Back in Turtle Lake - Tour Time

¿Qué tal? I finally got a new camera, one that shoots clear movies.

Hope to start working on the farm projects soon. (Y continuo trabajando en mi español)

Guess Who's Coming to Dinner

Took pics of these two Spanish Black poults six months ago -

They grew up fast and are in the freezer now.

I have pics/movies elsewhere on the site of them as adults. Beautiful, interesting animals.

Go to the wikipedia page on Black Turkeys for more info.

Combining Corn - 5 Short Videos

My video camera sucks.

thanks for watching.

Bird Slaughter

My friend Andy's two sons came up from Chicago this past weekend to help on the farm. My parents (dad is riding the tractor in the blog header) came too. Among other things we put about half the birds in the freezer. They'll come back in a week or two to help me finish them off.

I grilled, whole, one of the guinea fowl tonight for dinner. Tasty.

bonus (graphic) movie -

There's Something Wrong With This Picture

From the Wisconsin Farmer's Union.  (click on image for a clearer view.)

The economics are no better for grain farmers.  At the moment the organic prices/profits are slightly better, but large Turkish/Ukrainian producers with questionable organic standards are flooding the US market, driving down those prices too.

How a Combine Works

It's an amazing machine. I'm cutting and pasting this diagram from Wikipedia.  Click on the image to make it bigger/clearer. 

To give you an idea of how efficient these things are, our combine - a 35 year old John Deere 6620 - can produce (that is take in rough dry stalks and give you clean kernels of corn) about 15,000 lbs in an hour.  Try doing that by hand.

Switching Heads on the Combine

The head of a combine is what collects the grain and delivers it to the body of the combine.  You can harvest most grains, including soybeans, with what we call a "bean head".  Once beans are harvested, in order to harvest corn you need to install a "corn head".

Sounds simple enough.

I took several short videos during the day while we got this done. On a related note I heard from a Sony rep regarding my complaints about fuzzy/grainy videos taken with the new camera.  He said that it was due to the autofocusing feature and that if I wanted clear videos I'd need to use a tripod.  Hard to carry one of those in my pocket.