old iron

 picked up this planter for $500 from a dairy farmer who closed his place.  It's a john deere model 7000 planter.  Here I've got Garret and Sean working on it.  Seed is expensive, so what's going on is that we're putting a little bit of seed into the planter and making sure that it's being delivered at the spacing that we want, and that all of the parts work.

This isn't the latest-and-greatest planter; but it's mostly functional.  Pressure wash it to get the grime off of it for easier inspection.    Grease for all the parts that spin, chain inspection, replace a couple of belts for $12.50 each and order a couple of bin lids (I'm guessing they blew off at some point ) and then put a little bit of feed into it, and roll it back and forth on the concrete pad, watching the seeds fall.

Seed corn sells for $4/lb, and if this thing doesn't work correctly it'll waste hundreds of dollars, so this is actually a pretty important activity.  Worth spending half a day to get it right.  I notice that the corn meters (the part that actually grabs each seed) isn't as accurate as it could be.  So off to the manual I go for the cleaning and tuning instructions.

The bins are fiberglass, and I'm getting itchy working around them.  I make a note that I need to paint them to keep the fibres in place, and I'll probably need to replace one of them.  I keep a list of maintenance for each piece of equipment, and that's a rainy day activity.  I'll order the parts so that I can do the repair as time allows.  

This particular planter is set up for dry fertilizer (the two larger bins on the tractor side). I'll skip that for now; I've put lots of manure tea from the manure lagoon on the land I'm planting, and I think it'll be good for this planting.

This JD 7000 can plant beans (soybean and edible), corn, probably pumpkin (although it's not listed, the seeds are the right size and shape and a lot of people are still using it.  More modern variants of seeders can be amazingly large.

It's the same basic unit; each row gets its own planter, there's just quite a few more rows.  With that sort of setup you can plant an acre in a few minutes, and they do.  With a four-row planter you're probably talking about 30 minutes per acre at roughly 30,000 corn plants per acre population.

Green and growing

 On the pasture front, I'm pretty happy with the growth of the various plots of grass and alfalfa.  In the picture above I've got some clover that I'm holding to compare to the alfalfa, and you can see the grass nurse crop.  It's greening up well.  The grass/alfalfa mix is much greener than the 100% alfalfa, but I'm sure that it'll fill in over time.

 The forage is about 3" tall at this point; it'll grow quickly from here.

And the dogs love running in it and rolling in it.

...three steps back

I've been raising a batch of dairy heifers under the advice of the local dairymen i've talked to; starting with young calves, bottle feeding them and then weaning them onto grass.  Things went pretty well; twice daily feedings and the weaning process, and this batch of 10 progressing nicely.

Well, all but one.  A little jersey heifer never really did very well.   I made sure she was bedded well and had food and water, but she lost weight and didn't look good; I wormed her and considered calling a vet, but for the cost of the vet visit I could buy another heifer, and so economics won.  She finally stopped eating and died.  The other 9 were doing ok, so while it's a small setback, it's not really unexpected.  Sometimes you lose one despite your best efforts.

Of the other 9, one was a little bull calf, and was a little behind the others in development, but the other 8 were fine and in due time I moved them to a summer pasture.

The property is fully fenced, but it's got a ditch that runs across the eastern edge, and it's difficult for me to say that I lost 3 of the little heifers into that ditch, near as I can tell the day we moved them there.   They were young cows, and the grass was long.  I got a count of the cows we'd moved from the guy who transported them, and I went down every day and counted them...  only to figure out that the count was 3 short.

That took three days, and so I went down to see if I could find them, and sure enough, I found all three, dead in the ditch.

This is the hardest sort of loss; there's time, and money,  and I am just kicking myself that I didn't fence that ditch off or something.

So I started with 10, and then I was down to 7, and today my count came up short; another little heifer is gone.  She's only a couple of hundred pounds, and and she's not anywhere I can find.  I'm wondering if she got stolen.  She'd be the easiest cow to steal -- small, bottle-friendly, trusting -- but I have to say that the move to greener pastures this year has been a disaster.  Not the way I'd like it to have gone at all.