How agriculture works thread

ArlyA · Sep 7, 2023

Mike Mitchell in Saskatchewan Canada combining wheat right now. Are they running 45 and 50ft heads? More info on there operation is below.

Mike is of the Mitchell fourth generation. He farms along side his two brothers, parents & their families. In 2008 they received a Century Farm award, meaning the Mitchell family homestead has remained in the family name for over 100 years.

With their respective companies, together as a family, they farm around 40,000 acres of red and green lentils, chickpeas, hard red spring wheat, durum, canola, and barley.

ArlyA · Sep 8, 2023

Taken somewhere in ND, might be west river? Central? On September 1st.

ArlyA · Sep 12, 2023

This is a neat video of a custom combine operator from Texas moving through my home state of SD heading north to do more wheat contracts. They loaded up from somewhere in central Nebraska and shows the things they need to do and the problems they face. This is further west in SD than what I'm familiar with.

5030 · Sep 12, 2023

Nice video Arly...

Don't play that way around here however. All farmers here own their own planting and harvesting equipment.

Speaking of harvesting, I ran 133 4x5 round bales of second cut mixed alfalfa grass yesterday on 2 fields and 16 on another (behind the land owners house). The fields I ran are on shares. My contiguous to the farm field (all vernal alfalfa), I already cut, raked and baled last week and of course they are all sold.

I really am getting in the 'groove' with my new Kubota BV computerized round baler. It's running perfectly. Running Bridon over the edge net and every bale is perfect, unlike the New Holland I sold. The new Kubota baler has a large in cab display screen but the feature I really like is the bale driving screen. It has a 'steering wheel' superimposed on the screen with sequential arrows that show when the bale chamber is being loaded lopsided. So long as no arrows show and just the steering wheel (centered) the bale is uniform. Very easy to follow and when the bale chamber is full, the monitor tells me to stop forward motion with a visible STOP as well as an alarm and then 3 seconds later, the wrap cycle begins. I'm running 3 complete wraps of net on each bale and each bale is hydraulically tensioned with a soft center followed by a progressively tighter wrap finalizing at 2300 psi for an extremely tight bale. The machine also tells me how many lineal feet of net is left on the net roll and the initial roll tension is set by the on board (on bailer) computer so no worries about running out of net in the middle of a wrap.

Very nice baler. It also has centralized greasing and it automatically oils the drive chains.

The only thing I'm not overly fond of is, it's a European design, totally enclosed bale chamber (just like a Claas) so you really cannot see the formed bale at all until you eject it.

Glad I got with the program yesterday

Took me 9 hours to complete everything (transit time from the farm to the ground, included) and I burned about 26 gallons of ORD.

I might get a late 3rd cut depending on how the weather goes. Will see. Not banking on it actually.

Glad I got with the program yesterday as it's raining here today but no worries about the round bales in the fields as they are tight and in net which really provides good weathering and rain shedding.

ArlyA · Sep 12, 2023

These guys like the Hayden's run small combines because they need to be moving them X times a year with 40ft flex heads. This is normal for custom guys. I believe They are still in ND and he talks about machine capacity and the dealersgip brought them out a X9 with a 45ft head to test run.

5030 · Sep 12, 2023

JD makes some good harvesting equipment until it needs serviced and then all hell breaks loose.

LHF2019 · Sep 12, 2023

Bring back lots of memories of my time on a custom harvest crew. Home base was Nebraska. My first day was in Alva OK. Worked on the King Ranch. Spent lots of time in Kadoka SD due to rain. Minot ND and Medicine Lake Montana. Lots of beautiful country and a great way to see it. Somewhere I have an atlas with the route highlighted so someday I can retrace it.

ArlyA · Sep 12, 2023

LHF2019 said:
Bring back lots of memories of my time on a custom harvest crew. Home base was Nebraska. My first day was in Alva OK. Worked on the King Ranch. Spent lots of time in Kadoka SD due to rain. Minot ND and Medicine Lake Montana. Lots of beautiful country and a great way to see it. Somewhere I have an atlas with the route highlighted so someday I can retrace it.

My folks live in chamberlain SD. Any pictures oif you time while on that crew? What year did you do that? My relatives who farm reside north of there in Highmore and Ondia.

LHF2019 · Sep 13, 2023

ArlyA said:
My folks live in chamberlain SD. Any pictures oif you time while on that crew? What year did you do that? My relatives who farm reside north of there in Highmore and Ondia.

Just a few pictures. Many many more in storage. Back when you had to carry disposable cameras and used prepaid phone cards. I remember walking through town (Medicine Lake MT) to get to a phone booth. Stayed above the bar while working there. The year was 1998. Left the day after graduation. There were 3 of us from this area. Turned out a former employee of my dad and his cousin were going. After my mom and his mom started talking and learned of the one I was going on they switched crews because of the housing. My crew got put up in hotels. Now before you think wow that's great they were the mom and pop style. But it beats a camper with however many guys you can cram in there. It was nice to at least know a couple people when I got there.

This is a list of acreage I kept track of on the King Ranch. It was a very poor year as my notes indicate. The previous year it took 70 semi's to keep up with 8 combines and the year I was there only 20 some. We worked with a 2nd company each having 4 combines. If I remember note correctly close to half million is what my boss was paid for that job.