Monday morning, bright and beautiful here in Frankenmuth! It was a whirlwind weekend of farming activities.
Last Friday Michigan Sugar opened up for regular delivery of sugarbeets. We put it into high gear here on the farm. Friday and Saturday we dug our first field of beets, about 30 acres in total. We haul beets with a 1980′s tandem that can be loaded with about 12.5 tons of beets at a time. No line ups at the piling grounds due to the fact that it was also the first decent weather to take off soybeans and get winter wheat planted in mid-Michigan. Scott or Roger dug beets out of the ground, Roger or his brother, Russell, drove them to Blumfield piling grounds. A good friend, Chuck, who considers tractor driving to have some therapeutic value for his soul, topped the beets. Friday we took out ten tandems and in three loads in a rented semi that hauls about 25 tons. Saturday we took out another ten tandem loads and two semis. Do the math, if you want. 30 acres, twenty tandems, eight semi loads, divided by….equals…or wait and the sugar company will send the yield results in an email!
That left Margie and Lydia to do the milking. They spent Saturday hauling manure and strawing pens, and also moved some steers around to new pens so they can be fed a more concentrated corn diet. Two heifers calved over the weekend, too, so the girls had to coax new cows into the stanchions at milking time twice each day. Sunday afternoon they tagged calves born in the last month and moved some out of little hutches. Margie hauled pit and pen manure on some fields that will be in corn next year so we can do our fall tillage later next week. It was good that Margie came home and could help us so much this weekend. Sometimes in the fall the cows are almost an afterthought with all the intense effort being put into harvesting crops. Margie’s heart is in the dairy barn, and she does a fantastic job, and Lydia was such a great helper!
On that note, Lydia had a cross country meet Saturday morning and ran a 24:20 5K before coming home to put in a eight hour day of
Harvest is waiting at Weiss Farm October2009
work on the farm yet!
My jobs are all in “human resources”, I think! I drive trucks in the field for loading beets if no one else is around. My most important task is to make sure all our help is comfortable: fed and watered. Saturday morning at 7am I made a big pot of spicy chili with 2 20 ounce cans of Brooks hot chili beans, 3 lbs of lean hamburger, a half gallon of tomato juice, and liberal amounts of chili powder and cayene pepper and homemade salsa. It was hot and spicy, and really fed the crew well at lunchtime. Supper was at Davinci’s in Frankenmuth around 9:30pm when we finally shut down for the night! Sunday we made it to church, which is always a good way to start the week.
Some tense moments arose because I had purchased tickets to see the musical ‘Ragtime’ in Midland several months ago. Everyone was so into farm work…but Roger, Lydia and I did go see the show. Really excellent entertainment and such talent to be found in mid-Michigan! One ticket was not used as Scott stayed home to help combine soybeans and do his government homework for school.
This week will be just as busy if the weather stays favorable.
Tags: Dairy Farming, Farming
October 21, 2009 at 10:03 pm |
Just found your blog. It is great to read other dairy blogs.
Keep up the good work. Stay healthy and safe this harvest season. If you want to follow a MN dairy come on over to our blog.
The Zwebers
October 22, 2009 at 4:44 pm |
Your site looks great! I will read through it at my leisure this evening. We read a few dairy blogs and always drop in newagtalk.com each evening. The internet farm news is so much more entertaining than commercial TV!