Oh, but if you had built your shocks with the knots out it would have rained for a week straight. The idea man can’t affect the weather is absurd. Just take a shortcut based on the weather forecast and watch the opposite happen!
Yup. Paul's eagle eye won't miss a single incorrectly placed sheave either. He was arguing with his son over who had built the one that fell over while we were at lunch. Both were certain it was not theirs. I'll find out how many of the ones I built that blew over in the wind later no doubt.
We're going carting in a little while when it cools down. That's pitchfork work so it won't be as hard. Daughter in law driving the tractor, Paul on the cart stacking and me and his son on the ground pitching the sheaves up to him. Half the weight of the bunches we chuck about and I can wear shorts.
You Tube popped this up in my feed today. Just down the road last year. I know a couple of the guys threshing. A few interesting bits of historical information.
I started a few fig tree cuttings a while back and they finally producing a few figs. I get to finally make my fig preserves.
I was chatting with farmer Paul about his combine harvester. 1967 Claas Matador. It completed the harvest without a hitch apart from breaking a pulley belt. The belt was one of two side by side and the combine was able to finish the harvest on one belt. Paul bought his combine harvester many years ago for £150. I bet yours was a tad more expensive. This is the larger version, the Matador Giant.
Same type of machinery I started my farming journey around. My uncle had a Gleaner “C” similar to this one. New John Deere combines are $400,000 to $800,000, plus another $80,000-$100,000 for each header. In this area you need a platform head for small grains and soybeans and a row (corn head) head for corn. I don’t farm enough acres to cash flow that so I trade trucking for harvesting with my neighbor. He locked in a three year lease on a new Claas combine about 5 years ago. The first year it did not run one full day without breaking down. One day when I was running it I made it about 200 yards on my first pass through the field and the low straw shredder speed warning went off. It was notorious for false alarms so I looked in the mirrors and confirmed the shredder was still running but about that time the low hydraulic fluid warning went off. Of course that merits immediate shutdown and when I walked to the back of the combine I found a 1.5 inch hydraulic fitting on the straw chopper was disconnected. Whoever put it together had not torqued the threads correctly. So instead of picking 50 acres of corn I spent the morning trying to come up with 75 gallons of hydraulic fluid to replace what it puked out. The thing was a disaster. It caught a field on fire once because of a failed bearing. The engine cooling fan blew apart into a million pieces one day. The flails on the straw chopper self destructed one day and a flying piece of steel almost hit a truck driver in the head which probably would have been fatal. The second season we did have a few days without breakdowns but the dealer brought a second machine up to use while the original machine was being fixed each time it broke down. At the end of the second year of the 3 year lease my neighbor breached the contract and paid off the third year instead of hiring a lawyer and going to court because the dealer wouldn’t void the contract or negotiate. So now it’s back to the JD green. Tell Paul to hang onto the old Claas. The new ones are garbage!
I have a custom silage harvesting crew put up my corn ensilage. This is the tractor they brought to push the silage into the pile and pack it. It weighs about 30,000 lbs. so does a good job packing the pile. Packing is important as it forces the air (oxygen) out of the silage so it ferments anaerobically. I planned to get more pictures of the chopper and trucks etc. but had to be gone the day they worked. Maybe next year…
Ground hay the other day. The grinder is owned by a custom hay grinding company and sets up at your location of choice and grinds for $300/hour. It’s your responsibility to get the hay into the spinning grinder tub. The grinder can be set up with different screens under the rotary hammer mill to change the size of the pieces of ground hay. There are options from 2” to 7” typically. I used a 3” screen this time. With pretty low moisture alfalfa bales and a 3” screen, the grinder gobbled up a 1700 lb bale about every 55 seconds. So ended up with somewhere north of 110 tons of hay ground in 2 hours.
Hay is outrageous here. I wonder if it would be cheaper to feed my goats grain. I have been doing mulch hay and sweet feed. Of course they have pasture but some is locked off.
How much is hay at your place? The last hay I bought was in 1970. A bale was 14” by 36” by 16” and cost $6 Australian.
8 dollars a bale for regular hay. A round bale of cow hay is up to 100 dollars. Bermuda hay is 16 dollars a bale and alfalfa hay is over 25 dollars a bale. And we had good rains this year.
That sounds like a lot in 1970. I don't know what the exchange rate was back then but it was probably about 50p a bale here back then. It was stuck at £1 a bale for most of the '80s. I don't know what it is this winter without looking but I expect it is at record levels after the long dry summer we've had. Might even be up towards a tenner.
Sorry I didn’t get back to this thread for so long. The majority of this ground hay will go to the weaned calves we “background” until usually some time in February. A little will go to the milk cows. The hay we grind is all dry hay cured in the field in windrows and baled with a round baler. After grinding it’s mixed with corn silage and a little ground corn in a roto mix feed wagon to create a ration balanced for optimal protein/energy ratio for growing calves. Oh, other beasts will eat some. The main goat herd runs with the milk cows so helps eat the ration fed to them. The Kune Kune pigs run out there as well and clean up what the cows and goats throw out of the feed bunks onto the ground. The goal is to not have much waste.
Basically yes. The screen size in the grinder helps determine the length of each piece of ground hay, but the moisture of the hay makes a big difference as well. Dry alfalfa hay ground with a 5” screen will mostly end up in pieces a couple inches long. Alfalfa hay baled on the “wet” side will end up in pieces mostly longer than 5” with a 5” screen. If you are selling hay by the ton it’s advantageous to bale hay with as high a moisture content as possible without causing spoilage. That way you get paid for the weight of the moisture. I don’t sell hay, so bale as dry as possible in most cases. This lessens the hauling costs, makes grinding faster/cheaper, and saves wear and tear on every piece of equipment from the baler, to loaders/skid steers, feed wagon, and trucks/trailers.
Alfalfa is my main source of protein. A lot of people feed wet distillers grains from ethanol plants as a protein source for backgrounding calves. I have in the past as well. It’s pretty good feed but not really what ruminants are designed to eat. I have healthier cattle when I avoid distillers grains and feed forage based protein sources instead. Distillers grains have good protein, fat, and energy profiles. But they are high in phosphorus so if you don’t manage that well you can have calcium/phosphorus ratios that are detrimental to weight gain and overall health. Also trace minerals are hard to manage when feeding distillers. The high sulfur can interfere with copper and selenium absorption and immune system function is compromised. When feeding distillers you can feed ground corn stalks or wheat straw or other low nutrient dense fillers because of the high protein, fat, and digestible fiber content of distillers. When feeding just forages (alfalfa, corn silage, etc.) the alfalfa quality has to be pretty good to supply enough total protein for optimal performance. There isn’t much room in the ration for low quality forage without increasing the ground corn percentage. And ruminants aren’t designed for that either. It’s a bit different with mature cows depending on which trimester of pregnancy they are in or if they are lactating etc. Usually our cows are grazing corn stalks through the second trimester and don’t get fed much until about a month before calving. In the third trimester the protein and energy needs increase drastically but cows can still do well eating a lot of cane or grass hay in their ration. I even include some ground soybean stubble pre-calving if the weather is good and the cows are in good flesh. Once a cow calves and begins lactating she has to be fed pretty good or she will lose weight and not re-breed in a timely manner. So my best quality alfalfa is saved for cows that are nursing calves. As you know, temperature and precipitation play a huge role in how much and how good of quality feed ruminants need, so that always figures into decisions on how much low or high quality feed gets fed.
Wow. I guess it’s high everywhere. I’m not sure what cow quality alfalfa is going for here. But we buy quite a bit of grass hay for the horses and donkeys and it’s running between $240-$300/ton delivered (big rounds). Even baled corn stalks that are usually around $50/ton are well over $100/ton this year. Sorry folks, beef prices aren’t coming down anytime soon!
I get a little concerned when I hear a farmer is stopping on row crops to grow hay. That means both the row crop and the hay crop are going up in price. Looks like no relief for the grocery shopper in the vegetable section or the meat section....sigh.
Hay is a good cash crop round here. What better way to get rid of a million pounds of chicken manure?
