Northern Farmer

I wasn’t planning on posting today because I figured I’d be swathing oats and am not adjusted yet to the possibility that such a thing as rain could accure more than once in the same month. But it rained again today, about three quarters of an inch, and I praise God! Not even a storm with it.

This morning we poured 13 yards of concrete in our silage pit so we’re off to a good start. Tommorrow knock out the forms and rebuild them for another section to be poured this Friday if possible. The pressure is off now that I know the corn won’t be burning up and we’d have to do an early chop. Now hopefully I can chop in September when it’s a little cooler. I always get amused at how some farmers around here can spend so much money on silage choppers. And also reading some of the books and articles on starting to farm, where they put the equiptment at such high dollar amounts. I bought our current JD chopper 10 years ago for $1200 and it works like a charm. I put in about a $100 worth of bearings in that time. The books and magazines will tell you it’s in the ten’s of thousands for this equiptment, some will even say alot higher than that. No wonder people go broke farming, financial suicide. Same with our JD combine, a 4400 model, bought it eight years ago for $4000 dollars, a snappy one owner to boot! Runs great and very few minor breakdowns,(so far). I feel sorry for someone wanting to farm and they get all the info they can that runs them broke before they even have a fighting chance to farm. There’s so many deals out there it’s amazing if a person conditions their mind to not spend. Some farmers here are hiring the chopping for their silage and it cost’s them more every year to chop than I have invested in it, and we chop more than they do in the season. And they complain that it’s so hard to make it nowdays. And now add up our expenses with chopping equiptment, plus soon not buying seed, and not buying fertilizer anymore, getting above average crops and I can’t beleive anyone would want to farm any other way. But I think more and more are getting the idea because I’m coming across it a little more on the web, it’s still not in the farm magazines, but that’s OK.

It’s kinda strange now when I talk about the future of our farm with the family and it’s so good. And this post was just about a couple segments of our farm operation. There’s so many more things that we are looking forward to. From small projects to larger ones, it exciting for us all. And to keep going with zero debt, living simply,and a strong faith in God is as good as it gets.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 25th, 2005 at 9:40 pm and is filed under Northern Farmer. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.