Grain Truck

Today I made my first trip to town in the grain truck and oh was it a doozy of a first trip. Yes I’ve ridden in the semi with Matt to town but I had never driven until today.

I drove and Matt rode shot gun since this was my first time in the truck, which is not ours, among other reasons such as the fact that I didn’t want to be driving the truck in the first place.

To start from the beginning the whole topic of me driving the truck started Monday when he called me and asked if I was going to be close to a truck dealer to look at some trucks. (I wasn’t, wohoo.) Tuesday also included an inquisition about driving a grain truck, as well as Wednesday. I was out of town on Thursday so I escaped the question that day. This brings up to today and the dreaded question about driving a grain truck.

Up until today I had been really good at changing the subject or just not acknowledging the question in the first place. Today started with “just going and looking at the trucks” haha just look yeah right. I refused to give an answer and changed the subject about 100 times. We jumped back in the car and that is where Matt held me hostage. He told me he wasn’t stopping the car until I made a decision about which one of three trucks I was going to choose to drive.

So if you have caught this it has changed from will you drive a grain truck to which one are you going to drive in the span of five days.

We made it to a town 20 minutes away before I committed to even picking a truck. (Needless to say whatever patience Matt was attempting to have was quickly wearing thin and my shoes were about worn out from me dragging my feet on the subject. Hehe.) Back home we went to grab a quick bite to eat for lunch and then back down to the landlord’s shop to get said truck started and back up to our house. Just getting it started was a problem because the batteries were dead and then when he got it out of the shed it was over to the hose to wash all the dirt off of it from sitting for at least a year.

The truck in question is an automatic (yes automatic not a stick) twin screw with an 18 foot bed with a PTO hydraulic lift. (The fact that it is an automatic leads into another story that I’ll pass on for now.) But I digress, so we get said truck home and Matt unloads the last of the wheat from the combine into the truck and me now down to severely raw feet, since by this time I had drug my feet so much on doing this I had ruined my shoes and socks, get into the driver’s seat.

Matt says from the passenger seat just back over those chemical boxes and jugs (they were empty) it won’t hurt anything. So back over the chemical boxes and jugs I go and to the end of the driveway we head. Getting to the end of the driveway was a feet in and of its self because I kept stepping on the breaks and hitting them just hard enough to jerk us forward in our seats. Matt of course is having a hay day with this.

Out on the highway we go and not even two miles south of the house we get flagged down by an escort truck. He tells me there are TWO 16 foot wide loads coming through! We live on a two lane highway with no real shoulders and I’m driving a twin screw truck for the first time!! So I pull over on the little bit of a shoulder there is at a corner and wait for the first semi to make its way through. All the while Matt is saying don’t get over so far. Then the semi comes around the corner and Matt starts saying maybe you should get over a little further. I don’t move the truck.

We decide that we are going to continue on down the highway until we see the next set of escorts for the second semi. We ended up making it a couple more miles down the highway to a gravel road intersection on a curve that allowed me to completely pull of the highway and wait for everyone to go by on the highway. Whew. While we were waiting for the second semi the conversation consisted of Matt telling me in the last 14 years of driving the trucks and semis to town he has never had to pull over to allow a wide load to go through, let alone two wide loads within in a couple miles of each other!!

Really!!! This is not my idea of a fun trip in the first place and this event is not changing my opinion in the slightest.

Big sigh, and off we go again. I make it to town (finally) and snake through town to the south end to the elevator. And to great us is a line of semis waiting to go across the scale. Ugh, now there are witnesses at the elevator to my domed trip! We fairly quickly make our way up to the scale and then to the probe (where the elevator staff take samples out of the trucks to determine the quality of the grain) and the dreaded vacuum for the truck slips (as Matt’s analogy went, if you’ve used the vacuum they have at the bank you can use this one). The truck slips are what you use to identify your grain, the seller, share and who delivered the grain. It is also the first time you have to get out of your truck, so now everyone knows I’m driving!

I make it through this and head off to wait in line to dump. Remember I said this was a hoist truck which means the bed of the truck lifts from the front in order to use gravity to help clean out the flat bed of the truck. So the next thought that runs through my mind is I’m going to hit the roof of the pit or I’m going to tear the bed off the truck.

I enter the dump, raise the bed (just missing the roof) dump the wheat, put down the bed and head off to the outbound scale. Hugh sigh of relieve exhaled at this point.

I stopped on the outbound scale and snagged the printed ticket for the load. All 87 bushels of wheat dumped. (I know such a huge load right!!!)
Then off to home we go, snaking through town and I’m sure making a few people mad while dodging for cover. We parked the truck back in the shed where we got it from and jump in the car to head to the house.

Then as we are pulling into our driveway with the car we see one of those used chemical boxes lying next to the driveway. You remember towards the first of this little trip he told me to back over said boxes that it would be okay. Now one is laying at the end of the driveway because I must have got it caught in the axle when I backed over them.

I’m sighing and shaking my head as Matt again says I’ve never backed over a chemical box and drug it around with a truck.

To that I think, I’m glad you have never done that but I’m more than willing to use this as another valid point as to why I should not be driving a grain truck.

Matt is right about one thing this will be one trip to and from town I will not be forgetting any time soon.

And here is everyone else’s fair warning.

You see the truck pictured here this fall and you had better get out of the way!

Later,
Stephanie
The Moderately Involved Kansas Farm Wife

Corn Field.

A couple of weeks ago, May 15th and 16th to be exact, we had some cold weather come through at night. It got cold enough to cause some frost damage on the corn that was up.

And talk about an upset husband who used to be able to look at some nice green healthy plants, but now sees nothing but a brown mess of dead leaves. Thankfully in the case of our corn the frost came while the corn was only a few leaves tall; about three to four to be exact. This means the growing point on the corn is still below ground level, which means that the ground acted much like a coat for the corn plants.

It has only been about four days since the frost and already you can see the green coming back to the corn. Yea!

It is still too soon however to have a crop insurance adjuster out to look at the damage. As one of those adjusters I thought I’d give you a few points of interest when looking at frost damage.

Frost damage falls into the realms of hail damage we have to wait 7-10 days before we can come out to appraise any affected fields whether it be corn, soybeans, milo or wheat. The reason for this is we have to wait to see what is going to live and what is going to die. Just like it take the corn weeks to dry down in the fall it takes a few days for to true extent of the damage to become apparent on frost/freeze or hail damage.

Some things we look at when we are in the field are if the plants are starting to green back up, meaning they are still alive. We also look to see what size of an area is affected by the damage or if the damage is worse on one portion of the field. The frost we had affected the corn in the lower laying areas since cold sinks closer to the ground. The corn on the higher ground was not dinged at all.

Another thing an adjuster might do is to pull a plant out of the ground and cut it in two. By cutting a plant or two in half we can see the inner most parts of the plant to see if the middle of the plant is still alive (like in the picture). If the interior color or composition of the plant is questionable an adjuster will probably elect to wait longer to make a final appraisal on the field. This will give the plants more time to either come back or to die off. This will lead to a more accurate appraisal on the crop.

This is one week after the frost.

The one thing an adjuster cannot answer is, how will this hurt overall production? There are too many variables to consider, will the weather stay warm, will you get rains at the right time, will you get enough rain to make a difference, will it get to hot and stay too hot for the rest of the year? These questions are some of the unknowns of farming an adjuster just cannot answer.

These are some of the unknowns that all farmers deal with on a day-to-day and year-to-year basis.

I help this explains some things the adjuster is looking at when they inspect your crops.

Later,
Stephanie
The Moderately Involved Kansas Farm Wife

The Rocks.

A simple, quite Sunday was what I had in mind last week. I’d hang out with little man while Daddy was in the tractor planting corn.
This didn’t happen at all but I did get a good bragging picture out of the deal.

It all started with a phone call from my husband, just like most farm jobs, to come over to the field he was in across the road and pick up rocks that had been left behind after some dozer work.

Little man and I changed cloths and got the bale bed cleaned off and off we went to the field. For little man this was a fun job because he got to run around on the freshly tilled ground and up and down the terrace we were working around pointing out rocks that he just wasn’t big enough to pick up.
We were doing well for a while, then my spotter decided it was time for a snack and drink break and left me to the job alone. That was just fine with me since this meant I wasn’t tripping over him anymore.

After his break he came back refreshed and he picked up the small rocks and was throwing them on the back of the truck seeing just how high on the pile he could get them. When he was bored with that he climbed up on the bed of the truck and scaled the mountain of rocks and the back of the truck.
A move of the truck later, and after watching me use the shovel to unearth some of the bigger rocks, little man took it upon himself to pick up the shovel and start unearthing the rocks too. This worked great for me since I didn’t have to fight to get some out of the ground.

All of this was fun and games to him, but what he didn’t realize at the time was the little bits and pieces of lessons of life he was learning.
You’re never too little to pitch in and help in any way you can.

Sometimes in life there are jobs we may not want to do but they need done anyway. If we didn’t pick up these rocks it could mean the senseless tearing up of equipment later; which could be rather expensive.

Completely do the job to the end no matter how tedious it can become. (With the exception of two rocks I left that Daddy will have to use the tractor and loader to retrieve because they were way too big for Mommy to pick up.)

Even a Mommy can do a Daddy’s work. Just because a person is a female doesn’t mean they can’t do the things a man can do.

There is a payoff to completing a tough job. The mental fortitude to know you can do more difficult things in the future because you have already built a base to work from.

All of this to me is otherwise known has having a good work ethic; something that can’t be taught in entirety in a classroom and will hopefully live on within him for the rest of his life.

So a few life lessons, two hours at least and at least a ton of rocks later we finished up and gingerly made our way back to the house.
These are the things farm kids grow up seeing and doing. I know my little man does not understand all of these things now but as he grows and matures he will start to see and understand these things. My hope is that he will be willing and able to continue in his father’s footsteps upon the foundation we are building today.

Later,
Stephanie
The Moderately Involved Kansas Farm Wife

In the Dog House

I’m in my own dog house because I haven’t posted a new blog since August of last year. In my defense it seems longer ago than it has been.

Since my last blog I finished off our garden with great success and my husband telling me I’m not allowed to plant green beans this year. ;-) We finally finished a harvest; we never though would start, the last day of November. We didn’t get any fall field work done like fall pre-spraying or anhydrous ammonia (NH3) put on.

That brings us up to the beginning of this year. We’ve worked on two tractors, split one in half to fix the Power-Take-Off (PTO) clutch and I took off and had the steering motor on another fixed and also put it back on by myself. ;-)

My husband spent 63 hours in the tractor two weeks ago putting on most of our NH3 while I pulled about 35 tanks from the field to town and back. That same week we also spent several hours checking the cattle as they are in the midst of calving. I even tagged my first calf ever.

We’ve pulled up stock field fence, electrified fence around a field of corn stalks we use as great winter roughage for the cattle to munch on. This last week I’ve been fixing some electric fence around some summer grazing areas that the deer have knocked down and/or torn apart.

My husband is gearing up to get more field work done with the spreading of dry fertilizers and getting the sprayer out and ready to go.
The planter has yet to make it out of the shed but it is next in line this week or next as we should start planting corn here pretty quick.

I’m hoping I will do better job from now on posting things that are happening on the farm as well as some thoughts that keep running through my head about farm related topics.

Sorry for the delay in posting a new blog.

Later,
Stephanie
The Moderately Involved Kansas Farm Wife

P.S. If any one knows what is wrong with either Google Blogger or what I'm doing that won't let me insert pictures please let me know so I can fix it and add pictures to my posts again. Thanks.