Déjà vu

Well, she did it again….. she packed up her bags and drove off leaving me and the dogs needing to fend for ourselves. Sounds like the perfect beginning for a country song…. no, she would have taken the dogs and the truck. Wait, she did take the truck....... Those of you that really know us know that I cannot function without her. So here I am walking around the farm dazed and confused, one shoe on, my shirt on inside out and backwards looking for any scrap of food the Finken’s may have thrown in their garbage.

Truth be told, she must have been worried herself as she premade meals, labeled them put them in the freezer. The Finken’s must be worried as well as I have had more than one invite to meals in the past week. Funny thing is that our Facebook memory this week was a blog post titled “Bach’ing it in North Dakota”. I had a sense of déjà vu, it seems we have come full circle.

It is going to be a long two weeks that is for sure. Where did she go you ask? She traveled to Minnesota for a few days then flew to Pennsylvania to visit our daughter Jessica and her family. So here I am alone in North Dakota watching the landscape transition from autumn into what will all too soon become winter. Other than the few trees and the crops changing colors there is not a lot of fall color in the area. But the contrasts of what color there is against the browns of most the fields and greens others are absolutely beautiful. 

A shot of the farm with the drone. Chris and Holly are building a new house!

Harvest wrapped up this past week with the last of the beans off the field and for the first time ever they let me run the combine! Granted they put me on the flattest field so I could not screw anything up but they let me do it nonetheless.

I can now see why they don't let just anyone do this. Even when everything is all set up for you, not only do you have to keep an eye on several screens to make sure everything is going properly you also have to watch the wheel, sections and terrain in front of you for gopher mounds, rocks or anything else and can obstruct the conveyers.

One of several screens you have to monitor

And then there are the buttons and switches.....

The attention now turns to preparing the farm and fields for winter and next spring’s plantings. Work on the farm is never done. This week has been busy with mowing ditches, picking rocks, hauling grain to the elevator, cleaning grain bins and harrowing some fields.

Last post saw me hauling soy beans from the field to the grain bin at the farm, this week I hauled the same beans from the bin to the elevator. It seemed like a lot of work to just turn around and take the beans to the elevator a week later. Why not take them right away and avoid the additional labor and expense of putting them in the bins?

Putting it in......

Taking it out....

Price is the reason, in the last week the price of soy beans went up .36/bushel in one day so they contracted 8,000 bushel and a haul’in I went. This resulted in several thousand dollars in additional revenue. I say revenue instead of profits as there are so many expenses related to farming. Since then the price has come down somewhat so timing is crucial!

There becomes a point when the internal auger cannot pull any more beans off the bottom of the bin so you have to put in the drag auger.

Drag auger working its way around the bin

Once the bin was empty I had to clean it, a dirty but necessary job. Unless they are putting the same item in there, all remanents of the previos grain have to be cleaned out. To say it is a dusty and dirty job is an understatement. A facemask is definitely required. How do I know this? I only lasted 10 minutes without one. Eye protection would be helpful as well, my eyes were burning by the time I was done.

It's a dirty job but someone has to do it!

My funnest task of the week was rock picking. Each fall after harvest Farmer Bob will go out and flag all the larger rocks in the field. I then take the Bobcat and rockpicker out and dig them up. Only a small portion of the rock is epxpoaed so you never know how big the rock is going to be until you start digging.

How big will this one be?

It is kinda like a treasure hunt. Most of the rocks are no bigger than a medicine ball and weigh a couple hundred pounds. But once in a while you run into a monster weighing several thousand pounds. It can take 30-45 minutes to get one of these bigger ones out of the ground.

This big!

Once you get the bigger ones out you have to go get some dirt to fill in the hole it left.

By the end of some days you are too tired to really do anything else. Which is why I have not posted in over a week, it takes some thought and mental energy to write a post and being in a state of depression since Barb left I just have not had it in me. After the day is done, you just want to eat and go to bed, but it is a good tired, we love it up here!

I have only been out deer hunting twice, the first time I saw a decent 8 pointer and the second time….well, we shall see as I am writing this post from the deer blind. (Update: No deer, but I did finally get the post written!)

We are getting South Dakota updates from the Jordan’s several times a week. They closed on their property this past Tuesday so now they are officially our neighbors and have changed their residency to South Dakota! They say the excavtors are done at our building site and everything is ready for our return.

They have started doing some work on their property by fixing the fence on the front of their property.

A load of posts ready to go in

First post in!

Jim and Brenda rented a post auger and got to work on their fence

They moved to their property, ours in is the background

Deer and turkey sightings are still common and the prairie dogs are running rampant!