A restart of sorts

It's time to get back to letting my thoughts out on a more regular basis.  When this blog was created it was with the hopes of educating the greater public on the daily life of a farmers, to take about the issues they face, how policies of the general public effect farmers, and so forth.  The hard part about maintaining a blog is devoting time to it.  When you're as busy as a farmer, it is very easy to discard anything that isn't of the utmost importance which is what has happened with this blog over the last couple of years.  While I don't know how well I'll be able to keep up, I'm going to try to keep up better this year on the blog.

Recently I've been trying to work on new hobbies as a way to quiet my mind and to get it focused on something else, find an escape from day to day life.  

I've written poetry off and on over my life.  Here is one I did today and maybe as I write about life, poems will show themselves too.

No focus

Trapped in an endless mind,

Thousands of thoughts screaming.

Phone conversation in another room,

Footsteps down the hall.

Piles on the desk miles high,

Twisted blankets on an unmade bed.

Work must be done,

No project more important than the other.

Tree trimming

How does a person take a tree down if they don't want to pay for tree trimming service, but the trees are too close to the buildings to just let the whole tree come over.  This was an issue we faced a few years back when one of the elm trees died next to the house. The solution that my uncle came up with is quite ingenious.  He got a cross bow, added some weight to the arrow and tied the arrow to a string. We shoot the arrow over the branch we want to cut then use the string to pull up a small rope that can be used to pull over a larger rope.  We loop around that limb.  A little further closer to the trunk of the tree on the same limb we shoot another string over, then pull up the tail of the rope that was tied further out.  We tighten that rope up and have successfully tied off the limb.  We put another rope up that's farther out on the limb we're working on so we have something to pull on to break the branch. 

Next we modified an electric pole saw to go on the end of a 30 ft ladder with 10 ft extending pipe. We have a couple of ropes on it for stabilizing the saw. The pole saw is then put in to place.  From a safe distance we start the pole saw and cut through about 2/3 of the limb.  We move the pole saw out of the way then yank on the rope at the end of the limb.  The limb breaks off and then we slowly lower the limb down to the ground.  The process is repeated until we have all the limbs down.  We try to keep the limb size to under 600 lbs. 

All the work is done from the safety of the ground.  It is a slow go but it saves having to have the tree service come out for one tree.

Ingenuity

 Ingenuity, a must on a 2 man farm operation. When something breaks it must be fixed.  Buying new every time isn't necessarily the best or most cost effective.  When a machine is worn, special parts have to be made to compensate for the wear.  This was the case for my swather.  The auger in header which moves the hay from the 14' wide cut into an 8' windrow has worn fins.  The stripper bars which are supposed to be within 1/8" of the fins show a gap of 3/4".  Ultimately the auger needs to be replaced but that's a long process.  So for the short term fix I have decided to weld some metal to the stripper bars to close the gap back to 1/8". You could take it up to a manufacture hand have them make it, but it's quicker and cheaper to do yourself.  Sometimes my fixes don't work as I think the should, sometimes they work better than I ever expected. 

Early Education

Tonight I was playing around on my computer.  I came a cross a modified program I used as a child in the late 80's.  The original program was called Logo Writer.  It's a simplified interface for creating a graphical computer program.  On the main screen it had a turtle in the upper portion and down below a text box where you could type commands in and make the turtle move.  Commands like "PU", "PD" pen up, pen down, "FD" forward, "BK" backward, "RT" right turn, "LT" left turn you tell the turtle FD 10 and the turtle moves 10 units forward. RT 90 makes the turtle do a 90 degree turn. You could draw any shape with it and then name that shape and move the whole shape.  In 5th grade I made mock clouds, told the clouds how to move then shot myself on video giving a weather report.  This exercise was my first venture into computer programming where I actually designed the program.  Before this time I had done some programming in Basic on our SVI computer using pre-designed programs which I would type in and then run them.  Computers weren't so common back then but now they are common place.  Almost everyone I know has a computer of some kind.