Cropping 2014

When Ryan broke his ankle skiing we then had plenty of spare time to get ready for our cropping season.  He needed surgery to remove some floating bone and about a 6 week recovery period.  He missed out on skiing at the NSW State Titles and the Nationals in Darwin.  

We got started cropping early with Ryan able to man the seeding rig.  We had a smooth 6 weeks cropping which was great!  There was some good rain before, during and after so we are very optimistic for a good year!

Harvest 2013!

Harvest 2013 was a mixed bag - after a very significant frost event in late October the yields on both the canola and wheat were down from previous years.  The low lying paddocks were badly affected but the more hilly paddocks were fine.

Due to Ryan being away waterski training it was my job to drive the header for a large part of harvest.  We employed a driver for the semi and another bloke to man the tractor and chaser bin.  Daniel helped out for a week or so as well.  It all went smoothly with only a few minor breakdowns.

Anyway, it's all done and dusted for another year and we'll do it all again next year!!

Wheat

Unloading on the run

Canola windrows

A Farm Wedding

In October we had a very special event here on the farm!  Good friends of ours Paul and Crystal held their wedding and marquee reception on the hill in a paddock behind our house!

It was the most spectacular wedding I've ever been to, and I'm not biased at all!!

It was lots of work for Paul and Crystal but so much fun!  We were very happy to see them enjoy their special day so much.

Another 5 Weeks Go By...................

............... and not a single blog posting!!!  How slack am I?!

We had a shocking end to 2012, so it's taken a while to get back into the swing of things!! 

First off Farmer Phil's 74 year old dad broke his leg in 4 places stepping down off a tractor!  Then we lost our beautiful Jack to a snake bite.  Someone backed into our new ute while I was doing the Christmas grocery shopping and broke the tail light.  Then Christmas Eve there was a short, sharp storm hit our house with howling winds and rain resulting in uprooted hedge plants, a smashed bird house, rainwater coming underneath the roof tiles and into the house via light fittings, a blown in garage roller door, and a 40kg pool cover reel picked up and tossed like it weighed nothing.  I know it's nothing compared to the devastation that has hit the whole of Australia in the last month with bushfires and now flooding, but we thought we must have "kicked a Chinaman" or something for so many things to go wrong in the space of 7 days!!

Anyway, here is what's been happening since my last post!

Christmas Day was at our house with Farmer Phil's family.  My brother in law's 5 children had a great time utilising the pool for the afternoon!

Christmas lunch was outside on the deck

New Year's Eve Farmer Phil and I went to the most beautiful beach wedding ever!!  It was at Moonta Bay in SA.  Congratulations Murray and Nicki!!

Farmer Phil and I in our NYE Glam - minus stilettos on the beach!!

We then had our annual 2 week waterskiing/camping holiday at Renmark, SA where not a single photo was taken but a great time was had by all!  First week the weather was all over 40 degrees with a top of 46!!

Last April I booked tickets for Farmer Phil and I to see Cirque Du Soleil's OVO in Melbourne during January.  Everytime we go to Melbourne and walk past The Hotel Windsor I always comment how I'd love to stay there sometime.  Well we did this time!  It was only for 1 night but sooooo worth it!

The dining room where breakfast was served.

A Superior Room very similar to the one we stayed in complete with huge dressing room, marble bathroom and old world class!! 

The 3 clowns of OVO - "Ladybug, the Foreigner and Master Flipo"!

"Ant" acrobats were absolutely perfect in their synchronisation of kiwifruit!

The "Firefly" diabolo juggler was amazing!

"Spider" Contortionists were unbelievable!

Love duet of the "Butterflies" rope adagio!

The "Flea" acrobatic troupe were amazing!

And now we're back to the reality of getting Emma organised and back to school this week for her very last year of school ever!!!!!  Year 12 and the Higher School Certificate here we come!

Emma has also been busy rehearsing since early November for a show she is performing in during February/March in Wagga Wagga.  It's called "Life in the Spotlight" and is an all singing, all dancing show featuring songs from Glee, Hairspray, The Jersey Boys, Rock of Ages etc with all proceeds going to Telstra Childflight.  She started out having 3 Solo's as well as being the Lead Backing Vocalist, but now she has been given 3 more Solo's to do.  So she's been a very busy girl trying to learn all the songs as well as the choreography and staging!

The upside for the start of 2013 is that we've had no Summer rain here so that means no spraying of weeds over the 5,000ac for Farmer Phil.  Ryan has been busy with his tournament waterskiing events and doing lots of training.  Farmer Phil is happy to have some spare time to go along and help out at the tournaments and do lots of boat driving!

It's been back to our little shop "Kindrawares" for me over the past 2 weeks.  After a very busy Christmas period, it's very quiet at the moment with lots of people still away on holidays.  Hopefully once the kids are all settled back into school routine, then the shop will be buzzing again!!



Harvest 2012 - This Is How We Do It.......

Harvest 2012

It's our second last day of harvest 2012 so I thought I should at least do one post on the subject!!

We bought a new header this year and there's a fight on each day between Farmer Phil, Daniel and Ryan about who gets to drive it for the day!!  I've had minimal input with this year's harvest due to my involvement with the new shop, but I have still managed a few hours of header driving!

Harvest has unexpectedly been quite good after receiving absolutely no rain for the whole month of September when the crops are really singing out for a good drink!!

The canola yielded well and had high oil content, and the wheat has yielded well also so no complaints about this year's harvest!

Picking up wheat on the run!

The header is fully controlled by GPS so you only have to steer at the end of each run or around an obstacle in the paddock!

Harvesting at 10km per hour

45ft Draper front gets across the paddocks very quick!

Graduation!

As part of Ryan's traineeship with us on the farm he had to complete a Certificate III in Agriculture at TAFE during the year.  He completed it and graduated this week.  He is thinking of going back next year to get a Certificate IV and also participate in a welding course.  There were a few farm boys in the course and he became firm friends with some of them so I think it really helped him more socially than educationally!!  It can be lonely for a teenager on the farm when there's only his boring parents to talk to!!!

Farmer Style

The Peterson Bros from Kansas have been at it again - very clever again boys!!!

An Overnight Trip with the Girls

During the week I went on an overnight trip with my Ag n Chat group.  As usual it was another fantastic learning experience for our group.  There will be a more detailed post about the trip over on our blog soon!

Our first stop was to visit Origin's Cullerin Range Wind Farm near Gunning.  After visiting Origin's Gas Fired Power Station at Uranquinty earlier in the year, a seed was planted that we all wanted to know more about wind energy.  The Wind Farm is an amazing sight to see and learn about how they work.  The turbines are 80m tall and the blades are 45m long!  The 15 turbines on the farm will permanently power 15,000 homes.

We had a lovely overnight stop at Schonegg Country Guesthouse in Murrumbateman.  I can highly recommend this accommodation - it has a wonderful quiet, country atmosphere and Evelyn our host was just amazing.  It would be a perfect base for a trip to Canberra because it's only about 30mins drive from the capital and well away from the hustle and bustle of the city.

Our next stop was to visit French Black Truffles of Canberra.  No one in our group had ever experienced truffles before - never smelt or eaten them.  Sherry, the owner of the truffle farm was a wealth of knowledge and an extremely passionate woman.  The weather was horrendous so we couldn't go out in the paddock with Sherry and Snuffle her truffle hunting dog and experience a hunt, but we listened to Sherry's experiences with awe for over 3 hours!!  We all had a smell of a fresh truffle (the 3 month truffle harvest had just finished) and came up with some amazing similarities of what they smelt like - molasses, red wine, earth, smoked oysters?!!  They were definitely very different smelling, but quite pleasant, so we all can't wait to actually experience eating some one day.

Workshop Floor

The concreters came on Wednesday to pour the floor of the new workshop.  It was a very big job for the four of them!  They started at 7am, and were still here at 8pm!  Farmer Phil and Ryan will be welding up the framework, erecting it and then sheeting the roof and walls so it may be a little while before it's finished!  Farmer Phil is very excited to be getting his very own "man-cave"!

Emptying Silo Bags of Wheat

Farmer Phil and Ryan are still emptying the bags of wheat from harvest last year.  We have a local grain merchant who is exporting it straight to China on ships so it's just a matter of getting the grain out of the bags, and putting it into our two silos at home where we can sift any wet grain or chunks that have formed in the last 7/8 months, and then auger it into the truck and drive it 7km to the bulk handler.

Sound simple?!  Not really!!  Just ask Farmer Phil how much hassle this type of temporary grain storage has been when we had over 9 inches of rain in one week fall onto bags which were damaged by foxes and kangaroos putting holes in them!  The rain leaked in and made a mess with some of the bags and it's been a bit of an ordeal to get the good grain out.  We had to use an industrial vacuum cleaner to separate and suck out the good grain in a couple of the bags.

 As the tractor reverses the machine, the bag is cut by a heated wire attached to the auger.  There is a sweep auger that goes inside the bag which then augers the grain up into the chase bin along side.

 As the tractor pushes the machine backwards it rolls up the emptied bag onto a spindle which is released when the whole bag is emptied.  The bag is then cut up into manageable pieces and thrown away.

The grain bags are an easy solution at harvest time when you've got grain coming out of your ears and the trucks can't keep up with carting it away, so we set up the bagging machine to keep the grain away from the headers so they can keep working.  Normally we like to have all the bags empty by March, but this year it was a lot harder to sell the wheat, and then we had an unheard of amount of rain fall in one week so you couldn't even drive near the bags in the ute without getting bogged!  Then cropping was in full swing, so the bags were put into the "too hard" basket for a while.

Not sure what the solution is other than spending more money to put up extra silos at home to cart to when the bulk handlers are either full or closed overnight.  Just another hurdle to jump over as a grain producer!