It's all slowly coming together

This is a bit of an update on the last post where I mentioned that I'd had trouble delivering the last of our barley to Viterra, and how my "blended load" strategy hadn't worked. I also made mention of lakes in paddocks and water over the roads and the there was new farm eqipment on the way.  You'll be happy to know that I have been able to deliver the last of the barley, but not to Viterra. They decided to reject the whole lot of my remaining grain on the grounds that it had animal feaces in it and they have a nil tollerance policy in this area.  Thankfully I was able to take it directly to a feedlot at Meningie instead where 5000 angas beef cattle were very appreciative, and didn't seem to mind the odd hint of cow poop in there one bit.    As far as water over the roads around here goes, I told of how 5inches of rain one night left lakes in paddocks and a number of roads under water.  This would have been about 6 weeks ago.  Well the roads are all open and dry again now, but I do still have 1 paddock with a slowly shrinking lake in it, with all sorts of bird life there enjoying the water.       It is always exciting when new farm equipment arrives, and last week that happened.  My new air seeder box, a Simplicity 9000, was delivered, as was 6 pallets of air seeder parts.  These parts when assembled make up K-Hart disk modules and will replace the existing tyne arrangement on the bar.  I have started the process of changing them over and at this stage all the tynes have been removed and 2/3rds of the modules are assembled and on the bar.  In the next day or so I should have this finished so I can start seeding in the very near future

The Water Is Slowly Receeding

I know it's been a coupla weeks since my last post, and it was a couple of weeks ago that we had the big rain event that gave us lakes where there once was paddocks, and rivers where there once was driveways. Well most of the water has gone now, and roads have re-opened. There is still one large lake covering the road... just down the road, and it is amazing to see the variety of birdlife that has made itself at home there. So two and a half weeks after we received 5 and a half inches of rain, I'm just starting to realize that that is a lot of rain.

So what's been happening on the farm??... Well I'm glad you asked. Frustration mainly. This frustration mainly revolves around delivering our last loads of barley from harvest to our Viterra terminal (where we take our grain once it's harvested). We finished our harvest in the first few days of March, but after the 1st of March we had to send off samples of grain for chemical residue testing prior to delivery. These tests took over two weeks to come back, and now that I can finally deliver my grain. The problem is that there is a nil tolerance on any animal feaces (ie. sheep or cow poo) in any load... and so far each load I have tried to deliver have been rejeceted for this reason. Let me just clarify that the barley we produce isn't for human consumption and also is shipped overseas. Any other farmer who delivers grain to any grain bulk handler knows what "blending loads" means.. well that hasn't worked for me either. I've resorted to running the whole load through a snail roller, which is a machine with two rollers pressed tight together. The grain runs down between the rollers and everything softer than grain, such as snails.. and poop, is pulverised. Lifting the auger up nice and high allows the wind to blow through the grain as it's augered into the truck and all the "contaminants" simply blow away. Tomorrow I'll find out if this will be good enough to pass inspection at Viterra.

Other exciting happenings include the collection of some of our fertilizer for the upcoming seeding season. So the other day I shot up to Ardrossan to collect three 25tonne loads of D.A.P. fertilizer.

I'm not sure if I've mentioned before, but we've got a couple of equipment upgrades in the pipeline, including a new airseeder box. We have a Simplicity 9000ltr tow between box on the way - I'll send pictures when it arrives. I'm also in the process of converting my existing cultivator bar from a tyne machine to a disk machine. The process has only got as far as the ordering the parts, but they should arrive at any moment and the conversion will then commence.

I have a lot of spraying going on at the moment too. The recent rains have meant that plenty of weeds have grown in the paddocks and so I've put my brother to work on the boom spray to take care of some of these weeds. So even though this is the "quiet time of year", I'm still flat out trying to get all the maintenance jobs out of the way before we have to start planting the crops for next year. This starts around the end of April, early May.

When it Rains it Pours

We have taken a break from crutching the sheep this week due to a little rain event we had Sunday night. I think the weather bureau forecast between 5 to 10mm of rain for Sunday night, well we had more like 5 to 10inches of rain. I couldn't accurately measure it, but I'll estimate that we took out 5inches, that's 500points (or if you like the new language 125mm). Although we had steady rain most of the day Sunday the majority of the rain fell overnight Sunday night/Monday morning. We woke up to lakes in paddocks where we've never seen lakes before, roads under water and our driveway resembling more of a river than a driveway.

A number of local roads were blocked, but I haven't heard of any houses being flooded out (the Edithburgh Football Club may be the only exception to this).

Water is receding now, 4 days later, but some roads are still impassable and are now home to bird life previously unseen on the roads and paddocks, such as ducks and ducklings, black swans and Cape Baron Geese (which are common around the swamp that is near by).

This is just a shallow lake. At least this road is still passable.

Here you see a river system running down into a lake that last week was our paddock.

This is the neighbours paddock... ahhm I mean.. Lake.

We have paddocks both sides here, but the only way we can check the sheep is with a boat.

The lake in this photo actually runs right through the paddock on the right and crosses another road. At that point the water is actually deeper, with the fences and 5 foot high fence posts well and truly covered in water. The kids were able to get there swimming gear on and take there boogie boards down there for a bit of a swim... on the road.

Crutching the Ewes

As soon as we could this week we got stuck into crutching the ewes (female sheep). They were quite a priority as they are due to start lambing in a few weeks, and so couldn't really be walked out of the paddocks to the shearing shed if we left it any longer.

This is a description of the crutching process, and I know that a picture is worth a thousand words, but as I was hard at it I couldn't really take any photos. So the process starts with tipping the sheep over and dragging them out of the catching pen backwards and position them next to the shearing equipment (the down-tube and hand piece). They are then given a dose of drench to kill any intestinal worms etc, and then the crutching itself begins. Crutching is similar the shearing in that wool is cut from the sheep using a handpiece. Starting with the head the wool around the face is first to go. The forehead (like the fringe) and on the sides of the face. This clears all wool from around the eyes so the sheep can see clearly, which will be important when they are mothering their new lambs in a few weeks time. They can become "wool blind" if the wool is left there and wouldn't be able to keep track of their lambs, and chances are the crows (which are evil animals by the way) would probably kill the lambs. Next I move down to the crutch area between the legs, and with the sheep still in the sitting position I take the wool off from the inside of one back leg, then a blow around under the udder to the inside of the other back leg. With the ewes getting close the lambing in a lot of them the udders are starting to enlarge so care needs to be taken not to nick of any skin around this delicate area. Quite often there is a small strip of wool that grows down between the teats (or nipples if you like) and that needs to be removed to give the young lambs the best access they can get to their precious food supply. Once the inside of both back legs are done I roll the sheep over to one side to do the backs of the legs and around the tail. I've got to be really careful around the backs of the legs because if the comb on the hand piece digs into the skin in that area there is a real risk of the hand piece catching the hamstring and cutting it. After doing one leg the area around the vulva, which is the external part of the reproductive system in female sheep, needs to be crutched, leaving no wool in the area at all - once again care needs to be taking in this delicate area of the animal. A blow over the top of the tail also clears this area up nicely. With the ewes so close to lambing it's important to have the area as clean as possible for the birthing process. I finish off the crutch with a blow down the back of the last leg, and one blow to tidy up the edge of the long wool that is left and then the sheep is let go out into the counting out pens.

We have four mobs of ewes, and we're working on the last one of them this afternoon.

The Long Harvest is Finally Over.

With great relief I am happy to report to you that harvest for the 2010/11 season is finally complete. On the 7th of March at 2pm the last row of windrowed barley was reapt. This is quite a bit later than the optimal finishing date, which would be early January. We had been waiting on the moisture to come down in the barley, to get it below the required 13.5% maximum, but when it come down we were into it again as hard as we could. The reason for pushing so hard in the end was that there was another rain even forecast... and we beat it! About an hour after we finished the rain started again. We only received around 9mm, but other areas in the state received quite a bit more.

So what's next? well I'm glad you asked. With the recent rains alot of weeds have germinated out in the paddocks. While some of the weeds are good weeds that provide good feed for the sheep, there are also paddocks with some quite nasty weeds which will need to be sprayed out before they get out of control.

The ewes will be due to start lambing in just over a month too, and with harvest being late, that means that we are now running late with other jobs. Crutching the sheep is a job that would usually be well underway by now, so the crutching is really quite a priority.

We are also looking down the barrel of this years seeding program, which should start around 6 weeks from now. We're changing over some of the seeding equipment this year so we'll need to start on the alterations pretty soon too, or we'll be running behind with that as well.

The Long Harvest

While most farmers in Sth Australia have finished their harvest for the summer, we are still plugging away at it. We only have about 90 hectares of windrowed barley to go, which would only take us a day or two, but with the recent wet weather, we've been held up yet again. Last Friday we received 89mm of rain, and as barley has to have a moisture content of no more than 13.5% when delivered, you can understand why we've taken a few days off. And a few interesting stats from the harvest so far....

• we have reapt over 3000acres of various crops.
• the header has clocked up over 400 working hours
• I have delivered over 100 loads to the Viterra and GrainFlow sites in the area.
• The closest distance to a delivery site is approx 5km.
• The longest is about 85km. (that I have delivered to this harvest that is... obviously there are other sites further away).
• The Kenworth has clocked up over 15,000kms in the 3 months since harvest started.

We are now thinking about options to make harvest next year a lot faster. The possibility of a new combine harvester has come up.

harvest update

Harvest is continuing with all the canola finished and about half the peas. The "snail guts" I mentioned last time just got too much for the machine and the grain elevator kept blocking up. So I decided to go on with something a little more abrasive, such as barley, that will actually clean the machine. The first couple of barley paddocks are done, and now that we are staring a little warmer weather in the face I've started on some wheat.  It is all busy busy out in the paddock with a header, plus a chaser bin and myself driving the Kenworth semi-tipper taking load after load out to deliver to our local port.

Harvest update

The weather is being a little kinder to us now, the rain has stopped and the sun is shining, ideal condition for harvesting. Moisture content in grain is very important. It cant be over a certain percentage. So hence when we have we weather the harvesting cant continue until the grain dries out again. That can take a coupla days, but with the right conditions we're all good to go.

We're slowly getting the peas done. During the wet weather we took the opportunity to do a bit of maintenance on the pea plucker. Alot of the fingers broke off in the first paddock which was riddled with clover vine. Probably about half of them needed replacing. It was a relatively simple process (once we worked it out) of just drilling the broken ends out of the holders, cutting a new nylon finger to length (25cm - and they're 10mm diameter flexible nylon rod), threading the end and screwing them back in the holders.

Another of the quite common joys of pea harvesting is snails. The pea plants do attract snails, so heavy snail control methods are used during the year to try and lower their numbers. But still some remain, and the problem with them is "snail guts"! See what happens is when the peas go through the header the snails that come with them get smashed up and the "snail guts" coats the inside of the grain elevators and bubble auger. It combines with all the dust that is going through as well and forms a solid layer which, left unchecked, sets solid like concrete and blocks the machine. So cleaning out snail guts is part of the process of reaping peas.

Reaping canola is much nicer. It's cleaner, quieter, and far less snails. It is a little slower picking up the canola rows with the windrower pick up, but still it's worth it. Canola is worth alot more and the oil content is good too.

Well it's back to my office now, which is the cab of the Kenworth semi-tipper.

Harvest time

We've had as little cold, and damp weather lately so harvest hasn't progress very quickly at all in the past few days, until today. Yep it's warmed up nicely and so the header is now flat out into it. At the moment we're reaping peas. We have been doing them for a couple of days because they can be reapt when it's cooler. And now that it's really starting to warm up it looks like we will keep going... as long as the thundery clouds steer clear. While the headers going we also have the windrower going as well. I'm cutting down the barley into wind rows because it will be the last thing we actually reap. Having it in rows will protect the heads from blowing off onto the ground before we can get to it with the header. So it's all happening. I've got to go and empty a grain bin ready to take to the paddock now so we'll have enough room to store all these peas before we can deliver them to the port.

Let the fun and games begin

Over the past few weeks we have been slowly edging towards harvest. Well a couple of hot days earlier this week has given it the hurry-up and in fact we have made a start. After pulling the New Holland TR88 header out of the shed and getting it all serviced up ready for work we took it over to the canola paddocks that were windrowed a coupla weeks back. After setting up the pick up front for the header, and installing a new air-foil sieve - ideal for handling canola, we pulled the header in to see how it goes. Well it was a bit "experimental" for a start. I had trouble getting the windrows to feed into the front properly, and the stone trap was tripping open all the time - and we weren't even picking up stones. A header is a complex machine, with many settings and adjustments that have to be set just right so it works at it's optimum. Well it took me a while to get those settings just right. Once I was happy that it was going to reap relatively successfully I left my brother and my old man to it and went of to service and prepare other vehicles for harvest. I'm in the process of getting the Kenworth ready. She got an oil and filter change, plus new mudflaps, and I would have had her all ready to go, but I found a few holes the size of 20c pieces in one of her exhausts - not a good thing to have out in a thick stubble on a blazing hot day. So she got to take a trip into town for a new section of exhaust. This mornings job was to head up country to collect a brand new chaser bin - yes it's even shiny still. Normally the reaping would have continued, but with the rain that we've had yesterday we had to stop, and took the opportunity to get the bin. A chaser in is used to empty the header into while the header is still reaping. It saves time during harvest as the header doesn't have to stop and drive over to a stationary field bin to empty its grain box.

Harvest is getting closer and closer

The excitement is building as we slowly edge closer and closer to harvest for 2010. In this area we generally say the average starting date for harvest is the 20th of November. Well that is only a day or two away, but at the moment the crops are no where near ready for reaping. It's going to be at least another week before we get started. There is a reason for this of course. Because we've had such a good growing season with plenty of timely rain fall, and also a very mild finish to the season. The past few weeks have been quite cool and at time wet and this help the crops hang on longer, and hence the heads get plenty of time to fill out properly.

It is also another well known fact that on this farm, and plenty of others I'd say, that no matter when the crops are ripe and ready for harvest, we wont be ready for another few days after that. This year is going to be different. I'm determined! I'm doing all I can to have all our equipment up and running ready to start right on time.

Yesterday I actually finished, yes that's right, finished.. all the spraying for 2010, with the last paddock of peas dessicated. And my determination to be organised for harvest meant that I flushed and rinsed out the boom spray right away, and it has now been put away in the shed for storage over summer.

I also sorted out the batteries for the Kenworth and got her out of the shed, along with the semi-tipper, ready to get going for harvest.

I've got engine servicing to do now and fitting all the guards and parts to the header before I'll be ready to start. I should have enough to keep me busy for the next week or so leading up to harvest.

Harvest is just aound the corner now

Now that we are a week or so into the month of November... or MOvember as it is affectionately known now, where thousands of men across Australia, including myself, focus their attention on the cultivation of their perfect "Mo" (mostasche) to raise money and awareness for  mens issues such as prostate cancer and depression in males, farmers in our area are turning their attention to the pending harvest.  within a week or two headers (also known as combine harvesters) will be cranking up all over the place to take this years harvest off. It is an exciting time, with all the signs of being a bumper crop, but also means that preparations for harvest need to be thorough.  Nothing worse than having the perfect conditions to reap a bumper crop but having equipment broken down due to poor maintenance.  So the current jobs include servicing and lubricating the header and truck and any other vehicles that we'll be using.  Also getting fire prepared, setting up fire fighting units on utes and making sure all fire extinguishers are operational.  As far as crops go the final preparations are being made to the canola and pea crops.  As we speak our contractor,Joel, is out windrowing the canola.  Windrowing is cutting down the crop, in this case canola, into rows ready for reaping.  The reason for windrowing is to protect the crop from wind which will blow the seeds out onto the ground.  We are also dessicating the peas.  Dessication is the process of spraying out knockdown herbicide to finish off the peas, and also to eliminate any unwanted weeds, particularly rye grass, to prevent them from setting seed.  I'm also finishing off a few sheep jobs, such as sending the ol' ewes off to market, too before we're completely tied up with harvest.

Every now and then a farmer gets crook

It is generally accepted that farmers work every single day of the week, and only stop to eat, sleep or for church on sunday... and alot of the time we don't even stop for those things. As for getting sick.. well there is no time for sickness on the farm, and a farmer would have to be on their deathbed before they took time off because they were crook. Well that was my day on Tuesday. I must have picked up some kind of stomach wog so, as you can imagine, the day was not pleasant. Another unique character trait of a farmer is their amazing ability to bounce back and get back into it. So the next day it was business as usual.

One of the jobs I got out of the way was to finally get my air seeder bar put away in the shed. Also got myself all organised for MOvember... pictures will be posted later.

Busy down on the farm

Spring is well and truly upon us now and so we starting to look down the barrel towards harvest now, and there's plenty of jobs that go along with getting organised for that.

I'm happy to say that all the spraying is out the way now. All the herbicides, fungicides, fertilizers and insecticides have all been sprayed out, including spraytopping all the pastures so that no weeds are able to set viable seed that will germinate next year.

Shearing is all done and dusted, with the shearing shed all cleaned up and the wool bales sent off to be sold.

While I'm on the topic of sheep, today is a very special day for the sheep on the farm, and particularly the rams. Over the past few days I have been sorting out all the ewes into their breeding mobs (we have 4 different mobs of ewes), and culling out the ewes I want to sell. They've been moved into the paddocks that they will stay on over the summer harvest, and the water troughs have been checked to make sure they will have plenty of water to drink. And today was the day that we sorted the rams, which form a little mob of their own for most of the year, and divided them up to go do what they do best. Yep, today they were put in the paddocks with the ewes for mating... see I told you... spring has really sprung!

For the next few weeks harvest preparation will be the main job on the agenda, and I have already organised a few things including some modifications to the TR88 harvester and pea plucker, and also some new equipment including shiny new field bins (bins to store grain in before we can deliver it to our local port).

2 x 360bag Sharman multi-bins (they have a high cone so they can hold grain or fertilizer)