Happenings

Do you find tiling interesting?  How about bulk tanks?  Walls and cement?

That's what we talk about around here.  We find it all terribly exciting.

A friend asked me the other day, "What's tiling?"  I shouldn't assume that anyone knows what tiling is, because I learned myself just a few years ago when we moved here.  (Again, I was not paying attention when my parents were the farmer and I was the child.  What was I doing?  Listening to guitar solos, I think.)

Many fields with crops in the Midwest are tiled, which means they have big plastic pipes underground that drain the excess water out of the field. This way, the field doesn't get too wet and kill the crops. If you're selling land, it's worth more tiled than not tiled.

These amazing machines called tile plows cut into the ground, lay tile, and cover up the tile again.  They're fun to watch.  And fun to harvest since it makes our crops so much better.  (Or this year, possible at all.)

And bulk tanks!  The excitement! 

We have a new bulk tank that has double the capacity of the old tank.  We needed more room for the more milk from the more cows.

This morning this building had no front - this afternoon it did!  Can you feel the electricity in the air?

Kris had to get into the bulk tank the other day to fix something.  It has a little round opening at the top.  Kris said he could pull himself up, but then he was totally stuck because the opening was just as wide as his arms and shoulders.  So before he went in he enlisted the milk truck driver to help pull him out.  He was pretty scraped up. 

Last, walls and cement!  The barn continues to be more and more finished.  The faster, the better.  I was standing looking at it all - the barn, the lagoon, the builders - in the pouring rain today.

I can't speak for the soaking wet builders, but it didn't dampen my excitement.

 

 

Building up and tearing down

There's so much to see around here ... so much going on.  We get up early, we stay up late - summers are the best! 

It rained the past two days, thank goodness.  Kris said the corn's going to be short, but at least it'll have ears on it now.   

We're adding onto our cement pad so that we can store even more feed outside for the cattle.  Drought or no drought, we're going to have more cattle and that means they need more feed.  And we need a place to put it.  We're using the muddiest part of the pasture for the silage pad.  Here's the truck delivering one of its many truckloads of sand to put under the cement.  Note the fascinated kids, too.

We continue to modernize the facilities.  Current studies show that cattle do better when they have lots of ventilation.  So, we took steel off both sides of the barn in order to let air circulate better. 

The cattle have a lot to see, too.  We continue to have visitors and friends stop by for their annual visit.  Dump trucks, destruction, and animals.  It's practically Disney World.