# Rough Year



## JMT (Aug 10, 2013)

Been a challenging year so far.

Pretty much rained from beginning of May to beginning of August.

Cows trampled pastures to rough muddy mess.

No hay put up till August.

80 acres of hay ground still not cut.

Cow died (feet uphill).

Bull died (feet uphill).

500lb weaned calf died and the rest of the calves were really crazy/flighty. Never did calm down.

Half the corn flooded out.

3/4 of the beans never got planted.
Other 1/4 of beans were planted last day to be eligible for tenants crop insurance (we did not purchase any crop insurance).

Made a lot of hay in August, but every time I turned my head there was a low spot or a seep with wet hay in the windrow.

Lost 4 new fall calves one week into calving.

Spent what seemed like an entire week trying to prepare 46 acres for new alfalfa field. Ground was rock solid because once it stopped raining it dried hard and fast. Gave up on 7 acres cause the weeds would not work in to my liking.

Then today... Got 39 acres worth of fertilizer, alfalfa seed,and orchard grass seed in a rented cart (with rate cut in half to double spred) to finally sow my new fields. Spred the first 15 acre field and when the dust settled enough to see through the window in the cart, IT WAS EMPTY. Walked back and last 1.5 to 2 acres had nothing on them.

Can't wait for tomorrow.

Thanks for letting me vent.


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## Vol (Jul 5, 2009)

Hang in there JMT.....most of us have had rough spots like this and it does make one reflect......but it could be much worse.....it could have been family health issues you had to deal with instead of farm issues.

This will pass.

Best Regards, Mike


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## snowball (Feb 7, 2015)

JMT I feel for ya.. had a few springs like that when we lived in southern Ia. always wet springs seemed like.. 2010 was the worst by far.. I told everybody " we were always 2 days from a drought and 2 hrs from a flood everyday there " Mikes right it will get better just keep your head up and do your best


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## Lostin55 (Sep 21, 2013)

I would have to say that you have had a pile of bad luck this year. It makes you wonder if it is all worth it. In the end, for me, the answer is always that it is.
Hopefully you will look back on this year at some point and laugh about it. Hard to imagine now, but it will happen. All that you can do is muddle through it.


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## PaMike (Dec 7, 2013)

ok, I gotta ask. Whats with the feet uphill on the cattle dying?


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## mlappin (Jun 25, 2009)

PaMike said:


> ok, I gotta ask. Whats with the feet uphill on the cattle dying?


Sometimes a cow will do something stupid like lie down with their feet uphill, then can't get up and panic, they'll fight it to death trying though. Doesn't happen often, but disheartening when it does. Not only lost a cow but they usually do it in the middle of the night so when you find em way too late to even think about butchering them.


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## mlappin (Jun 25, 2009)

And yah could be worse. My friend with the organic dairy had a hay fire a while back, lost both hoop buildings with supposedly $100,000 of organic hay em them. I've done the math and unless he jammed them in there with a battering ram I can't make it pencil out. He has receipts for what he bought and had trucked in, gonna be a hard row to hoe convincing the insurance company that the rest came off his pastures that the jersey's couldn't keep up with. It's still smoldering as well, fire dept even brought a bunch of foam in trying to smother it, no go so here it is with winter closing in and he can't even start on replacing those buildings yet. He's pretty limited on space as well so even though he wants to space em apart farther, there isn't room.

Then of course his neighbors are being dill holes and keep calling the board of health and the Indiana Department of Environmental Management about the smoke. All city people who either bought land and moved out into the country and built or bought existing houses.


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## slowzuki (Mar 8, 2011)

That plain out sucks. Its always concerned me balancing the handiness of a huge single barn/close buildings vs individual buildings spaced out.



mlappin said:


> And yah could be worse. My friend with the organic dairy had a hay fire a while back, lost both hoop buildings with supposedly $100,000 of organic hay em them. I've done the math and unless he jammed them in there with a battering ram I can't make it pencil out. He has receipts for what he bought and had trucked in, gonna be a hard row to hoe convincing the insurance company that the rest came off his pastures that the jersey's couldn't keep up with. It's still smoldering as well, fire dept even brought a bunch of foam in trying to smother it, no go so here it is with winter closing in and he can't even start on replacing those buildings yet. He's pretty limited on space as well so even though he wants to space em apart farther, there isn't room.
> 
> Then of course his neighbors are being dill holes and keep calling the board of health and the Indiana Department of Environmental Management about the smoke. All city people who either bought land and moved out into the country and built or bought existing houses.


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## mlappin (Jun 25, 2009)

Yup, almost wished I'd spaced mine farther apart. Have a drive between the north two and south two with enough room between the pairs that are next to one another to make two passes with a ZTR with a 60" deck.

Works the same with grain bins as well, thought long and hard about putting up one large bin, instead put up three smaller ones that equal the storage of a larger one, a lot more flexibility and if you ever have problems with storage you won't loose as much in a smaller one as one large one.


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## mlappin (Jun 25, 2009)

Pretty ugly here as well for beans, some are already cut, others are barely a foot tall and turning already, a few brave souls tried double cropping some beans, best bet for those would be to chop for forage.


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## panhandle9400 (Jan 17, 2010)

Is this the Boiler Room ? You are not alone with being a TOUGH year my friend, there are many in this country who had and are having a most shitty season . Here it was drought until last week of April, wheat was almost totally dead some has already blown out with blowing sand from winds , then it began to rain as my swathers were sitting at the the 1st circle of irrigated alfalfa which was almost ready to lay down. Then the rains came wheat shot 1 tiller out to make a head which btw was NOT worth a damn, just enough to have to harvest several thousand acres of shitty wheat barely payed to cut what did get cut was test weights down to 41 lb , back to haying ready to cut 1st cutting by may 1st stayed too muddy until june 17th got several circles layed down between weekly rains ., my 2nd cut didnt get put up , most layed in a windrow in knee high alfalfa , so it was cut again with new regrowth. Right now I am short about 600 to 700 ton of alfalfa, I forgot to mention now it wont rain so I can plant all that bare wheat ground, hope it dont get windy and I still have not got my 2nd cutting baled .Oh yeah prices in the tank around here too except if you have GOOD hay . I am ready to have winter come but not until milo and last cutting of alfalfa is baled/stacked , I doubt that is going to happen , something tells me it is going to be a heck of winter . Hell look at this way NEVER weaken and next season is going to be a bell ringer ......................Life is good but it can be tough at times . I have a friend in NW Missery he had been telling me all summer about how much he had been getting , you are right it has been tough . I told my wife this morning how I was sick of this s*** but I think she may hear that about this time of year every year ? Do you run any hired help ? I wont even get going on that good bye GOOD luck to all those who WORK so hard.


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## PaMike (Dec 7, 2013)

The reason I asked is I had some 300-400 lb calves that died over the years and I could swear it was cause they laid down wrong and couldn't get it. We have a lot of hills in the pastures...


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## mlappin (Jun 25, 2009)

PaMike said:


> The reason I asked is I had some 300-400 lb calves that died over the years and I could swear it was cause they laid down wrong and couldn't get it. We have a lot of hills in the pastures...


Physics, if they lie down with the feet up the hill, they have to shift their weight over their feet to stand up, steep enough hill and they can't do it.


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## deadmoose (Oct 30, 2011)

Without bad luck, at times we would have no luck at all.


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## hog987 (Apr 5, 2011)

My worse year farming was about 3 years ago. The year started off by loosing the pasture land for most of my cow calf pairs. I ended up finding something else to rent but was not enough for my pairs. So I had to reduce my main herd by 1/3. Than in the fall I bough a group of cattle to feed. I bought some poor ones and some nice looking ones. But guess what the nice ones got sick and passed it onto everything in the pen. Was spending all my spare time doctoring cattle. To make things even worse the magpies would peck at the sick animals feet so they couldn't get up. Than during the night the coyotes would start eating the animals alive. I ended up loosing over 30% of them. To make matter worse while this was going on my Grandma got sick and died. We were close. Now I was farming 2/3 of her land but after she died I lost farming some of this land and now only farm 1/3 of her land.

To total it up I had to reduce my cow herd by 1/3. The group of feeder calves I bought I lost 1/3 of them. Plus with loosing out on farming the land my farm size was reduced by 50%!

Now all those losses were very hard tom take. That was 3 years ago now. But you know what. This hard times was the best thing that happened to me. Forced me to think outside the box and do things different. Since then I have built my herd up to where it was before. Bought some land. Increased production on all the land that I do farm. Now Iam farming more land than ever.


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## Thorim (Jan 19, 2015)

Some times the platitudes nor words of good advice no matter how well intention-ed seem to help, that black cloud of doom seems get closer and closer till it smothers you and you want scream at those times it is faith that will bring us through the storm.


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## PaMike (Dec 7, 2013)

mlappin said:


> Physics, if they lie down with the feet up the hill, they have to shift their weight over their feet to stand up, steep enough hill and they can't do it.


I just would have thought somehow a young animal would be able to wiggle around somehow to get up...I mean they can get through holes in fences, over 4 ft gates, stuck in bale feeders you would think they would have a way to get their legs under them....


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## JMT (Aug 10, 2013)

Thanks for the comments and encouragement.

Heard from the fertilizer dealer and they said that the fertilizer cart was mistakenly left on high speed. They said they could probably take care of the fertilizer cost, but not the seed.

Not sure what I think or what would be most fair. I kinda feel like they should cover fertilizer and seed cost for what I have left to plant. Also not sure of the benefits or consequences of spreading 39 acres of fertilizer, seed, and pelletted lime on only about 12.5 acres. Just not really sure what would best and what I should deserve.


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## mlappin (Jun 25, 2009)

JMT said:


> Thanks for the comments and encouragement.
> 
> Heard from the fertilizer dealer and they said that the fertilizer cart was mistakenly left on high speed. They said they could probably take care of the fertilizer cost, but not the seed.
> 
> Not sure what I think or what would be most fair. I kinda feel like they should cover fertilizer and seed cost for what I have left to plant. Also not sure of the benefits or consequences of spreading 39 acres of fertilizer, seed, and pelletted lime on only about 12.5 acres. Just not really sure what would best and what I should deserve.


Well it could have been worse, had an early spring one year, had an uncle that was "helping" that spring, was far enough ahead of the game that we started to spread fertilizer on the hay ground as well as it was just greening up. Loaded him up with enough 6-15-40 with 2lbs of boron to the acre to cover a 37 acre field, he engaged the ground drive, adjusted the gate to where we told him and started to spread, covered the whole 37 acres, just "forgot" to engage the PTO though. How anybody could cover a 37 acre field and never look back once and see that the PTO shaft wasn't turning is beyond me. First cutting had a 2 foot wide streak every where he drove that was just gone, by the last cutting it was almost 5 foot wide streak of bare ground every where he drove.

Since then we keep the "help" away from the fertilizer spreaders and either father or I spread all the fertilizer.


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## OhioHay (Jun 4, 2008)

Had that same thing happen this year with fertilizer on hay. Dad turned on the pto, but the belt to the spinners jumped off. I came to take over after he had spread 33 acres. I couldn't believe my eyes. That was a costly day.


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## carcajou (Jan 28, 2011)

I was floating fertilizer on timothy a few years back with a terragator. Raining like hell and i never even considered the divider boxes would plug up. Enough come out the airmax booms to fool me. 225 acres later i figured it out. Not my best day for sure. 2 years later i could still see the strips in the fields. Shit happens, life goes on.


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## luke strawwalker (Jul 31, 2014)

That's one of the biggest mistakes I see nowdays... guys just don't watch what's going on with their machinery....

Guess I'm just old school... we always farmed with open station tractors and cotton pickers (til the last few years we farmed cotton when we did get A/C cab machines) and a combine that had a cab but no A/C so we ran with the door and windows open of course... I could always tell how the machine was running, or if anything mechanically was wrong or starting to go out, by how the machine sounded.

When we got the cabbed air conditioned machines, I soon learned it was a LOT harder to see/hear stuff to figure out how things were running, and harder to see the "trouble spots" (like looking down between the drums or behind the drums in front of the tires on a cotton picker to check for plugged doors, etc. Nice to be cool and clean, but being disconnected from being able to see and hear the machine as well, that's not so good...

I know when I was running the no-till drill for my BIL in Indiana planting beans, I'd stop every so often and jump down, have a quick stretch, and do a walk-around of the machine... dig up a couple random rows and check the seed spacing and depth, jump up and check the level of seed in the box (and level it as needed) and look for obstructions or other stuff... Once I found a piece of glass that had rode through the entire process of harvesting, storing, cleaning, treating, hauling, and transferring seed beans into the drill, and managed to go through the feedcup and hang up in the entrance of the seed tube... all the beans were spilling over the back of the feedcup funnel at the top of the seed tube and splattering all over the ground behind the press wheels... Fished that out with a pair of pliers, checked the tube, and was good to go. Had I not checked, could have covered an entire field with one row basically not getting planted...

He had some coulters that were wearing the pivot pins a little crooked, and the snap rings holding them in the swivel mounts on the toolbar were jacking out of their grooves and I found one coulter barely dangling one time... Pulled it back in, replaced the snap ring, and found it doing the same thing next time I checked... Put it back and wrapped a big wire flag around it to help keep it from "walking out" but still kept an eye on it on every turn to make sure it didn't fall off in the field... Had I not been watching, the thing would have fallen off in the middle of a big field and might not have found it until a combine ran over it or ran it up through the sickle into the header or something equally bad... Not good!

If I'm not running in the field, I'll typically dig behind the planter when he's planting... sure monitors and stuff help, but they don't tell you everything, and they're no better than how they're set up...

I noticed last year looking at the stand, that his old planter had "skipped then doubled" 25 times in a 1/4 mile long field on the right hand 6 rows... obviously a drive problem... probably a tight bearing or shaft or something that would hang for a split second, causing a "skip" then "pop forward" resulting in a double... knew it's not a meter problem because it was always on all six rows... Told him about it but don't know if he ever did anything about it... Heck he traded off the planter anyway and uses his SIL's 16 row now...

We had an old #18 John Deere 3 point planter that the first thing you did after dropping the 3 point for the next round, was to glance at each chain drive on every guage wheel to make sure the chain hadn't jumped off... the 3 point lower arm would sometimes hit the chain and jump it off, so that row wouldn't plant. (I found out later when I finally found the book on that old planter, that the idgit assembly mechanic at the dealership probably 30 years earlier had assembled the two inside rows on the wrong side-- swapping them left for right and vice versa put the chains on the other side away from the lift arms, solving the problem).

I don't care what machine your running, whether planter, disk, plow, harvester, combine, cotton picker, baler, rake, mower, etc... knowing how it SHOULD operate and how to adjust it properly and KEEPING WATCH over it to make sure it continues to operate properly is the difference between an OPERATOR and a "tractor driver"... you can train a chimp to drive a tractor, but getting a good OPERATOR, well, that's an entirely different ball of wax...

The electronic-everything modern stuff is nice, having a monitor or stuff that "tattletales" on the machine, autosteer, etc., all that stuff is nice icing on the cake and definitely makes things easier... but it STILL doesn't remove the need to get out of the friggin' cab once in awhile, check the machine over, and actually dig in the dirt and see what it's doing, and if it's being done RIGHT...

JMHO! OL JR


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## hillside hay (Feb 4, 2013)

Sorry to hear about your troubles. Not to sound flip but they will strengthen you. Hog's and several others' posts on this site attest to this. Regarding double checking the modern machinery it must be done. Especially rental machines. Always calibrate always. Like Luke says operators from the analog age tend to be more apt double check the digital stuff. Newer operators are too trusting of monitors and software.


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## Bgriffin856 (Nov 13, 2013)

It could be worse

It can be hard to believe at times but can't have good times without the bad.


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## atgreene (May 19, 2013)

Sorry for your misfortunes. I often feel like a black cloud has settled over myself and the homestead.

Joel Salatin is fond of saying "without destruction, there can be no construction". Some days I have to keep telling myself that.


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