Unofficially finished planting May 18th, the last 300ac had too many wet spots throughout & I was hoping they would dry. May 23 - 26 the wind blew up to 50mph everyday, the wet spots seemed like they dried & I tried to finish planting May 27... I didn't go half mile & sunk my drill on the side of a hill
First time in my life of farming that I had to split the cart from the drill to get out of the mud hole... that was about 4hrs of not fun
Where I buy my fertilizer & chemical in town, they also have specialized equipment to rent like this Valmar... I filled it with fertilizer & was hoping to broadcast on the surface the last I was trying to seed & with just seed in the cart it'd be a lot less weight to drag around... just about sunk it 3x
Gave up, done seeding!
With that Valmar, I broadcast the last 20mt of fert on the land I seeded, don't want to store fert till next season anymore b/c I went thru an exhausting wreck this spring from fert I kept over from last yr.
A half section that was a swamp last yr that I never got seeded meant 20mt of fert left over. took it all out of the bin, put floor dry in the bin bottom to collection any moisture that might accumulate at trap... added 60mt on top last week of March this Spring... May 3rd when I just started seeding, couldn't get the fert to come out of the bin.. beat on the slopes of the hopper with a fence post & using a hockey stick to poke from the bottom for 2hrs by myself with no success... phone fert agent, two guys come out with a big plastcic sledge hammer & a vibrator snake... two more hrs go by & we kinda got it to flow, but the fert was coming from around the edges & that started a corkscrew effect that started to literally crinkle the hopper slopes & dents appearing up the side of the bin
so we quit... and I go to town to get 10mt of new fert so I can atleast get some seeding done that day.
Next morning two guys come again with a picker trk & basket, and a gen set with a big hammer drill with a home made 5ft drill bit... essentially a half inch rod with sickle sections on the end with 1/2 rod stubs welded perpendicular on the 5ft shaft.
I managed to get the manhole cover on hopper slope open the day before & we worked the hammer drill through there for better than a hr AND THEN THE FERT DROPPED!!! It was a bit of struggle getting that manhole cover slid back in place, maybe half tonne hit the ground.
Put 15mt on the trk, go fill the drill, take another 15mt out, looks like we got it, the workers leave. Next day take another 15mt out & it flows ok. But after that the last 45mt to come out was a lumpy mess that took better than an hr each trk load. That wreck cost me more than a day's worth time of hard labor over the period of the week of seeding durum... never again store fertilizer through summer, fall, winter!
That shaker screener/conveyor was a god send, it would've been 10x the job if I was still using my screw auger.
Land rolling peas, took 2 days to go over 650ac
Pick rock football size & bigger b/c the land roller aint pushing them in the ground.
This is why I spray ahead of seeding... somehow I forgot a small area in the middle of the field... probably tank went empty, went seeding rest of day, next morning spraying again in a different area, didn't check "plane" view on monitor when finish the field
The swamp half I didn't seed crop on last yr, it's bottom ground that has several square miles of higher ground of water run off that goes through; the last 7yrs the quality of soil has been diminishing with the ten feet of rainfall accumulation, plus whatever the winter snowfall amounted to; I decided last yr to seed it this spring to a forage grass blend of alphalfa, brome, crested wheat grass... cut/bale next summer for 7 - 10yrs, then maybe rent it for pasture after that or could farm it again... though I won't be farming anymore in 10yrs.
I put my 9390 on the little grass seeder, tractor is 21ft wide, seeder 33ft wide
...but I did find a couple of spots that I did get some wheel slippage
...the Ford FWA would've been stuck!!!
