Spring Seeding 2016

I know amidst all the posts lately about fitness and the triathlon fever that seems to have taken over my blog, it's easy to forget that-- Oh, yeah... I live on a FARM! Today's post will take a closer look at our efforts to plant our crops this spring.

This year, we seeded yellow field peas, spring wheat, and barley. We also planted some hay mix. Typically, we have some winter wheat, which is planted in the fall, but this year, we didn't have any in the ground, so this meant we really had a lot of work ahead to get the entire farm planted in the spring.

As of today, we are *pretty much* done with seeding. We've actually had quite a bit of rain in the second half of April and early May, so the guys have worked hard to get a lot done in between rains. Because of the rain, some parts of some fields were too wet and muddy to seed into. We'll have to go back in later this spring at some point and fill in those pot-holes and gaps.

Another reason we technically aren't done with seeding is because we haven't seeded our organic farm ground yet. This year, we had some land that was coming into production for the first time in many years (coming out of CRP) and we decided we wanted to farm this ground organically. I can go into more detail on this in another post sometime. We are starting to work on seeding the organic ground today, and plan to have it done within about two days.

As I mentioned in my recent Weekly Review post, Jeff and Tom had a big, big push of long days about a week ago recently to finish the primary seeding effort before another cold snap and rain event. They took turns running the drill. We seed with a farm implement called an air drill, which is pulled by a big tractor. It looks kind of funny.

The seed is loaded into a big cart, along with any fertilizer or other supplements that will go into the ground at the same time. The drill uses air to move the seed and other product through hoses and down into the ground. It's nice to be able to plant seed and apply fertilizer at the same time, and thus reduces the number of trips a farmer must take through the field. It takes one person to drive the tractor, and typically another person to help shuttle seed from the grain bin in the yard out to the drill when it's time to fill. It's nice to have both people available when filling the cart with seed and fertilizer.

My role in the seeding operation was pretty limited. I did the best I could to help prepare evening meals and the occasional lunch. With my busy track schedule, this often meant that I cooked a bunch of meals ahead on the weekend, and then kept them in the fridge or freezer to be reheated throughout the week. Carol also helped out quite a bit by taking meals out from town or coming out to prepare a meal on an evening that I was gone. I also helped occasionally with shuttling vehicles from one field to another. I think I've mentioned this before, but I know that it would be much more convenient to our farming lifestyle if I wasn't a Track Coach. Everyone here makes accommodations to allow me to continue to do that, which is something that I greatly appreciate.

Seeding has been intermittently happening over the past several weeks-almost a month. Much of what we planted early on has started to break ground. I love how happy the little seedlings look as they sprout up! One thing that's nice about farming is that you have constant visual reminders of progress, and evidence of your hard work.


Our next big tasks of the farming season will be to continue to finish what's left of the seeding, get the organic ground planted, and then it will more or less be time for spraying season of our conventional farm ground. We also have to work and sort our cows into breeding groups and turn out the bulls, which we plan to do this week. Keep checking in to the blog for updates on how everything is going!