of their abdomen and they go down for the count and eventually death. While we were formulating a plan the bull got up and started walking toward the paddock where he had escaped. That was a good sign and so a plan hatched to use the bobcat skid-loader to persuade the bull to go though one of the gates into the pasture or back into the paddock. After trying to show he was boss which didn't really work against the skid-loader, the bull eventually ended up going through the main gate into the pasture. Tomorrow I'll get some step-in posts and run electric along the cattle panel that he's figured out he can overpower and then push him back into the paddock with the steers. Hopefully that process goes without a hitch. I don't need that type of excitement.