Getting Green Again
August 23rd, 2007 by Northern FarmerLife is coming back to the land this last week and a half! Everywhere a person looks the color green is starting to dominate the land. And it seems with a vengeance! I do believe we picked up around four inches the last week and a half and even in the deepest meadows it still isn’t wet. The land was able to take it all and still have room for more. There’ll be a scramble to try and catch up at least a little bit on hay and grazing to take the brunt off the drought effects. The alfalfa is coming back quick, from totally brown to growing at an incredible speed. The corn even picked up somewhat and we still have a week or two until silage chopping.
Today was spent hauling hay from eight miles north of here. I was able to but 120 bales of meadow hay, “big†round bales, 1500 pounders, at a reasonable price and latched on to that deal. Hauled 44 home today, four loads, at an estimated 16500 pounds of hay per load. Reed canary hay from a deep meadow, basically a dead lake. One that got overgrown the last couple hundred years. On normal years it would be difficult to get in a place like that but this wasn’t what would be considered the norm. Reed canary is excellent beef cow hay, in fact I almost prefer it and I think they do too.
So today, in the afternoon, was just driving up and loading up and driving home and unloading. I would have got more hauled but every load there’s a big bull session about anything and everything! Plus I had a flat tire on the trailer on the second load. Don’t know what happened there, something sliced that heavy duty tire and I had to buy a new one and get going again. So that knocked me down at least one load this afternoon. But all in all, everything went well. Them’s some big bales!
As it greens up and the grass lushes out the next couple of weeks I plan on sending those cows that are at home back out on grass. But their “evilâ€, fence busting calves are staying home, about a month and a half early for weaning around here but they’re not going back out to cause me incredible headaches again! They done had it! Plus those cows can put on a lot of flesh for winter without a calf dragging them down. That’ll save a lot of hay and silage over winter!
All is well then, it’ll be a scramble here and there to make things right again and go into winter without the worries of running short on feed. Pretty soon we can finally get around to sawing some firewood on the tractor buzz saw. I just gotta get some pictures of that thing, it’s incredible and safe. Plus we picked up an old grain elevator to replace the man required now to grab and throw the sawed off piece of firewood. Rigging that up to run on the John Deere 50’s hydraulics. Run the elevator nice and slow and make the wood pile. This way we can cut up to 20 or 25 cord without moving the tractor. We did 10 cord one day in June and it was fairly hot out then and we were resting quite a bit, in fall when it’s cooler I can’t see why we couldn’t do 15 cord with ease.
It’s been busy here, thus the lack of posts from me and will continue to be fairly busy for a few more weeks. Tis the season you know! But from this end I’ll try and keep some updates coming from over this way.
August 23rd, 2007 at 8:47 pm
Good to see you finally getting some rain. I have always contended that if happiness has a color, it would be the spring green of new growth. Listening to all the news reports about the floods in Minnesota, made me wonder if you were going to have to give up cows, and raise catfish. Sheesh, they made it sound bad. Speaking of saws, I once worked for awhile at a small sawmill with a big grey bearded guy. He had piles of cutoffs, sawdust and flitches all over his property. And what seemed like a hundred mean ole watch dogs chained up around the place. He was a little odd… well, anyway, about the saw. He had an old one cylinder John Deere tractor he had rigged belts from a pulley to his cross cut saw. He’d get the flywheel turning and chug…chug…chug. away we go, sawing small logs. Worked great, except that it probably would have made an OSHA inspector feel a little concerned. Come to think of it, that might be the reason for all those mean dogs. His whole operation was, say, little wobbly when it came to his equipment. Well, glad to see you got some rain, and didn’t get washed out. I enjoy your blog.
August 24th, 2007 at 5:49 am
Morning Mark!
Well, I tell you, I don’t know much about floods around here, I hear they’re bad down in southern MN but here it’s been pretty calm. Had good rains, really a dream come true, plenty of it and cooler temps finally.
It’ll feel good in a few weeks to have all this behind us and get around to sawing wood, hauling wood and all the rest. Nothing like cooler days and the smell of woodsmoke in the yard, shorter days, more sleep. Oh man, it’ll be good! Take out the flintlock rifle and get ready for a little hunting, set some traps later. Yup, life gets a bit different in a bit.
I’ll try to post on the internet sometime in the future some pictures of when we’re sawing and all that stuff. Using a 60 year old tractor, well really it’s older than that, and old fashion buzz saw. Just a bit more common sense put into it.I remember years ago almost all the farmers around here were missing some fingers or worse from buzz saws and other contraptions.
Thanks!