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Life on the Farm

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bjrogg:
 A couple Marc.

1 my schedule. Have a meeting this afternoon and tomorrow I have my great aunt funeral.

2 I like having the ground frozen enough I don’t even leave a track.

3 going to take a few days and have to do it while conditions allow.

With the gps it’s not a problem.

Bjrogg

Buckskinner:
I grew up on a beef/hog operation but decided not to peruse it later in life, but still live on part of the property. My brother was born to be a farmer and not room for both of us anyway.  He gave it a go for about 20 years but could not find enough land to make it work.  Now he just hobby farms about 90 acres and I rent mine to the neighbors.  He's the last of 8 generations to farm the area, but who knows what his kids will do in future.

That is quite a conversion!  I remember my Dad back in the 70's converted a 4 to a 6 row corn planter, obviously that was nothing complicated as everything was mechanical and pretty simple.  These days with the electronics alone makes that a major undertaking.  I don't know a thing about raising sugar beet, but my brother put in radishes for cover crop last fall and the deer sure love them!  Actually I ate a pile of them as well, I'd pull one on my way to deer stand and munch on it.  Also they were great cooked!

bjrogg:
Buckskinner I totally understand you and your brothers situation.

We grew up milking cows, making hay and hoeing weedy sugar beets. My dad was very good at letting us make mistakes and learning from them. It’s something I’m probably not as good at and mistakes have become very expensive.

My dad said we could always come back to the farm, but we had to leave it first and try something else. My dad was a smart man with a lot of common sense. I went to electronics school and after I worked in Detroit for several years. In the spring of 1984 the economy was terrible. Inflation was crazy and the place I worked at was going to have to let someone go. It was me or a guy with a wife and kids. I decided to pack up my meager belongings and go back to the farm.

It was difficult. Interest rates were high. Everything was expensive and when I left the farm they sold the cows. My next youngest brother had taken a job and work off the farm for a few years. Now he was getting married and wanted to come back to the farm. We decided to buy some cows and start milking again. I remember being very nervous about how much money I had to borrow and how high the interest rate was. My dad told me if you don’t have anything, they can’t take anything away from you. That was 38 years ago and I have been I debt ever since. It has been a struggle and the time I spent off the farm made me appreciate my time on the farm enough to stick with it. I have had to sell stuff I couldn’t make the payments on. It hurt and my brother who farmed with me for 35 years decided it was time for him to leave the farm again. We had to sell land and there wasn’t enough left for all of us.
Myself and my middle brother decided to keep trying to make it go. The next couple years were very difficult and very hard on one nerves. We somehow managed to survive them. I said a lot of prayers and asked the good lord to take care of us. Honestly he was the only one who could. He has and we are getting through it.


My dad planted our first sugar beet crop two days before I was born. This spring if my planter works I will plant our 61st crop of sugar beets. Things have certainly changed. Yet stayed the same. We still take those delicate little beets seeds and plant them in the cold moist soil. We still do a lot of praying and worrying.

Last year we had a record year for sugar beet yields. We averaged 44 tons per acre. A whole 10 tons higher than the fantastic crop we grew the year prior. Unfortunately the sugar content was very low. We averaged 16.4% sugar. The year prior we averaged 20.23% sugar. The previous year even though we had over 3,000 less tons. We had over 300,000 more lbs of sugar from them. This still wouldn’t be so terrible except beet are a perishable crop. We can’t just store them in a bin. They go on huge piles and we have to get them processed before the end of spring.

The most we have ever processed as a coop is 5.1 million tons. Last year we estimated we had a 5.8 million ton crop. We left 5% of our crop unharvested, knowing we would never be able to process it. Also knowing we probably should have left another 5 or 7 percent unharvested.

We harvested them though. Hoping for a record slice and hoping the factories could get them processed. We are still very short on employees at our factories with 80 open positions. Covid has made it difficult to keep the ones we have able to come to work with exposures and quarantine.
Instead of having record slice it has been pretty disappointing.  Now we are paying to haul beets away and dispose of them. I expect us to discard around a million tons of beets between what we didn’t harvest and what we haul back from the piles. And the amount of sugar we get from the tons we do process is low. Normally we get between 290 to 320 lbs of sugar from a ton. We are averaging 239 lbs.
Kinda like when you have to much zucchini and can’t find a home for it, but a lot more expensive.

We will do it again though and chances are with different results. Hardly ever have the same results two years in a row.

Bjrogg

Buckskinner:
Most who don't grow up on a farm don't realize the cutting edge that farms run on, literally year to year where a lot of them you are just trying to pay for inputs and interest.  We also had extremely lean years where Dad wouldn't talk about it, but you could see it in his face every day.   I wouldn't have traded my childhood for anything, I learned 100x more working on the farm than I did in college, and the farm was the reason I got my first job which laid the foundation for my entire career.  My to be first boss saw on my resume that I grew up on a farm, asked me some questions only a farm kid would know and offered me the job on the spot.

I try to instill the same for my kids and even though they helped the neighbor milk and my brother put up hay and such, it's not the same as the grind of every day.  I do think they have a work ethic and can appreciate a hard day's work.  I remember a day about 8 years ago when their baseball practice was cancelled because it was too hot out and they spent the afternoon unloading hay, that's farm life though...

I learned a lot about the beet business just from your above post!  I wish you a prosperous growing season and with high sugar content and efficient processing!

bjrogg:
Stick around and you will learn a lot more about the sugar beets. They are pretty interesting crop to grow.

I got up at 3:00 am Thursday and applied Biosolids till 1:30pm. Then got cleaned up and went to a meeting from 3:00 pm till almost 8:00

Slept in a bit Friday and went to my aunts funeral. She was only a couple weeks from 97. Lived a good life and raised 13 kids. It was really good to see so many of my cousins again. It’s to bad someone always seems to have to pass for so many of us to.

I visited with my cousins till about 3:00 pm and then went back at applying Biosolids till 10:30pm

My wire harness came back. It did have a broken wire. My nephew installed it last night but couldn’t get the hydraulic motors to turn. This morning I looked everything over and tried it. I got the motors to turn but the one we added was turning wrong direction. I’m hoping I can plumb it differently to change its direction. I’ll have to talk to Deere Monday.

This afternoon I got the bow I started last winter back out and did a little scraping. I got this stave from Arvin. Thanks Arvin I’m sorry it’s taking me so long, but hopefully I can get it to the flats someday. September is a really busy time for me though.

It has a little reflex right out of the right fade. Makes it look a little worse than it is. I think I need a little more right outer third. Kinda like left limb so far. I’m not going to rush this one. It’s about 50@21
right now. It seems to have gained a little weight just sitting in my shop.

Bjrogg

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