pile up

 There is a pile up in front of and in the shop building where we do our fixing and simple building.  This is what happens often when you attempt to farm with tractors and equipment that is not, shall we say, "showroom fresh".  Especially is it true of the part of farming that involves lots of equipment use. 

Even though we took a 'prevented planting' option in the crop insurance thus cancelling the entire corn production season we still have the problem of weed control on those acres, still muddy from spring, as well as the need to establish a cover crop beyond noxious weeds.  And we have a considerable number of acres in hay, as well as a semi perennial planting of Kernza to deal with.

So the pile in the bottleneck grows.  The older tractor we have pulling the big baler overheated badly in the extreme heat last week while baling the nurse crop of oats off the new hay seeding.  It is parked in the doorway, baler still attached while Andy reluctantly hired a neighbor to bale the ninety or so acres being threatened by rain.  It has the hood pulled off and the water supply jacket disassembled to the thermostat under my mistaken impression that the thermostat was the problem.  So it is back to the drawing board on that job, while we wait for the gasket set my exploration destroyed.  

Meanwhile we have the old swather sitting to the side waiting to have the sickle pulled out and refurbished.  Jury is out as to if the rest of the old machine will hold together to cut the Kernza crop, long as it is on straw.  Also our field pickup developed a series of bubbles on one of the front tires meaning that it is unsafe at any speed.  Finding a decent used tire for a sixteen inch rim is difficult to say the least in this age of seventeen through twenty inch wheels.  We use that old truck to help with moving the newly baled hay to storage.

I pulled the sickle out of the swather yesterday and moved the machine out of the way.  Time to get hold of the hammers, punches, and right angle grinders to make that sickle usable.  Today we will start to reassemble the front of the baler tractor after having done what we can to flush the radiator fins of the fine dust built up in there.

But it is hard to escape the feeling that we hold our breath waiting for the next pile up to begin.

rainy

The seven day forecast from NOAA that I look at has shown significant rain for the last three months, often enough two of those rain events in the same seven days.

I can remember another year, probably in the early nineteen nineties, that was wet like this. It was pretty much before we moved into trying to market our production personally.  We have never gone whole hog for chemical weed control on this farm and I remember trying to cultivate the first time in the first week of July. The only weed control applied to this point that year was a band of granular grass herbicide over the corn row.  It was not fun.  Things on the farm have changed considerably since then, with the move into pasturing livestock and a revised crop rotation.  The organic certification accomplished in the early aughts and maintained ever since is a change in outlook and philosophy that has a major impact on everything.  This year we took the crop insurance offer of prevented planting and brought the corn seed back to the dealer.

Rain that won't stop is a challenge and a game changer. We will have to locate and speak for corn for the hogs.  We face trying not to allow noxious weeds to set seed in fields too muddy to till and the temptation to break the organic certification and spray.  We need to establish a cover crop in those same muddy fields.  Corn stalks will not be available for our hog bedding from our own fields.

But a good farm always tries to provide margins.  We have thirty acres of the new crop Kernza ripening for harvest.  The yield from that will make excellent hog feed.  And the straw left from that harvest, together with the extra corn stalks baled last fall, will get us through in terms of bedding.  The hay production, both from the established hay fields and clippings of pasture overgrowth are much in surplus.  Andy has gotten the sow herd on a continuous full feed of good hay from our own stockpile.  And due to the lack of a growing crop on the corn acres, we now have the chance to spread the manure in summer rather than first thing in the spring when the soil is wet and easily compacted.  Maybe we can trying seeding a winter grain crop such as rye, wheat or triticale.   

So we provide a part of our own insurance against adversity, which farms should always do, but are in fact too often failing to accomplish today.