Hay Harvest

After we tilled the ground from land clearing, we seeded the ground with oats and brome.  It took a while, since we used a small broadcast seeder on the back of a quad (It seemed to have feed issues, so we went around and around until we were sure we covered everything.) So harrow it all in, set up the handmoves so we can irrigate the crap out of it, then wait a bit.

Hay harvest was really good this year; we always seem to break last years record of hay bales, and this year was no different.  While the two main fields have reached full production (so, statistic wise, our harvest numbers have reached their peak and will start to taper off), the extra four acres just added should equal an extra ton or so of hay in a couple of years.

Here's a video of our first harvest off the new field: 

I think we got just over 1100 bales - around 12 tons of hay.  Considering hay production takes us a week to do during the really hot part of summer,  that has to say something about our methods and endurance.

On our second cut, I revived a Belarus 820 that we parked a few years ago.  It came with the farm, and we used the loader it had to move stuff around before we brought our backhoe over from Cranbrook.

It was awkward to use as a loader machine, and had enough mechanical problems that we decided to park it after the backhoe arrived.  When we needed a larger machine to run the baler, we opted to get an MF180 off one of our neighbors instead of fixing the Belarus up (Largely due to both questionable parts availability and the reputation of the brand on the internet).  While the 180 does an okay job, it has enough mechanical problems that Mom and Dad feel a little ripped off over it.

After I kicked it awake again and started cleaning it up, I realized it ran so well I might as well try it with baling the hay.  I took the loader off, bolted some sheet metal we found for it back on and changed the fluids. (I have never seen transmission oil the consistancy of custard before) and put the baler on.

Considering it is a noisy, soviet-era tractor, it ran better than we thought it did 5 years ago!  I think a  

Field Preparation

Here is a video of what we did this May:

I cleared 3 acres over the summer of 2012 and finished cleaning it up this year to be tilled this spring.  After discing it, we seeded it with oats and grass.

The next few posts will show us harvesting the hay.

Well, trying to cover close to two years of absent post is going to be a bit of a challenge, so here goes...


Got my first job in summer 2008 for a fabrication shop. That and a couple of deaths in the extended family did a good job of inhibiting work on the farm, but we at least got the upstairs mostly insulated and drywalled, and that helped immensely with our heating.

we had some trouble getting our hay to dry that year, but we did pull off two cuts of hay.

2009 saw some rather busy work both on and off the farm. neither me or my brother were able to get a job this summer, so we set to work on the farm.

After some dithering around, we finally decided to mount a brush rake to our D8, after having it sit around with just a c-frame for two years. An torch, grinder and some three boxes of welding rod later, we had a decent mount for a home-made brush rake. Six hours got about three acres clear that almost as quickly started filling with junk.

Dad arranged with a scrap dealer to take some of our scrap away, and we spent a full day gathering it into one place, everything from sheet metal to engine blocks, and 7 tons of junk was hauled off.

We had a real long heat wave, and we had a heck of a bumper crop of hay. 530 Bales the first cut and another 300 for the second.

Winter 2009 gave us almost no snow, and we only had to plow our driveway twice. It started to dry out real bad in spring (Which led to our brush burn pile running off and burning out our hay field. It had a positive result on the field except for the afternoon we and the volunteer fire department spent putting it out!) But then the rain clouds moved in. They had a season's worth of forgotten snow, and they intend to deliver.

It rained for close to a month. It is starting to let up, so we can get back to brush clearing with our new-to-us D6D

8 months since the last update? Boy, it's been a while!

The winter was rather uneventful. I was extremely busy with school and "holding down the fort" to worry about anything else... :-)

Over Christmas break, we ripped the whole kitchen out of the house. It was good to finally get rid of the back-cramping 30" counters, and even the whole kitchen smelled better. Then again, we did remove a bunch of old flour from who-knows-when, the moldy and nearly rotten sink counter (WE WERE WASHING OUR DISHES IN THAT???) a few mouse nests and a big diesel fuel stain on the floor.

Some notes on the contruction of this house. The whole house was framed using rough-cut 2x4's. The framing is rather half-hazard, with 16-plus-or-minus-two-or-three-inch centers. What the framing lacks in structural strength, it makes up in nails. Lots of nails. And big ones too. For sheathing, since there was no plywood, 3/4" planks are nailed diagonally to the walls, and floors, and some of these planks are a good two feet across. On top of this, tongue and groove planks are nailed to all four sides. These are solid, clear larch, and these are nailed on - two nails per stud. (There must be a ton of nails in this thing!)

We heated the house (Or what was left of it) for two weeks from the wood we pulled off the kitchen walls, and carried away fifteen backhoe-bucket loads of garbage from that kitchen.

We set down 3/4" plywood on the floor, with construction glue and a few hundred screws (They use nails - We use screws!) and currently finished the wiring and plumbing to insulate and close the walls.

Mom has a rather giant kitchen planned- the walls on the east side of the kitchen are lined with counters, with two double-bottom sinks and a central vac. A 7-foot window provides a good view out the east side, and the dinner table is in the middle of the kitchen, in front of the upstairs furnace.

We had a rather heavy snowfall, getting around four feet of snow. It got to the point where we had to start up our tired D7 to help widen the road a bit from the encroaching snowbanks.

There is stirrings from Mom and Dad that we should start work fixing up our bulldozer-forever-in-restoration, our Cat D4D. Dad just bought some parts for it, and we are preparing to clean up (and out) the shop to start work. Finally finishing somthing for a change would be nice...

Well, the last bale of hay was taken off the field last weekend, officially ending summer for us!

Haying this year was quite easy for us, as we decided to buy the proper machinery for the job. We got a New Holland 469 "haybine" (mower-conditioner) to cut the hay, a NH 1010 Balestacker to collect it, and a 60-horsepower Massey Ferguson 180 to work beside our 202.

But perhaps the best addition to our hay equipment (Perhaps a bit late) was a John Deere 348 baler. I have NEVER seen bales come out of that Ford baler as nice as what the John Deere can do! I ran a bale over with the 180, and the bale didn't even notice! also, not having to stop every time the knotters trip to cut the twine is a plus too.

After we were done, we got 650 bales off the field. That's a far cry from the 75 we got last year.

We were originally using the quad's seed spreader to fertilize the fields, but since we got a fertilizer spreader for the tractor, it has become way easier. I don't think the fields would have produced as much without the fertilizer.

At the end of June, a massive windstorm blew through. me and my parents were heading to a tractor show in Alberta, but my brother said it was comparable to what you would see in a hurricane. Quite a few trees were blown over, including a massive Douglas fir that was four feet wide at the trunk (It's heartwood was rotten, so it was an easy push).

We were without power for five days. Not that we entirely noticed, as we had two generators, kerosene lamps and the gravity fed water, so we were managing quite well. We didn't have much in the line of firewood, as we burnt it all up in two winters. So, this mean we have a lot of premium firewood now, ready for the chopping!

To store this firewood, we cleared the lot were the woodpile sat so we can build a woodshed. We got our D8 going, and pulled out a couple of stumps, including several trees that (Thanks to the windstorm) we no longer want by the house. One large pine we pulled out was on a rock pile, and had a surprisingly small rootball, so it was a good thing we decided to clear them out.

September means school, so it's back to the grindstone for me! I'm taking English at the collage, with math and socials at the distance education. I have to say, I'm finding it's pretty easy so far!

Well, the fields are seeded. Now I need to fertilize all 20 acres of it!

I disced over the course of two weeks, first on one part of the west field with the Massey 202 and it's little Ferguson disc, and since the D7 needed repairs, we used our '51 D8 attached to the 14' CaseIH Plow to disc the east field.

In the middle of it all, Mom and Dad invested in some 800 trees to rebuild our forests, so I had to help plant those, ranging from Blue spruces to Grand Firs.

After all of that discing, We seeded. And seeded. and seeded. and then used the Massey disc to cover the seed.

Okay, now the seed's in. We finally got a soil test kit, and found the solid was devoid of just about everything except phosphorus. As much as we expected it, it still came as a surprise! So off to the garden store to buy them out of fertilizer.

after some passes of fertilizer with the quad, the fields sprang to life. Now the grass is getting so tall, the clover at the near end of the east field, normally not a hay crop, is just about ready to be baled!

Now we are irrigating the crap out of the fields, so we should get a good start with the grass.

What I have been doing in the last week is cutting parts off the D8 blade. The blade was not original, it was a blade probably meant for a older RD-8 with a overhead pulley, back when they were still perfecting the first blade design. It was cobbled onto our D8 before we bought it. I hated it for not bulldozing a flat line, and it's short travel span, from mounting it on top of the Overhead pulley frame, made it rather hard to work with, and not very popular as a result.

So after I busted the blade pins off from trying to ram a stump out, me and Dad decided to replace the blade mounts with something from a later generation bulldozer.

Borrowing a 300-amp welder, I air-arced the central pivot off another blade, the angle mounts from a C-frame, and all the old-blade crap off the D8 C-frame. Now all I need to do is grind the stuff flat, and it's time to break out the welding rods!

So spring is here, weather the last few days was BEAUTIFUL, and the farm work is going into full swing!

in January to February, we focused mainly in the shop, setting up for getting started again on some major mechanical projects (And mainly to get set up). We did some rearranging, set up some new shelving and lined a little over one-thousand feet of wire just to get it properly lit (8 Main-lights, 4 workbench lights, 4 plugs on each long wall, and the lights were block-wired!)

In march, the heat turned up so suddenly we had a "Mega-melt", were there were big rivers of meltwater everywhere! There was a great big lake in a low spot, and there was a overflow crossing our driveway! Interestingly enough, all the rivers were gone in a couple of days...

Since it has now dried out for a few weeks, I started up our MF202 and got the disc going. We want to fix up, improve and expand the field we got the most hay out of, so that means churning the soil a little, picking up any rocks that appear (2 backhoe loader buckets (6.7 Cu.Yards each) Already!) and clearing a little land.

Coming up this summer is a photo tour of the farm!