**Please keep in mind while reading my blogs, I am a beginner in farming... my terminology may be quite "crude" and cause me to sound ignorant - I am a work in progress!**
Corn chopping went a lot smoother this year at our farm. No mud! Hooray! I definitely have to say I didn't miss pulling the 8560 out of the muddy ruts with my tractor or seeing a full chopper box tipping so far to one side bogged down in mud.
2011 has brought a lot of knowledge to us in both the cattle herd as well as the field crops. We decided to go with a different kind of seed corn and fertilizer this year. We were both worried about chemicals in Round Up ready seed corn and the fertilizer we normally use and the effect it had on our herd health. I have never seen such HORRIBLE STANDS OF CORN! Spindly and meager rows, pale stalks, it was awful! Terry had decided to get some fertilizer from our Crop Production Service we'd normally use and only then did they start to come around. Too little, too late. We bought a cultivator and cultivated the corn fields. Terry now feels like it (the cultivator) is now good for nothing but scrap metal. The tractor kept falling off the ruts (which the cultivator had made) while he was chopping and kept pulling the chopper off course in turn flattening the stalks rather than chopping them.
The farm hands (My daughter, sis in law and myself... OK Terry too) got a good work out x3 with broken apron chains on one chopper box in particular. Talk about scrap metal!!! I vote for that chopper box to be scrapped! I would not let him put it back into the rotation while we finished up chopping, 3 strikes and it was out!
Bring on 2012!!!! :)
P.S. There is a corn chopping 2011 album on my page if you care to take a peek.
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