Hauling

Recently, when we haven't been in the fields or doing regular chores around the farm, we've been hauling corn and soybeans to the elevator (huge storage unit/business that will store and then sell the corn/soy beans to a factory to be processed into your favorite food like substance). *see elevator pictures below

On P's parent's farm "hauling" involves emptying both steel grain bins as well as the more quaint grainery. Here's a helpful hint, if you ever get asked by P's dad which one you'd be willing to help empty, choose the steel bin.

When emptying the steel bin, we take advantage of the harnessed power from the dams of the Missouri River (electricity), to move the grain out of the bins through an auger and into the waiting truck. However, in the grainery, we harness the power of gravity for 90% of the work (letting the grain simply flow out of a hole in the floor into the truck bed waiting below), but those last couple feet don't flow quite as freely and require a bit of human effort, via shoveling. P tends to harness this last 10% from carbohydrates in the form of whole wheat bread and potatoes, while C has been fairly successful at finding garden work to do during this time.

Emptying the grainery is accompanied by a fair bit of dust which makes the job a little less fun, but it also makes for fairly dramatic pictures. This dark picture is P shoveling and sweeping an overhead bin of soybeans. The ray of light is coming from an overhead window, and the tiny circle of light on the floor is the chute where all the beans must flow out.

Using the truck, or wagons pulled by a tractor, we haul the grain to a large cooperative elevator, called Fremar (the combination of Freeman and Marion-the two nearest towns), that is simply massive in scale.

Every year in rural America you can read stories of farmers who die when they get trapped in a grain bin/grain avalanche. By and large grain bins aren't all that dangerous, but what generally happens in these tragedies is this:

1. Wet grain ( > 17% moisture in corn) is stored in a grain bin.
2. A farmer starts to remove the grain from the bin by using an auger to unload from the bottom of the bin. . . similar to a hourglass if it only had one end.
   
3. If the grain is too wet, it does not fall down past each other or flow evenly, instead it cakes up and makes clumps of grain or even bridges which creates a void below.
4. The victim errantly somehow, either intentionally or not, gets into the grain and under the additional weight, the grain finally collapses.
5. Unlike water, a person has no buoyancy in grain, and also unlike water when you breath out and your chest collapses, you cannot re-expand your chest to take in more air as the grain does not displace easily.
6. A human succumbs to the air constriction.

I've never even seen grain really start to cake up in a bin until today when I was unloading some corn. Here is a relatively bad photo from my phone camera demonstrating dangerous conditions in a grain bin. If the grain were dry you'd see a relatively even/smooth conical shape. In this picture there is large void in the center with ominous dark dust swirling around in it – a bad sign.

Tassels and Mortar Boards

First off, a poll of our readers: Raise your hand if you've attended the high school graduation of your first-cousin-once-removed.  Now look around the room.  At best, your the only one in the room with your hand raised, and more likely I suspect nobody in the room raised their hand.  We, however, had that pleasure and more as we attended the graduation ceremony of P's high-school alma mater Freeman Academy.

A few things probably distinguished this ceremony from the ones you may have attended.  It took nearly an hour and a half — for 10 graduates.  It involved what was basically a sermon, scripture readings, several prayers, two choir performances and a video of the senior class, starting from Elemetary school (baby pictures included).  In visual appearance, it was some mixture of prom, a wedding and traditional graduation.  All the graduates sat on the stage the entire time, except when they were performing in a 4 part choir, which sounded pretty good.  What makes this event even more unique, is that many in the audience aren't even related to the graduates, they just come to provide support to the students and families in the community (and because there are no other entertaining events scheduled in the area).

A significant percentage of the ceremony was spent on each individual graduate, providing insight on the personality of the individual and on the group as a whole. It was interesting to see how a rural population celebrates its youth, faith and community in general.

Our little lawn mowers!

Remember when your parents would say they didn't need to buy a dish washer because they already had three of them (or however many children they had)? Well, P and I now have 13 lawn mowers, and only one of them uses oil.

Since about the time the grass started to grow we have been considering the "green" option of sheep keeping our lawn trimmed, with the perk of some tasty locally grown meat in the fall. (Disclaimer: The lawn immediately around the house we mow in the modern manner, and it's the larger acreage which the sheep are encouraged to eat.)

The story that goes along with acquiring the sheep is considerably longer, at least if P is relaying the story (and perhaps embellishing the details a bit ;).  The short version is that within 2min of the picture where C is unloading the sheep from the trailer, they easily found a hole in the cattle proof fence and were mingling with P's uncle's cattle.  The cattle thought the sheep were really weird looking dogs and didn't know how to react, so they panicked.  This lead to some nifty figure eight patterns of cattle chasing sheep and vice-versa.  The sheep flock eventually got split into to groups, nine running around in the fields surrounding our home being chased/trailed by P and three less adventurous sheep chillin' with C in the cattle pen.  Eventually we managed to herd the two groups back together and merge them into a pen rapidly built from "cattle paneling."

We've since been training the sheep to respect electric wire, not using tall metal fences, and rotating them through large paddocks where the grass is often taller than they are.

A few lessons were learned in this short period of 15min:

1. Sheep are incredibly cute, but fast little buggers.
2. When one sheep crosses some sort of barrier (fence, creek, brushrow) all the rest are sure to follow even if you're standing in front of them yelling and making a scene, whereas cattle would likely turn around.
3. Sheep herd quite nicely when they are hungry and grazing.
4. Sheep like dandilions, cedar trees and forbs in general.
5. Not all sheep are electric fence trained.
6. It's awesome when your uncle keeps a number of cattle panels (12'x4' heavy gauge fence sections) around the yard for you to quickly create a sheep proof coral.
7. When/If you are anxious around sheep it's important to have a really good poker face, and a calm disposition.

Bull!

Perhaps you have already noticed the "problem" with this photo, but in case you missed it, there should be a fence between the large Charolais bull and me.

We received an SOS phone call from P's mother stating that one of the bulls had escaped from its pen and was attempting to pick a fight with some other bulls in a different pen.

With roughly 25 years of farm work experience between us, C and I made short work of showing the bull who was boss and got him back into the appropriate pen.  It should also be noted that despite being roughly 1/14th the weight of the bull, C decided she could handle moving the bull bare-handed while P needed a fiberglass stick to help backstop his confidence.

Ferrell Asparagus

On the same mile section of land as P's folks house there used to be a farmstead which apparently had an asparagus patch. The farmstead is gone (for at least 40 years) but the asparagus patch seems to live on in a fence line. That's almost got to qualify as a heirloom and micro climate adjusted variety. Perhaps this fall we'll transplant some to our own garden.

Turn, turn, turn

Let the rotating begin!  One of the things we're most interested in investigating this growing season is the introduction of management intensive grazing to P's parent's pastures.

We've done plenty of fencing in preparation, some of it in the wind, but this past week we started rotating the cows on the pasture.  We've now worked through 5 paddocks.  In that particular pasture of about 38ish acres, we have 33 cow-calf pairs of animals and we're planning on rotating the animals about 30 times to new grass before having them repeat over the same turf.  The idea is that this will force the cows to be less picky on a day by day basis, and not allow them to continually go back to their favorite grass in the larger pasture and re-graze it too soon.  Over time this should bring more diversity of plant life to the pasture and also allow for more tons of forage to be grown on the same amount of land.  All in all a pretty good thing we all think.

The cost to all of the above is management — that's where the chumps come in.  We move the cattle once per day and it currently takes us about 30-45 minutes every other day and 10-15 minutes on the other days.  This assumes we would just move the fence, look over the ladies and their calves, and move on.  The reality is that, at least for this first week, we're absolutely enamored with watching the cows and calves get super excited by the new grass.  Additionally, the other wildlife is fun to watch.  Swallows come out to swoop over the cows as they stir up insects from the grass and I think we also saw some finches and robins tonight.

Moving the cattle, at least in good weather, is really one of our favorite parts of the day.

Maggie

Every real farm needs a farm dog.  Since we do not yet live on a real farm, we will live vicariously through P's parents farm, and their dog, Maggie.  She's an Australian Sheppard and she's incredibly lovable.  She's got some issues of knowing when we want her "help" and she's a firm believer in overwhelming farm intruders (and friends) with her love rather than her bite, but she's great for companionship.

In addition, despite the implications in the book, I think that she may actually poop flowers.