The Hancock-Henderson Quill, Inc.
6-105-2008 Column
I think we’re going to have to throw out the calendar this year. We were “late” getting our corn planted.
Now it is June 10 and we’re just starting to chop first crop hay. It is the making of another interesting year on the farm.
Guess we can only complain about what we can control. So what do we do? Enjoy and observe.
We are usually holiday cutters….Memorial Day, Fourth of July and Labor Day. Now we’ll be able to enjoy the Bowlus 4th of July weekend parade and fireworks. You’ll always find us in front of the Fire Hall sitting under the only shade tree on the north side of the street.
We’ll have one eye on the parade and the other on the sky. It will either be very hot and clear with the hay turning to toast or very dark threatening clouds rolling in from the west.
For someone who grew up with annual picnics and fireworks on the 4th, it is very frustrating to think we have to work on this one day. But we started to cut hay this week. We just needed to get this project going. We hope we’ll get everything up between rain clouds.
Talking with the neighbors around the pickup truck this morning, we came to the conclusion that as late as this crop is, maybe we could combine the first and second cutting of hay into one. A two for one deal!
The late cutting has stretched our haylage supply to the limits. I know there are several farms in the area that have started to chop a box or two to get through until the weather clears and we can really start to harvest the hay. Thank goodness the kids are home from school and we have extra hands to haul feed carts of haylage to the mixer. We keep reminding them that it is a modified football weight training program.
You know what is really neat about running out of haylage? You can fix the unloader at your level instead of 18 doors up! We’re taking advantage of this by replacing the auger and other maintance work. The new auger arrived yesterday with some assembly required. After three long distance phone calls, Mark finally found someone who confirmed his hunch of how to put on the auger knives. They didn’t send any instructions with the auger. Must have figured it would have been a waste of paper.
Meanwhile, Katie and Jonathon had already started to install the blades on the wrong side of the auger. Once we discovered their mistake, we took the blades off and switched them to the other side, but no one told me that we didn’t need to switch the bolts too. After we finished our “chunks”, Katie discovered I put the bolts in backwards and had to take them out again. Thank goodness it was a nice bug free day under the shade tree.
Now, I’m not what you would call mechanically inclined. I break better than I fix. But I wonder how things work. Being at the bottom of the silo, we have had to open up the door below the chute to hang the thing-of-a-bob that balances the unloader. It is a great chance to see how the unloader picks up the packed haylage. I marvel at how it goes around in circles and doesn’t get twisted up. I wish our telephone cord could go around like that and not end up in knots!
I don’t know who invented the silo unloader, but I bet it was someone who had to pitch feed by hand. The guys talk about the “old days” when they had to pitch feed out of the silos everyday because dad never bought an unloader. I would think that after doing that job for a few weeks, you would become pretty clever in how to solve the problem. Necessity is the mother of invention.
Look at all the things around the farm that makes life so much “easier” than in the “good old days”. Silo unloaders, cordless drills, hydraulic rock wagons and skid steers are some of my favorites. When we got married and the three of us started farming together, the first pieces of equipment we bought were a hydraulic rock wagon and 4-wheeler. Both are still working 20 years later! They have saved us time and fingers. We use to load rocks, big and small on a wooden flat bed wagon. When it was full and we were picking up more rocks from the wagon than the ground, we would head over to the rock pile to unload each rock by hand! Many fingers got smashed between rocks on the rack. I can’t even begin to count all the fingernails that were lost over the years.
I wonder what pieces of equipment our kids will develop in the next 20 years to make farming “easier” for them. I watch them try to figure out different ways to do their chores. Their imaginations are surprising. What they can create with baling twine, pulleys and old milk liners amazes me. None of it really works, at least not yet. This is going to be a great adventure.
The next adventure on the calendar is the start of show season. You’ll find us at the Dairy Day Show and State Holstein Show in Sauk Centre next week. Now the summer fun can begin!
As their 4 children pursue dairy careers off the farm, Natalie and Mark are starting a new adventure of milking registered Holsteins just because they like good cows on their Minnesota farm. (Natalie grew up in Stronghurst, the daughter of Becky and the late Larry Dowell.)