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Life on the Farm
YosemiteBen:
Hey Pat! I know what you mean! weather patterns are off! 70 degrees at 4000' in Yosemite today!
Pat B:
Hey, Ben. You guys have had a few rocky years lately. I thought your heavy snow last your would help break your decades long drought. I guess Mother Nature has other ideas for us all. :o
Hope all is well with you and yours otherwise. :OK
bjrogg:
Hope you get some rain Pat. Funny we keep getting rain, but really still just small amounts. Just enough to make things challenging.
We actually had two sunny days in a row now after our snowstorm the other night. We finished the field by my house two days ago and moved to my Grandparents farm yesterday morning. It was a little tricky finding a safe spot to load trucks at first but the sunshine really helped.
We were required to leave “set aside acres” this year as this was a really big crop and beets are a perishable crop. First they told us 15%. Then they said some areas had poor yields and they estimated that the average yield to be lower than they had estimated. They said we had to leave 7.5% of our acres set aside. Two days ago they told us that we could harvest all of our acres. I hope they can get them processed. That would be fantastic. We are going to need a good winter to store our beets and the factories are going to have to have records breaking slice. Just a few more miracles to count on.
If they are wrong and we have to pay to dispose of the beets rotting on our piles it gets very expensive. We have a lot of money into harvesting and piling these beets. We generally have to pay half of what we get for delivering beets, to get people to haul them away and dispose of them by spreading them back in their fields.
The sugar content has improved. The field by my house was 19.5% and that’s pretty good. Hopefully the 125 year old factories can kick butt. Things are running better than they have for the past few years since COVID. Still lots of time for trouble though. The last beets processed won’t be until the beginning of April if they keep that long.
All in all the release of the set aside acres is a good thing. Hopefully it works out for everyone.
Bjrogg
BrianS:
Bjrogg,
Thank you for taking the time to keep up with this ongoing post. I find the pictures and explanations fascinating. Very interesting.
Take care, Brian
bjrogg:
--- Quote from: BrianS on November 03, 2023, 09:37:11 am ---Bjrogg,
Thank you for taking the time to keep up with this ongoing post. I find the pictures and explanations fascinating. Very interesting.
Take care, Brian
--- End quote ---
Thanks Brian.
I’m hoping this is the last early morning digging picture for the season. We are in our last field and we should be able to finish it today.
This is the last field of beets I planted this spring. If you remember, our tillage tractor quit with just this 20 acres to plant yet. I decided to plant the field directly into the rye cover crop without tilling it.
The rye was probably 7” tall when I planted the beets. It was probably 26” tall when I sprayed it and you couldn’t see the beets.
They look fantastic now.
Bjrogg
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