My Office Was Dusty Today...

Plowpoint · #1 07/11/12, 06:10 PM

I spent some serious time in this bad boy today getting ready to plant corn. With all the rain we have had, we are delayed by 3 weeks and there are still some fields we cannot get to yet. As is, in dry years we can hit the ground twice and then plant, but this year it is taking 3 times to break up the sod. The rain is just making the sod clump together! Still the sun is shining (finally) and we are cutting the sod and plugging corn seed into the ground as fast as we can.

Years ago, before we bought Ole Blue, we used to have to disc 24 hours a day just to get the crops in since we only had a 16 foot wide disc and a 140 horsepower tractor. Times have changed, but we also plant a lot more corn now and never stop milking cows (24/7/365)

My farm is the last farm to be planted. We lease land as far as 33 miles away from the home farm in order to have enough land to feed our cows. Years ago it was the first, but we bought a new farm last year and now the old farm just contains heifers and calfs. Because I am so close to that (3 miles) this 72 day corn will be chopped in the dough for heifer feed. The milking cows will get the older corn, chopped in the dent.

When I took a shower tonight the tub looked like mud from all the dust, but I'll take a little dust and a view out of these windows over any corner office in a high rise any day. (been there, done that and it sucked!)

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**fordson major** · #2 07/12/12, 06:15 AM

they are nice too drive! i put over 10,000 hours on a 9482, only thing ever went wrong was the center pivot bearing let go.

rambler · #3 07/12/12, 09:18 AM

Nice.

You can plant corn in July and get a crop in your area? Sweetcorn or silage corn perhaps? Can't see field corn getting ripe & dry?

--->PAul

Paquebot · #4 07/12/12, 11:37 AM

Used to have a neighbor farmer who would plant peas for the canning company and then corn as soon as the peas were harvested. He'd plant the earliest that he could find and usually ended up with decent silage.

Martin

Plowpoint · #5 07/12/12, 11:49 AM

Yeah we can get a good crop in. We start with 100 day corn, but by the time we get to this time of the year, we are down to 72 day corn. Of course it is shorter so the tonnage per acre is down compared to the other corn, but its still good corn.

Years ago when we got paid premiums by the butter fat content we used to plant our corn and then get our grass crop in. No more now that they pay a premium on protein content. In order to get that you got to have high protein feed, so we will stop planting corn, grab our first crop of grass while it is in its prime, and then return to plant the rest of the corn. We are better off for doing all that too.

I am not sure which is better, waiting until the corn dents or chopping it in the dough. One nutritionist says "in the dough" and the other says "in the dent". I know chopping it green helps produce a better pile of silage, but I think there is more nutrition in the dented kernels.

Either way we have a cracking head on our chopper that helps extract a little more nutrition out of the corn. I am not sure how it does it, but supposedly it cracks the individual kernels of corn while swallowing 6 rows of corn while traveling at 4 mph and chopping it up into 1/4 inch pieces and spitting it back out into a truck. That is quite a feat, but it saves us from buying a lot of grain/soy meal and allows the cows to produce more milk.

Funny how much complexity there is to just growing some corn stalks.

Vickie44 · #6 07/12/12, 02:43 PM

Do you pit or agbag the silage ? That green stuff would be rough on a silo.

Plowpoint · #7 07/12/12, 03:45 PM

No, we call the agbag stuff (never heard that term before) Baleage. For us, we do Corn Silage and Haylage, that being chopped grass put into a horizontal silo, though we call that bunkers or clamps here. For us that consists of a hot topped pad, about an acre in size. I am not sure how much it holds, but a lot since we round it up quite high, then cover it with plastic to shed rain and snow.

We use the same tractor with a blade on it, for that job. Push the haylage/corn silage up into a big pile and pack it down with those big 8 tires. Getting the air out of the feed is what ensiles it, gets the PH down and converts the sugars and starch in the feed. It is a complicated process but basically is pickled sourkraught.

Here is a picture of that, but in this photo we just started making the pile for the year. This photo is a few years old too.

Making Haylage Pile

Plowpoint · #8 07/12/12, 03:50 PM

We do not even bale hay anymore. In fact as we were discing my farm up and putting it into corn, we got talking about hay. Apparently they went so far as to sell their baler (big round bales) to a neighbor.

We only need 50 small bales for the young stock (baby lambs and baby calfs cannot eat straight haylage or corn silage because of the high moisture content) so every few years we used to bale some up. Now we just buy it.

Thankfully though they added my hay needs in with that order so I now have enough hay for my baby lambs this winter. That is good because hay might get scarce if everyone here decides to ship out hay south and west. That was nice...nothing like having farm problems taken care of for you.