Vet Feed Directive

Another week of pictures. I got a few hours off today. I love when I get time off and can get a lot done around our house. There's a lot that gets behind during the week. 

The first couple are of us waiting to preg check cows. It's expensive to keep and feed cattle. If they are not bred, we cull them from the herd. 

There are a lot of changes that occur in the agriculture industry. A group that I'm involved with and very passionate about is the Jackson Heights FFA Alumni, hosted an informational meeting about new rules regarding feeding medicated feed. Our Deputy Secretary of Agriculture, Chad Bontrager, a Holton native, talked about the opportunities and challenges faces agriculture. 

Then Dr. Tim Parks spoke about the new rules with the Vet Feed Directive. A rule that will make producers have a prescription to feed any antibiotics in the feed. 

The rest are photos with me and livestock around our farm. 

Still lots to do tonight. Hope you all are having a great day. Enjoy your week! 

Lots of Pictures!

Happy Sunday! Hope your weekend is going great! So lots of pictures to catch up on! 

Matt and I helped my parents walk cattle down the rode to their winter pastures. Kayla and I took the time to take a selfie!

Abilene, of course, had to be involved. This was a full UTV!

This is very dangerous! DO NOT DO THIS AT HOME! Matt, being super lazy was eating cheetos and driving with his feet. We were going slow following the cattle, but still!

Rough day! Bad picture, but Abilene is fast asleep!

Just like humans supplement their diet with vitamins and minerals, we supplement our cattle's diet with protein to maintain their body condition scores. 

This is our pet cow. I take selfies with her all the time. Had to get one with her baby too!

To winterize all our equipment (examples: sprayer, power washers, etc) we use windshield wiper fluid and run it through it. This is what my cart looked like in Walmart. Kind of hard to push it through the store. 

This is a video of how we grind the ear corn to feed to the calves. A process for sure!

I love when he actually smiles in pictures! This was a brief special moment when I got to ride with him. He brought me lunch and then he "drove". Except we have auto steer so he just sat there, but it was a great gesture!

It's that time of year for the cows to be on stalks, cleaning up everything the combine left. 

Lots of birthdays and anniversaries in our lives right now. This is my parents, with their 2 grandchildren, with the cake that Kristen made them for their 29th anniversary. Kayla, Garett, Kristen and Dad all had birthday in October and November. 

My meal I made with the special rose I got from Dillons. We were just walking out and a lady asked if I wanted a rose. I picked pink rose to remind me of my Grandma. She loved pink roses. It's the little things in life that make it worth the living. It's still alive, more than a week later. It's so special!

Anyway...I'm spending time with my niece and nephew and sister and mom so I'm going to get back to them! Hope you have an absolutely great week!

Bean Harvest 2015

Bean harvest is mostly done. There is the replants left that were too wet to cut when we were there. Just a few acres left! 

Lots to celebrate this week! We have are done with harvest, mostly anyway. My Forever and I have made it 2 years! Two years!!! 

So what did we do on our anniversary? Well, we picked beans of course. I knew how romantic our anniversary would be when I wanted to get married in the middle of harvest. I got to ride with him for all of two minutes. Enough to get our anniversary photo and move on. At least he's kind of smiling :) 

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I got to be a trucker with bean harvest! YEAH!! The elevator keeps everything moving so quickly that it's hard to get photos. I got a few, well one to be specific. This photo shows waiting to dump the grain. The first thing when getting to the elevator is to untarp the truck. Some trucks have automatic tarp unrollers! Can you believe it? Drivers can sit in the truck and unroll the tarp! I can remember growing up when we didn't even have roll over tarps, we had roll up tarps as Dad is fond of saying. They had to crawl up on top of the truck and pull it off and fold it up. The trucks we have now are roll over tarps. There's a bar at the back of the truck that you roll the tarp to the other side of the truck. All standing on the ground. 

After you get the tarp unrolled, they probe the trucks and you send your card to the office. The card has all the information they need on it. Who's grain it is, what the shares of the grain are, what they are to do with the grain (sell, store, on a contract, etc), who the trucker is and what commodity is on the truck. When they probe the truck the official, licensed grain inspector, inspects the grain. They weigh it and check for dockage and splits and all sorts of stuff. 

Next comes weighing the loaded truck. I always thought it was unfair that they got to probe the truck and pull some grain out before they weigh the truck. It's not a lot of grain they use, but still! Anyway, after weighing, the printer prints out the card with a bar code that tells you which dump to go to. 

That's where the photo comes in. Normally, there isn't a line to dump. For some reason something slowed down progress and there was a line which enabled me to get a picture! 

After dumping the grain there is another scale. With the card that you got the first time of weighing that has the bar code on it. You insert it, the machine reads the bar code and prints off your receipt. Then you head back to the field and hope the combine isn't waiting on the truck. Again, the goal is to never have the combine stopped! 

That's about all the time I have. Just a few more quick photos of dumping grain at night and a sunset. I love both of these. I love the lights on the combine and truck and grain cart, it's such a beautiful sight. And who can resist a Kansas sunset!

Have a great week! Enjoy everyday-you only get one chance to make each day the greatest that it can be! 

Blog Name Change

So no pictures this week :( Sorry! That means that my Forever is going to stop reading right now. We had a relative from Washington that came back to visit us and I didn't take ANY pictures!!! I'm terrible! I really enjoyed Steve being here and involving him in our day to day activities!

You may or may not have noticed...I tweaked the name of the blog. The last name was much too long. I wanted to keep the blessed part because I am absolutely blessed in my life. There is no huge or little, for that matter, health problems in Matt or I's life, we have our own house and land and awesome family surrounding us. I wanted to have a location in the name and wanted to involve agriculture, of course. Hence the name, Blessed Kansas Farmer. I would love to hear any comments about it.

Bean harvest will probably start this weak. Busy times, of course. That's all I have for this week. I'll post next week! Have a great week!

Harvest 2015

HI! I'm so sorry it's been so long since I've got a blog written. It's been a busy busy month. I know no excuses, I should have made time. I've got lots of pictures to share with you! Harvest 2015 is well underway. We have all the corn done and are going to get a good start on beans tomorrow. We had a couple days of "rest" in between corn and beans. What that really means is that Matt was really busy getting everything ready and serviced for beans. 

This is actually before we started corn even. Not a great photo, but I was impressed that he let me take one! 

Dumping onto the truck. 

Chasing the sunset and combine. 

Love how beautiful it is right after dark with the lights on on the equipment. Such a beautiful sight. 

Dumping onto the grain cart which is dumping onto the truck. 

A VERY rare time I got to ride in the combine with my Forever. VERY rare! I told him I was going to take it so apparently he decided he was going to do serious face instead of smiling with me.

The grain cart is normally where I spend most of harvest. The job of the grain cart driver is to make sure the combine keeps picking. We can fit two combine bins onto the grain cart. It takes 3 to fill the truck. We unload on the move quite a bit so that the combine can continue picking. We don't like having down time and we don't get done with the combine stopped. 

Changing topics a little bit to our four legged kid. I was home briefly one morning throwing in a load of laundry and doing dishes when I heard Abilene start barking and going crazy. I went outside to see what was wrong and she had a raccoon "treed" right on our deck! That means like right outside the back door! I made her come inside so she didn't get hurt and called Matt. While this was happening the raccoon made its way around our deck to our front door and sat right outside staring at us while Abilene was barking like crazy at it from the inside. My dear Forever finally got home and I let Abilene out to see where it went. She put her nose down and took off on a exact straight line to the raccoon's home. Maybe she would be a good tracking dog. We found out she is scared of guns though.

So proud of herself.

We boostered our weaned calves with another shot so that they don't get sick. This calf apparently decided he really wanted to get to the wheat mids in the middle of the truck bed. He just crawled right on up. 

Changing gears again...conservation is important to most farmers. We've been taking out some trees to clear up ground for grass to grow. This particular pasture was getting very brushy. It takes a lot of water out of the ground for those trees to grow and also takes ground where grass could be growing. We spent a couple days and will spend some more clearing brush and cutting posts out of the trees that we take down. My job was to run the skid loader and make sure Henry was able to get to the trees to cut the posts out. We will use the posts to build new fence. 

Matt ran the hoe to make sure that the trees wouldn't fall on the guy cutting the trees down. 

Matt wanted to get the hoe serviced today. I got bored waiting for him so I started taking "felfies" with the cows. A little wheat mids for persuasion. They all gathered around the pickup and were watching what was going on. 

Again another rare opportunity. He hardly ever takes pictures with me. His hoe is in the background and the service pickup/feed truck for the cows. The cows enjoyed getting a special treat today.

Well, that's about all I've got for this week. I'm really hoping to be more regular with my blogs. Bean harvest pictures coming soon :) 

Remember 9-11

What an important week in our nation. A time to remember a day where our nation came together in a unity that we won't soon forget. Please take a moment today to remember those lives that were lost and the families that were torn apart. Remember to take a moment to tell those special people that you love them. 

What's been occurring on the farm? Well, more fall calving. We weaned calves this week. 

Harvest will be approaching very soon. When the corn ears turn down, it will be ready to harvest. 

Lots of things going on. Taking advantage of a little break to get the house ready for the busy season that is approaching. 

Sorry about the short blog. Harvest photos coming soon!

Silage Chopping/Fall Calving

This week we were busy preserving corn for the cattle for this winter. This is the first time I have really been involved in filling an upright silo. And I've decided that I don't like it. However, being involved in a diverse agricultural operation there are bound to be things that I don't like doing. The great thing is that it only took a couple of days and I was really only involved on one of those days. 

This is Matt with the chopper. We have a pull type chopper that chops three rows. 

The chopper (right behind the tractor) takes the corn and grinds it into little pieces. The yellow piece blows it into a wagon. When the wagon gets full, somebody has to unhook it and hook on an empty one. Then the full one is pulled to the silo. 

This was my job. Transporting the full wagons to the silo for Henry to unload.  

The wagons are unloaded and the blower blows the silage up to the top of the silage where it then floats to the top of the pile of silage in the silo. 

Fall calving has officially started. I check them twice a day and tag the new calves. 

We've had two sets of twins so far. This was the first cow that calved. I didn't even know she ha twins for about a week. Every time I checked her she had one with her. Then one morning when I was driving across another pasture, I saw her with two. Sure enough she had twins and is taking great care of them. 

Sometime they need a little help. Luckily this cow is very gentle and with the persuasion of a few wheat mids and a little patience, we got this calf eating right away. Abilene is my constant calving companion. She goes with me to the pastures night and morning.

That's about all that's going on on our farm. Pretty soon harvest will start and we'll get really busy. Hope all is well in your lives. 

Garden City Leadership KFB

This last weekend was incredibly eye opening for me! It was our fifth and final Leadership class in Kansas. All the way across the state to Garden City we went! Kristen, my mom and Dean were off Thursday morning. Stephanie, another class member, met me to ride out with me at four thirty in the morning! I didn't even know that hour happened twice in a day. My travels haven't ever taken me to Garden City so I didn't know what to expect.

Day 1 started with a tour of a dairy. They had 6500 milking cows and 6500 replacements on that particular farm. The next stop was a 40,000 head feedlot. Both had very similar parallels. High level of commitment to their employees and the care of their cattle was the top two items both places talked a lot about. The work out there is hard long hours. Many Americans won't do it. They have to resort to refugees and immigrants to do the work. While there are bad apples in every group, every place we went stressed that these folks wanted to be there and to have a job as good as they had. The dairy put an ad in the highest unemployment counties in the state of Kansas. They paid milage to come out for interviews. They said most applied to meet their application number to keep unemployment. They brought 5 out to interview, I think. They offered a couple of jobs, but those individuals decided that the work was not what they wanted. The problem isn't that there are not jobs out there, the problem is Americans simply won't take them. Obviously, we have an immigration reform policy. How are we going to solve these problems? That's something that I can't answer, but it needs an answer.

Another place we went and toured was Tyson. There were 16 different languages spoken in the plant! The diversity was incredible! Not my favorite thing to see, but I know that it's a part of the food chain. They are very highly focused on producing a high quality product and treating their employees with the highest standards.

I don't know what needs to happen with immigration reform, but there has to be something done! This trip was so fascinating and eye opening for a Northeast Kansas girl that has been around very little diversity. So thankful I applied for this class and have been given the opportunity to expand my horizons and meet the lovely ladies I'm in the class with. I encourage all of you to apply for this amazing opportunity by October 1st. Apply today at http://www.kfb.org/getinvolved/leadershipkfb/index. It is definitely worth the time commitment. 

More to come next week! 

Brome Seed

So this blog is much delayed. We were doing this around the end of June, beginning of July. Sorry I'm so far behind. I didn't realize this was such a speciality crop for just a few counties in northeast Kansas until our next installment of Leadership KFB and was talking to Beth (who is from Northwest Kansas) and she didn't have any idea what I was talking about. These videos are not high quality, but I tried. 

This is the actual cutting of the brome seed. It is the yellow/brownish part on top of the brome grass. It is very light and will easily blow away if there is a lot of wind. 

Since it is so light, it doesn't run our of the combine onto the truck like corn or soybeans does. It's very fluffy. Therefore, to get it out, someone has to push it out. That's what Matt is doing. He's using a piece of PVC pipe to get an opening in it so it will fall into the auger. This is very dangerous to do. There are augers at the bottom of the bin that could seriously injure or kill somebody if they fell in the bin. Extreme caution must be used. 

Another video of pushing the brome seed out. 

It comes out very slowly. 

Since it's so light and fluffy you waste a lot of truck or trailer space if you don't stomp it down and add more. It's just like grape stomping, just less fun. Brome seed will stick to your clothes and get wedged in your socks and not come out unless you pick it out one piece at a time.

Brome seed is a lot of manual work. It can be time consuming. However, since it's such a specialized crop with few places able to grow enough of it to make it worth cutting, it's normally worth our time to cut. After cutting the brome seed off, we put up the bottom part for hay. If buyers aren't buying brome seed in a certain year, the brome seed isn't cut. We mow it with the rest of the hay to be fed to cattle in the winter. 

Hopefully that gives you a little big of an idea about what brome seed is. After being harvested it is taken and cleaned and bagged. Then it is shipped all over the United States and world to be used for a variety of different things. It's definitely not my favorite thing to do on the farm, but it must be done. 

Have a great week!!!