Hey! You- in the yellow and black- you missed the alfalfa fields!

May 20, 2012
 
Guests at a Picnic?

What a day we had Tuesday…  About 1pm our neighbor called and asked me to come to her house to see something…When I got there, she showed me the picnic table you see in this picture.  Look closely, there are so many bees on the edge of the table cloth they are pulling it down off the table!   She wondered if I knew anyone who made honey?  I called a farmer who raised pickles, and he said call so and so.  I did, and was told to call a bee keeper in Millington.  Yep, he was real interested in getting the bees.

Interesting to me, the bees came from the north – the direction our farm is from our neighbor’s house.  Assuming then that these bees lived in the woods to the north of us…they flew right by our alfalfa fields.  Only thing I can think of is they aren’t in blossom yet, so the bees were hungry.  Well, it was a windy day, so maybe the little bitty things thought flying a quarter mile in 30 mph winds were far enough for a day.  On the north side of the house, they were protected from the wind by her house.

The swarm was huge

When the bee keeper arrived we got a bit braver…and moved in for a close up.  the swarm consisted of thousands of worker bees.  We were informed by the professional that somewhere in the center of the five inch thick ball of bees there was sure to be a queen.  The bees leave an old hive when populations reach a critical number.  They make a new queen, then fly away with her.  My neighbor said she was in the garden when a black, buzzing cloud came swarming toward the table.  She is petrified of bees, so quickly abandoned the garden for the house, and she started making calls.

Setting up a hive

The bee keeper assembled a bee hive as we watched in the late afternoon.  He worked so close by the bees, and they simply ignored him as a few would buzz around.  He said there were scout bees who were out looking for a new home, while these waited around for her to come back with real estate news.  Our beekeeper, of course, had brought prime real estate right to the queen!

Dinner for a crowd

When the hive was ready, the bee keeper literally swept the bees into the hive, or at least as many as he could.  Then, he put the hive on the table and put a plastic pail on top.  It had a hole in it, through which a man-made nectar would drip into the hive so the bees would want to stay and could start making honey.  Bees buzzed all around the new hive, and he said either they would stay put or all of a sudden they might swarm out again and move on.  After about an hour, he decided they like the house.  He went home until dusk, so all the bees would be in the new hive and make the move with their queen to their new home in Millington.

 

A patch of trouble

So, back he came in the evening.  There was a visible problem… Many of the bees were swarming in a patch on the grass!  The bee keeper explained there was a good chance that the queen had either crawled out of the nest, or she had never been in it, but had been inadvertantly knocked to the ground when he swept the swarm into the hive in the first place.  So, he scooped up the smaller swarm and put them in the hive, too.  He told us when he got home he was going to sort through the bees to find the queen!!!  Yikes, I would never, ever attempt such a feat.

All day long, working with the bees, he only got stung once!  He says this is an old-time remedy for bee stings.  He got three different kinds of leaves, mashed them together, and rubbed them on the sting.   It makes the sting go away and eliminates the possibility of swelling and itching.  He said any three kinds of leaves will work.  (We joked that one of them should not be poison ivy!) I will try it for sure when I get stung this summer…although around our house all we have are those very prolific european wasps that build nests in every crevice, it seems!

Home SWEET Home (literally)

Honey bees are really important to agriculture.  It is imperative that we encourage the growth of new hives whenever possible.  They pollinate about 80% of the fruits and vegetables and nuts and other plants that people enjoy eating.  Colony collapse is a recent phenomenon, in which whole hives full of bees suddenly die enmass.  Scientists are trying to figure out why this happens.  It is a man-made threat or natural threat?  Evidence seems to support many different scenarios for the collapse.  So, it was good of my neighbor to think beyond her own fears and natural inclination to want to eliminate the threat as soon as possible, even if it meant killing all the bees.  Hopefully, in the hive they were moved into on Tuesday, the bees will thrive.

We are sincerely hoping that the bees in the original hive are getting ready to start pollinating our alfalfa by the way.  This week the flowers will pop out.  We will also begin cutting the field for the first time and store it as haylage…but that is a tale for next time.

PS Sorry about the long gap of time, I have been crazy busy helping our local schools with some dairy promotions and writing a grant for Fuel Up To Play to be in our schools next year.  Frankenmuth Middle School will be at Ford Field in the fall, and we hope the high school can also get into FUTP60!

 

 

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Happy Earth Day

April 22, 2012

We had a set of twins this month. This sweet little calf is about as big as our dogs! Sadly, the other twin was stillborn. Cows do not normally have multiple births. This little guy is doing great though!

Are you celebrating Earth Day?  Actually, farmers celebrate earth every single day.  We know how important healthy soil is, we participate in the yearly ritual of planting one small seed and then nurturing it, trusting God and nature to bring it to fruition.  We know that it all has to be just right: the planting date, the nutrient balance, the warmth and the rains, the cultivation, for a crop to mature.  As we harvest a crop, each American farmer finds satisfaction in the fact that all the hard work helps feed 159 complete strangers here in America and around the world.

And for a livestock farmer there is even more responsibility, more stewardship of the natural resources.  We care for our animals each and every day, giving them feed and water and housing, guard them against predators and disease and illness.  We make sure the corn and hay we feed is nutritionally balanced for each cow.  We make sure the manure is applied to our fields to fertilize the next crop.  We rely on nutritionists and soil consultants, veterinarians, and seed specialists in addition to the knowledge we ourselves have about dairy farming.

Today, I just walked around the farm and took some wonderful pictures of what we look like on April 22, 2012.  Enjoy!

These calves are about six to eight months old. They wanted to lick the camera as I took their picture!

A dairy cow will drink about a bathtub full of water each day!

Cows like to drink warm water from a fairly big pond or tub of water.  In an effort to be as energy efficient as possible, we pump water from the ground and through a milk plate cooler which runs lines of water opposite lines of milk from the cows.  Water from underground is 54 degrees or so, milk from a cow is about 102 degrees.  As the two liquids pass each other, both in their own lines they exchange heat and cold.  So, we are able to pre-cool our milk before it goes in the bulktank to about 55 degree and heat the water up to between 60-65 degrees.  It’s a win-win’win for the cows, our electricity consumption, and the environment.  It’s a sustainable system.

The beets are growing, even in this cold weather (it's about 50 degrees lately during the day) more are emerging from the ground each day!

     One month ago we were enjoying temperatures in the 80′s, it cooled off toward the end of March to more seasonal temperatures.  That has been the story through April.  The rain earlier this week, we got about a 1/2 inch, was great for the crops and for my flower garden.  Alongside the old house, I’ve planted perennials.  The daffodils have lasted more than a month!  And the tulips just started this past week so I think I will get to enjoy them for another week or so.  I planted two lilac bushes last year, I think they were fooled into trying to flower last month and now will not have any blooms at all this month.  Kind of sad, their scent is heavenly when I bring a bouquet into the house.  I might have to go pick some at the neighbors, I see their purple ones made it through and are blooming now.

UDIM has posted some really fun Earth Day dairy videos.  SO, if you need to hear some cows and see the breeze blowing around a farm or two, check out this YouTube site for some awesome footage of Michigan agriculture.        http://youtu.be/ht0bJ8XF7nc

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Throwing our hard-earned money down a hole!

April 15, 2012

      We’re back to putting our money in a hole in the ground this spring, taking up where we left off last spring!   You wonder what we are up to?  And, what in the world is that rusty contraption anyway!?  Roger (and neighbor, Eric) are putting more tile in the fields.  Friends helping friends, the way it’s done in the Frankenmuth countryside.

Roger is the fourth or fifth person to own this Buckeye Tiler Machine.  It is vintage WWII, according to his dad.  It came into Frankenmuth in the 1960′s on a train, was unloaded back at Star of the West in Gera, MI, and then a local farmer purchased it as a piece of used equipment and tiled his farm.  When he was done, Elmer (Roger’s Dad) bought it around 1972 or so and used it to tile some of our farm and lots of neighboring farms.  We bought it from Elmer’s dad, and believe it or not, it actually has real value as it works quite well and parts are still available, although we are gettting more creative in searching the internet all the time…!  We are in touch with a few Buckeye owners on a regular basis and always looking for more…

      Eric is in his 70′s, Roger is in his 50′s, and a new generation is learning to operate the machine.  There are some blog stories from fall 2010, when Margie, Scott and Lydia were tiling all by themselves in this same field one fine fall day.  This spring, Scott has been in the trenches hooking up plastic tile to existing tiles, tamping it down, and then later he uses a skidsteer to fill in the trench.  Scott, or Margie, help with tiling because it’s pretty tight work in the trench.  It’s about 18 inches wide, so a body has to be pretty limber to be able to twist and turn and get the work done.  The 4 inch tile is about 4-5 feet under ground.  Gotta love the supervisors breathing down his neck, right???

How does field tile worK?  Well, when it rains, water soaks into the ground.  If the ground is dry all the water is used by crops.  But, if we get a heavy rainstorm, or to help dry off the fields in the spring, the tiles – which have 1/4 inch by 1 inch long slots all along them (you can see them on the tile above as sideways slashes on the tile Eric is guiding into the chute) – will fill up with excess water and take it to ditches.  Tiled ground is necessary in much of mid-Michigan – this was all swamps before our industrious German forefathers (and their busy families) arrived 150 years ago and started to clear land for farming.  Other groups arrived to, and their drainage ditches helped dry off land that is very fertile.  Of course, they used clay tiles which were about a foot long, and hooked them one by one together.  After WWII, tiling land became a common practice.  In the 60′s and 70′s there were some govt programs to aid farmers in getting land tiled correctly, and the switch was made to plastic tile.  Today, the farmer bears all the costs.  Our farm is tiled every 80 feet, we are putting in supplementary 40 foot tile lines as we can afford to do so.

      Scott wondered when he would ever use the geometry he learned in high school… Well, there’s lots of math in tiling: depth, slope, length, gear ratios, and of course with a machine this old, there’s also the tools to give it some TLC as needed!  Scott and Margie facebooked one day that we had put in about 8 feet in a minute, and three strings (once across a field is called a string) that day.  Scott’s girlfriend’s best friend’s husband (follow that?) facebooked back that they can put in about 100 feet in a minute with their modern machine.

Scott’s response?  So, where’s the challenge in using such efficient machinery?!  He is a Weiss through and through.  When it comes to recycling, we are the farmers with the most recycled machinery around.  Sustainable, yep.  We can afford to fix this old tiler, much easier than writing a check to a tiling outfit to get the job done for us.  And where would we be without the comaraderie of spending a day with neighbor Eric?!  He loves talking with the “kids” and his only charge is asking Margie for a hug each day… which she laughingly does.  Ah, these are stories to be treasured and shared with their own kids in years to come.

Lately, we are scanning the skies for some rain.  We are pretty dry here in the Saginaw Valley, already hauling water for the cows and for our household use.  We got about 1/4 inch this weekend, we would love to get a one inch of warm rain in an all day soaker sometime soon.  Beets are sitting in dry ground and need moisture and warmth to germinate.  And, corn will start going in around here after that miracle rain arrives.  As I said, we pray for favorable weather.  And trust God has is under control, as He always does.

 

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Favorable Weather and Playing “The Glad Game”

April 8, 2012

         In church this morning, we celebrated with Christians here in Frankenmuth and all over the world the joy that comes from knowing we have eternal life through our Risen Savior, Jesus Christ.   During prayers, the Pastor asked God for favorable weather for the growing season that is upon us.  I’ve been making that same request since the beet seed went in the ground two weeks ago, and I will continue to beseech God and look with hope or dread at weather.com for the next eight months or so, until the harvest is completed.  Timely rains, warm weather, gentle breezes, moderate conditions: we’ll experience some great weather patterns – and more than likely, some nerve-wracking ones, too!

Roger and I complement each other in that I worry enough for both of us.  His ever-present “Pollyanna” behavior drives me crazy, but I know it’s a life saver I cling to when I am up to my neck in worry.  Pollyanna is a fictional character from a children’s novel by the same name.  Pollyanna is an orphan who lives with a stern aunt.  She plays the “Glad Game” all the time, always seeking something to be glad about in every situation she encounters.  Of course, she is tested with a severe challenge, but in the end it all works out.  That’s the beauty of controlling the ending of a book.

I was excited three weeks ago when the alfalfa began to grow… And worried that it might freeze and harm it.   Of course, it froze, it was MARCH in Michigan!!!!  Roger, ever the optimist, said it wouldn’t freeze too hard or too many days in a row.  A vague answer to be sure, so he can always be right, Right?   Well, now we are getting emails from our feed company about a fungus that may harm our stunted alfalfa, and I worry anew…  And Roger?  He says it froze other years after the alfalfa started growing, and it always makes it.  Which isn’t true, one year it did die out.  Which is the fact I focus on, while he dwells on the other twenty-odd years when it didn’t kill the crop.  See, how we complement each other?  See how it can drive one crazy to live with a Pollyanna?  Or a worry-wart?!

So, at church this morning the sermon was about the phrase “According to the scriptures…”   Jesus lived his life and died his death and rose again “According to the Scriptures.”  Not the New Testament scriptures Christians are most familiar with, but the Old Testament books of the Hebrew people.  Jesus’ friends and his disciples were very familiar with the OT, they knew a Savior had been promised.  And, by the time of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, they knew (as much as their human minds could know anyway) that He was the Son of God.  SO….they knew how the story would end!  But, they still mourned his death like any other human death they had ever known.  And, on Easter morning, his disciples refused to believe Mary when she told them two angels at the tomb told her Jesus had risen from the dead and was among the living!

And, me – I know how the story ends, too.  My time here on earth will be brief.  My work here is transient.  My influence is miniscule.  But, I am a Child of God, a Sister of Christ.  I know these are earthly worries I bog myself down with day in and day out.  I need to focus more on the Glad News of Jesus’ Victory for me and all believers.  Some alfalfa may die, some may live.  Some beets may freeze, or fail to emerge, or get root rot from too wet conditions, or shrivel up from drought… It really doesn’t matter in the long run, I am not  going to lose my eternal inheritance as a daughter of the King.

Now it is Easter evening.  The end of a beautiful day with Roger’s family for a few hours and my family for a few hours.  Scott and Bethany are helping Roger do chores around the farm.  Later we will all rehash the day and start planning our week.  Margie comes home on Tuesday from Germany.  I am GLAD to be a Michigan farmer and Roger’s Pollyanna project!

You will find Pollyanna,  by Eleanor H. Porter (copyright 1913), in the children’s section of your public library.  It is a great story to read to your children in the evening.  Or you can rent a movie version.  The BBC made a six-part TV series in 1973 that is faithful to the book; a 1960′s Disney movie version is greatly changed, but has the same optimistic lesson to teach to viewers of all ages.  I watched the movie in the 1970′s on a Sunday evening, after racing to finish the book the week before it aired!  It’s a habit I retain today, books are always better than their movie versions, I think.

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LELY Open House

April 5, 2012

                                                                                                               Roger and I are just behind the lady in red, who is Mary Andringa, CEO of Vermeer

LELY has partnered with Vermeer in the USA, and the new factory is nex to Vermeer

Roger and I traveled to Pella, Iowa last Tuesday for the LELY Grand Opening of a factory that will be able to build milking automated systems, commonly called robots, here in North America.  We purchased our Johann LELY robot last June, and it was built in the Netherlands.  It traveled to the USA, where it had to be retrofitted to be in compliance with all the Pasteurized Milking Ordinances that exist in the United States.

Pella is a ten or eleven hour drive from our farm, including a tense hour as we traveled around the south edge of Chicago.  We crossed the mighty Mississippi River, and still had about three hours to go before reaching Pella.  Between Frankenmuth  and Pella, Iowa we saw beautiful farm land: flat, gently rolling, and some downright hilly!  Everywhere it is early spring this year, and we saw more than a few farmers working ground.

Before we left home, Roger had our beets in.  Today, a week later, they have not yet emerged.  The seedcoat that surrounds each seed is heat-sensitive, so the seed will set in the ground until soil conditions are optimal.  They were the week before, and farmers who could get on fields in other parts of Michigan now have beets sprouting through the soil.

Back to Pella!  First, it is a lovely town.  And the people were as friendly as the reputation about midwesterners says we are.  Our hotel, a new AmericInn, was great.  We had a jacuzzi in our room, so we really relaxed after the daily activities.

A veterinarian from Netherlands held two important seminars about cow behaviors.  He has a company called Cow Signals.  His research has made him somewhat of an expert on what cows can tell you just by their daily behavior. For instance, in our herd, we can walk up to a cow and get within a yard of her nose.  This signifies that our cows are calm, they know little stress, and they trust us.  Of course, we knew we were good cow people, but now we actually have some benchmarks to work from as we continually make an effort to keep our “dairy queens” in comfort fit for the important position they hold on our farm as the ladies who help us earn a living and maintain our family’s needs and feed consumers.

                                                                                                                                                      Alexander van der Lely and son, Laurens

Mr. Alexander van der Lely did the ribbon cutting with his 11 year old son, Laurens.  He provided us with delicious meals, great motor coach transportation around the city of Pella, and many opportunities to talk to other robot users and potential customers.  We are members of the Frankenmuth Chamber of Commerce, and we have welcomed guests at our farm over the years.  Now, having experienced this grand opening of the Lely company, I know we will be working harder than ever to make sure guests who visit our farm have an experience as positive as ours was in Pella.

                                                                                                       The red LELY wall is a statement about the passion van der Lely has for the dairy industry

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Frankenmuth farmers start planting 2012 sugar beet crop

March 27, 2012

         Can it already be time to start farming again!!??  The weather conditions certainly are favorable these days: warmer weather than normal (ok, I know it froze last night, but 10 day outlook is warm…), dry field conditions, and plenty of sunshine.  We have decided to get going.

First crop of the year to go in the ground is sugar beets.  The beet seeds are coated with a protective cover that will allow them to set in the freshly planted furrows waiting until the soil is perfect temperature before germinating and poking up through the ground.  A beet seed is tiny, tiny, tiny.  About the size of a hot pepper seed and the seed coating that is applied makes them about the size of a small bb pellet.

Why the festively bright colors?  Well, I don’t think it’s because farmers are celebrating the start of another year, although who knows, it could be true.  No, really, the seeds are colorful so they can be found in the soil when the farmer checks to make sure his or her planting depth and density is good.  Beet seeds are planted less than an inch in the ground.  We try to germinate a beet seed every four to six inches, and we plant in 30 inch rows.  Our tractor tires, sprayer rig, harvester, and topper equipment must all be the same 30 inch settings, so the crop can be hired when October rolls around.

We are planting 43 acres of beets this year.  The cost of the seed is just about $3000 and there is a technology fee we pay to Monsanto so we can use Roound-Up Ready seed of just about the same amount of money.  We have already invested over $5500 in this crop.  Farmers do this every year, putting our intuitive and experiental knowledge on the line when we figure what day to plant a crop, or cultivate, spray, water, or otherwise nurture a crop.  There is no payback if there is no harvest eventually.  So, we are very careful about every input cost we incur, as we need to have a profit margin if we are to have money available to make loan payments, pay health insurance, and feed our own families.  The federal government has some crop insurance available for selected crops: sugar beets is one we insure, as we do our corn and soybeans.  However, 1/4 of our acreage, just over 70 acres of our farm, is planted with alfalfa for cows to eat.  This perennial crop is not insurable and we watched anxiously as the winter stayed warm.  It looks like it has wintered well, and is growing quickly in this unseasonably warm spell.  It’s about six inches high already, and most years it would still be dormant.  Barring any prolonged freezing weather, both the beets and alfalfa should be off to a good start!

We are not the first to get in the fields this spring with the planter…. First, Scott and Roger spent some pretty intense days hauling manure on the fields and working it in.  Manure is a by-product of our dairy farm operation, applying the manure on fields saves us thousands of dollars on commercial fertilizers.  Beets use lots of nitrogen to grow, so it is our hope that the nitrogen from manure is a good starter fertilizer for the beets and we will apply minimal or no extra amounts in June after the soils are all tested by Brookside Labs.

     Scott has a great camera, so he takes lots of photos of field working when he is able.  This is a field cultivator, and it is used to work the soil to a depth of about four inches prior to planting the sugar beet seeds.  You can see how it works up the soil, uprooting early spring weeds (yep, weeds are always the first plants on the scene in the spring!) and how it works in the corn refuse from last year’s crop.  Scott also made some short videos of beet planting, putting his camera directly in front of the tractor so it could record the event.

http://www.facebook.com/#!/video/?id=284976174858927     Scottt made a half minute video of a sugar beet planter pass, you can check it out at our Weiss Centennial Farm facebook page – friend us,too!!!! Scott updates the page from his mobile phone every day.

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Father-Son Bonding: The Weiss Farm Way

March 11, 2012

      Scott has really stepped up to the plate when it comes to mechanical work around the farm!  He has always been intrigued by how things work: he tore apart a VCR when he was 8 just to check out the insides – discovered a bandaid wrapped in it – and earned bragging rights for fixing the thing!  We’re still using it and he’s 20!

The MF 1085 in this photo is probably twice as old as Scott.  It’s a good, hard-working tractor.  This fall it broke down and Scott and Roger determined they could do the mechanical work in our farm shop and save the labor costs of a repair bill.  They had to replace the clutch plate and a stripped out spline, and lots of other little things Roger rattles off as I type that mean nothing to me.

     First step, split the tractor in two right in the middle of it!  Scott unhooked all the lines, labeling some for reattachment and making notes about others.  He has a little bucket full of bolts and assorted pieces that need to be put back on when the work is done.

 

     Scott and Roger worked on this tractor for a few weeks, often late into the cold, winter night.  They talked about the progress at every meal.  Scott is also employed part-time to install LELY robots, so some days Roger worked alone.  Sometimes he waited until Scott was home before attempting a new step.  Scott has taken several diesel mechanic classes at MSU and Baker-Owosso, and here he is able to put his knowledge to work.  The age of this tractor means the engine is fairly simple and can be worked on without a computer diagnostic tool.

     Igotta hand it to Scott’s girlfriend, Bethany:  she is very patient with all this father-son bonding time!  She comes up from Lansing to visit for a weekend and spends a great deal of her time helping Scott in the shop or hauling manure, helping Margie with calves and horses, and helping in the house with some meal time chores, too.  This I know – if Roger had been as persistent about working on farm equipment while we were in the dating phase – there would not be a Margie, or Scott, or Lydia, or 24 years together!  I definitely had other ideas about how to spend quality time together…  Gotta love these modern farm girls!   Oh, and get this, Bethany is not a farm girl by birth, but rather by desire.  She’s loved farm animals her whole life and has worked on several farms in the Lansing area as she grew up. She is also a webmaster for D&G Farm Equipment.  All week long she works with green stuff, then she comes up here and works with the off-brand red stuff we operate with on our farm!

     This past week Scott and Roger finally got the tractor back together and running.  So, this weekend Scott took time off to spend with Bethany and her family at their home.  But, he’ll be back this evening and ready for farm work or robot work tomorrow morning, bright and early, we hope.

         It was Heritage Sunday at church this week, we went to German services to see the school kids sing auf deutsche and to feel a bit closer to Lydia, off in Germany.   Pastor Brandt reminded us we should not only celebrate our St. Lorenz heritage, but our Christian heritage.  For six generations, Weisses have participated as part of the corporate body of Christ here in Frankenmuth’s St. Lorenz.  We trace our family heritage back seven more generations in Rosstal, Germany to the 1300′s when a Peter Weiss celebrated Christ’s victory over death and worshipped Jesus as his own savior.  He is our savior today, too.  And he will be my great grandchildren times seven Savior, too.  He is forever.  So, think about this family bonding thing: we’re all God’s children - isn’t it neat to think of God watching over you as you go about your daily work, establishing a Father-child relationship with you?  Guiding your hands and feet, putting kind words in your mouth to share with others, guarding you as you grow up in your faith.  That’s what our Heavenly Father does for us!  Our congregation commissioned a hymn called “Where the Swallow Builds Her Nest” in 1995 for our sesqui-centennial anniversary here in Frankenmuth.  One stanza is “What a treasure to receive!  What a legacy to leave!  Here the Word invited, saved us, Gathered us one family. On the Hand of God engraved us, Made each one a fruitful tree.  What a treasure to receive!  What a legacy to leave!”  That pretty well sums up the entirety of my prayers for my own family and yours, too.  Amen.

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Weiss Farm is a Sea of Mud

March 4, 2012

         This is our backyard today…this is what it has looked like for most of the winter!  Frankenmuth’s farming community is anxiously wondering what spring time is going to be like this year.  It seems we’ve been in a state of suspended March-like spring weather patterns all winter long.  It has not gone below 0 degrees, except once in windchill.  We’ve barely had a foot of snow cumulative all winter long.  Frost has been less than six inches deep and never sticks around.  It is indeed a weird winter.

Is it global weather change, or just an anomaly?  Most farmers think it is just a weird pattern, and we are optimistic that we will be planting sugar beets by the end of March as we have the last few years.

      Meanwhile, we are really cutting up the back yard with deep, clay loam ruts!  As we go about our daily routines – feeding cows, strawing pens, storing manure – we are challenged to do so in mud more than a foot deep.   That slows down even the biggest tractors we own.  Mixing feed takes double the amount of time it should.  And, when we do have the rare days of frozen ground, it’s really tough on equipment boucing over the top of the ruts.

      Every year we haul in a truckload of stones for our farm driveway, too.  As you can see in the picture above, they have been pressed into the mud.  I have lived here twenty-five years, and every spring we see this phenomenon.  Stones, big as they are and a few inches deep, just sink into the mud.  Roger thinks there may be a couple feet of stone and rock and broken cement chunks in the farm yard from over a hundred years of dealing with mud.  Our soil, that clay loam that is so fertile, offers challenges of its own for farmers as they plant in the spring, nurture crops in the summer, and harvest in the fall.  While we hope for timely rains, we always hope it isn’t when we are planning to go on the fields.

      Scott’s girlfriend, Bethany, took these photos for me today to share with you.  She almost fell over in the mud out behind the barn, as she captured the essence of mud on the farm!  Her boots bear witness to the fact that these days we are moving earth with every step we take here at Weiss Farm.

Are you anticipating spring’s arrival?  Only 16 days to go!  Or did we just skip winter this year, suspended in perpetual spring?

 

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Have you been to Pella?

February 28, 2012

Today Roger and I talked about going to the LELY meeting in Pella,Iowa next month.   The CEO, Alexander van der Lely, is coming to the USA as part of the company’s celebration for installing 12500 robots in the last twenty years.  Roger REALLY wants to go to the meeting, to meet Mr. van der Lely, and to meet other robot users.  I can just imagine a convention room filled with farmers as enthusiastic as Roger is about our “Johann LELY.”  The positive energy will be stupendous.  It would be great if they could bottle that goodwill and enthusiasm and somehow transfer it to Washington DC!  Would it be great if our congress men and women approached their daily work with such joy and gratitude and optimism.  Lely is celebrating the fact that they are building a factory here in the USA to make robots for the American farmer, instead of importing European robots and retrofitting them.   Jobs will be created, jobs that require technical knowledge of computers and ag equipment. 

Margie will be in Europe at that time… She is going on a dairy farm tour of many of our 4-H IFYE (International farm youth exchange) kids who have lived with us over the years.  Two highlights of her trip is visit to Suzanne Marschall’s farm in Thorihaus Switzerland.  She and her husband, Jurge, have had LELY on the job at their dairy farm since 2009.  Then, Margie goes on to visit LELY world headquarters in Rotterdam, Netherlands.  She will get a tour of the factory and the pasture farm that LELY owns.  Roger is jealous of that part of Margie’s trip!  He would love to see where the robots are made, talk to engineers, and give them all a great big high five!

Scott is working for our local LELY dealer, Inbody Inc.  So, he has requested vacation time while we would be in Pella and Margie is in Europe.  Robots can only do the milking, it still takes lots of TLC to feed and care for the cows each day.  Eric Inbody, who may go to Pella with us, has granted him the time off…with the condition that Scott will be on call for the six robots in our area, should they need any servicing.

So, I will make hotel reservations tomorrow and plan a roadtrip next month to the American Heartland… I haven’t been to Iowa since my honeymoon twenty-five years ago.  Wonder if they’ll be farming at the end of March, or will winter still be hanging on?

Margie is thrilled with LELY.  She was happy when Eric Inbody brought the LELY flag and smiles frequently when she sees in blowing in the wind.  This photo is from June, 2011.  We were still finishing up the building project, that explains the lumber in the picture.  For a twenty-one year old dairy farmer, the 21st century looks mighty promising with technology like automated milking systems, automatic feed equipment, and computer terminals that let you know your cows in lots of new graphic ways.

 

 

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Putting it into Perspective

February 19, 2012

On the last day of topping sugar beets last fall, the ”1085″ ran out of engine oil so we have a huge repair bill to get it fixed.  Then, this past week the ”1080″ we use to pull the TMR feed wagon burned a clutch.  Another bill to contemplate.  We called Heindl Implement, our local Massey Ferguson dealer, and we know it’s going to cost about $1200 to get the mixer wagon tractor fixed and more for the beet topper tractor.  Then, the phone rang.  Last November we had looked at a used MF 1085 in Vassar.  The owner wondered if we were still interested in it at this time.  We offered $4500 for it, and he said we could have it for that price.  So, the tractor above is not the exact tractor we drove home last Friday, but it is similar…  Seems like a good deal, we pay between $4000 and $10000 for most of the tractors we purchase.  They were built in the late 1970s and early 80′s, but with TLC from Roger and Scott, both good wrencher guys, they run well…

       Last week Margie was also shopping for a car.  I didn’t know this until she tracked down the Mustang above!  It’s in our yard now, she bought it for a little less than twice what we paid for the tractor… It is a 2005, and its got a little wear and tear, but looks pretty sharp overall.  Problem is (to me), of course, cars lose value every day.  Tractors hold their own, and I don’t expect the car to be here 30 years from now, at least not as anyone’s daily ride to anywhere.  I am feeling more angst than Margie. (Could be the fact I had to co-sign the loan as she has no credit history!  …She works hard, I think she is good for the payments.)

Well, I guess Margie thought she would put it all into perspective for me.  She came up with this logic today after spending time outside feeding calves.  The utility cart we bought last fall for the corn maze and to straw pens with cost $2000.  She said it was half the cost of the tractor and her Mustang is only twice the cost of the tractor.  She rounds up and down generously, and Yeah, I am trying to understand the logic, too… But, it does make me reflect upon how many times we have contemplated a $5000 purchase and how many times we have impulsively spent the same amount over the years.  Used to be $2500 was our magic amount, but now days it seems lots of farm purchases are in the $5-10K range.

Johann LELY cost us $200000, that’s 45 times more than the tractor!  Both pieces of equipment, as well as the utility cart and car work everyday on the farm or to get us to work and back.  WOW, it’s a pile of money we are spending these days!  Well, borrowing really, to be perfectly truthful with myself.  The milk check is about $18000 a month, so we are going to have to work smart.  Paying down debt is my goal this year.

This morning in Bible Study, leader Chuck Andersen challenged us to examine our habits in the next six weeks as we begin the Lenten season with Ash Wednesday, then change our bad behaviors as we put our daily actions into an eternal perspective.  In six weeks will I celebrate  Easter joy, will I have a closer relationship with Jesus, will I be a better example of His Love and teachings to people I meet?  What is each minute of my life worth, do I invest my time wisely and deliberately?  Our family enjoys this Bible Study: it’s the first time we are doing it as a family. It’s a great way to enhance messages we hear while sitting in the pew on Sunday morning.  Chuck wants meto put my life choices into perspective,too, just like Margie encouraged me to do with our farm purchases lately.  What is eternal life worth?  Enough to die for, Jesus promises me.  Praise be to God! Amen.

 

 

 

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