Monday, June 18, 2007

Beautiful corn! Above, sun going down, looking southwest toward the horse barns. Compare the picture below to the one from last week! I promise they are only 7 days apart.
I started the Crops rotation today. We had 20 acres left of timothy-clover hay to mow, merge, chop, and bag. We don’t bale any of the hay here; it all gets turned into haylage. Instead of being preserved by drying, like baled hay, haylage is preserved by fermentation. It either gets packed into a bunk like the one I helped cover last week, or into an Ag-Bag, which is a huge long tube of plastic, probably 10 feet in diameter, and as long as you need it to be. I learned to mow and merge today. The mower is called MoCo and the merger is called HayBuddy. I mean, they actually have these names painted on them. They are the actual names of the equipment. We mowed all 20 acres before lunch, and merged them all after lunch. Merging is when one windrow (row of mowed hay) is picked up and piled onto the next one. It’s done so the chopper doesn’t have to make as many trips around the field. To mow, first you do 6 circles around the perimeter or the field, working your way in. Then you just go back and forth. You have to swing the mower from one side of the tractor to the other each time you switch directions, but you do that with a lever inside the air-conditioned cab of the tractor while you’re listening to the radio. :o) The merger follows directly behind the tractor (an older model, with a clutch!) You just drive straight down the center of a windrow; the merger picks it up and places it on a conveyor belt, which shoots it onto the windrow to your left. I got to do merging all by myself, which including stopping to unclog it every so often. You have to keep a constant watch to make sure it doesn’t get clogged, because if you catch it early, you don’t have to get out of the tractor. If you watch straight ahead and don’t check the merger for one second too long, it will have a huge clog that requires you to turn everything off and get out of the tractor and pull armloads of hay off the conveyor belt. The best thing about these jobs is how quickly time passes. I’m sure having the radio helps out a lot with that. Anyway, it was a very productive day and I feel very accomplished.

Also, I forgot to say last week that I mastered driving the old Massey-Ferguson tractor, and that I got my first bloody nose ever! The Massey is at least 30 years old and has a standard transmission. I can drive it anywhere now, and use the manure spreader. I got the bloody nose when we were weighing cows. There is a gate attached to the scale that forms a chute the cattle walk through to the scale. Well, there was a cow who didn’t want to go on the scale and she swung her hips into the gate, and I was standing right on the other side of it and the top rail hit me right in the nose, really hard. First time for everything, right?

Here is some of the wildlife I have seen so far:

A turtle Chad brought into the break room at the dairy barn.
A cedar waxwing that apparently flew into a window and was collecting itself on the ledge below the window. I had never seen a bird like this before but I showed my roommate the picture and she knew immediately. She said when they migrate south they stop in Burlington, eat all the berries on their campus, and leave.