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!!!