Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Farming Pics

Old Trapper, I'm not really sure actually on alfalfa. It is hard to find though. First cutting was thin with all the weavil trouble and second cutting was sold early in the year. I would guess +$100-120/ton delivered local if you could even find any for sale. I know my dad was looking for some back in July and his usual grower said it was a tight supply.


Lots of CPR hay headed south, $60-80/ton plus freight on that I guess.

I got $100 for my regular Prairie and other grass hay this year. I just got done with a dab of CRP. I'm gonna charge the same old boy about half that. Maybe $60 or maybe $50. I ain't decided yet but it's not much of a decision.

Thanks for the pics Sam. I always enjoy seeing how other folks do it.

Nice pics Sam!
In the central part of NY here we are just getting at our third cutting of Alfalfa.
First cutting was fair.
Second with the combination of drought and potato leaf hoppers was a exercise in running over the fields with all the equipment to trim them off and a new growth started,
We then sprayed for the leaf hoppers and put a couple hundred pounds to the acre of $600- a ton fertilzer.
All that would of amounted to naught were it not for the rain and third is heavy.
Corn is shorter than normal but the rain came in time to make for good ears.
You don't have to drive far to see some pretty poor corn though.
Don't envy you the carrier bearing repair.
Chit like that happens.
Right in the spring push our main horse had a snap ring come loose in the final drive.
Not good.


Best to you on the harvest.

Man, that bearing job sure doesn't look like a walk in the park. Can't be cheap either. It's kind of funny when you hear 'slickers griping about the price of food. They think all you guys do is sit around for the summer waiting for the harvest checks to roll in. Everyone ought to have to spend a season down on the farm doing what you guys do to make a living. I think they'd have a different view on things.

On an unrelated note, I drove by one of the farms I hunt 'yotes on yesterday. They had cut the field on Sunday, and hadn't bailed it yet. Sure enough, there was a 'yote out there in broad daylight oblivious to all the cars going by, just having a good old time mousing. I stopped for a few minutes and saw him get one. It's a good time of year to be a 'yote I guess.

[quote=gophergunner]Man, that bearing job sure doesn't look like a walk in the park. Can't be cheap either. [/quote)

Yeah, the parts bill approached $10,000.
A good part of the day on the phone got me the biggies used $2500-. My time isn't worth anything so I ended getting it fixed for under $3000- .
The real job was getting it from the field to the shop as that tire was set up in place. I almost ended up doing the repair in the field.
Thank the Lord for my neighbor the excavator. Even so it was touch and go getting it on the trailer and off in the shop. Glad I went with a 16' ceiling.

That looks like a mess. Hopefully you got her back in the field asap.

Lately we've been working on second cutting and reseeding a few fields.

Just a few cellphone haying pics.

Ethan, they opened up alot of CRP around here, of course you can't cut everything but just part of a field. It's a good thing too, some of those fields need to be cut, lots of old growth and they will come back nice next spring.


FVA, now that is a job! Damn, good luck with it, way too many parts there for me to remember how to put back together.

We basically just clipped our entire first cutting also. Weavils chewed the hell out of it. Some guys sprayed but a guy really hates to do that, kill all the good bugs and I'm not even sure about how the birds would do with the spray. Maybe it doesn't hurt them but I don't know.


GG, the yotes and birds(hawks/gulls) think the toolbar or swather is a dinner bell!
This Spring I was seeding some hay barley and came upon a killdeer and her little chicks. Damn gulls were following me around so I turned real quick before they saw the chicks. Didn't seed that part of the field, my dad wondered what the hell when a bare patch showed up later on but at least the gulls didn't kill the chicks.



Ben, cool pics, how do you like that baler?
Netwrap sure is alot faster when making a bale. I've heard it's like having 1.5 balers in the field compared to 1 twine baler.

Can't post pics but we are done with about 3000 acres and only 800 to go. Wheat went about 40 or so and canola about 30 bushels per acre. DAMN good crop for no rain. Being to wet last year paid off this year. Crossing fingers because we haven't had a breakdown with a combine this year yet. ED K

Sam- We just got that baler this year. Its pretty badass, it eats hay almost as fast as you can throw it at it. Its got a wide head, bale kicker, and a computer with automatic netwrap. When your bale gets to size, the computer beeps, you push in the clutch, the baler wraps the bale (maybe 30 sec.) you open the door and your on the way. You can start full bore from where you left off. With our old string baler it was pretty tough to get over 125 bales in a day. We have done 200 a few times with this machine, if we dont run into any problems.

FVA- Parts can be crazy. last week my brother went over a diversion ditch at a wierd angle with the discbine, the front plastic PTO cover expanded to far, did not slide back over itself and got scrunched up. We were like no biggie it'll cost 30 bucks. We my dad got off the phone with a New Holland dealer and the quote was $460. That was just for the plastic, no idea how much it would cost if the actual shaft went.

Pard owns about 400ac and hobby farms about 100 of it:









No Semis or grain trucks. It's 200bu gravity boxes and pickups.

Thanks SamO. The weevils got half of my alfalfa. I got half a crop worth twice as much. Wheat around here looked about like yours.

The Juneberries were great though. ;-{>8

Great pics all, and this should be required reading & viewing for the folks that don't where there food comes from or how it is handled.

Lots of my friends farm......

Here's some from the Palouse.






last one is cutting dry peas the other day with lots of smoke in the air from the fires around.

This is the same field as the 3 tractors are plowing in, looking the other way.

Interesting photos - thanks Sam!

Many thanks to all who posted the pictures. It is always great to see where our food comes from and the people who produce it. More threads like this would be welcomed by me and I'm sure by others.

This photo especially was great as it brought back memories of combining wheat with my John Deere 95 square-back combine 35 years ago in Minnesota.

Interesting photos worked one harvest driving an old KW with a spud bed hauling potatoes from the potato digger to the storage sheds down at SimTag, a 65 thousand acre farm near Irrigon, OR.

Over the years drove Semi out of the Columbia Basin in Eastern Washington all over WA, OR, ID and MT with a trip or two as far East as MN. I think at one time or another I've had either Semis or Truck and Trailers on cow trails no self respecting cow would be found dead on.

The weevils were really hard on our alfalfa too. Good thing we could get CRP to hay, we ended up putting up 1700 round bales of the stuff. With all of the CRP coming out these days I wonder about wildlife cover for the future. We're going start farming about 13 quarters of CRP that has been in the program for 20+ years and they wouldn't let it back in.

The last year I got to go north with a combine crew was 1958, operating a model 55 John Deere. No cab, no power steering, and no radio. Lots of changes have been made since then. And I sure would like to try running one of these modern day JDs.

Maaan, that baby was self propelled.