Our Farm In Pictures: Baseball, John Deere, Flipped Pivot and a New Home

Well, after quite a bit of time off from the blog, here we go again.  Been a busy 2013 so far.  All of our crops are in the ground for this year and have all emerged.  We will be raising popcorn, white corn, yellow corn, alfalfa and prairie hay this year.

Our color scheme change. first planted corn field in the background

 

 

We welcomed a full time employee to our operation this year.  Mason is a graduate of Hastings College and had worked for us part time while attending college and playing college football.  He graduated in December and started work for us at the beginning of the year.  We are happy to have him helping us.

Hastings Brickyard Bombers 8u

I have spent a lot of time this year coaching a USSSA 8u Hastings Brickyard Bombers baseball team.  Coaching 8 year old kid pitch baseball has been a great experience.  To see where the kids are now compared to the beginning of the year and to see them start to have some success has been very gratifying. It has been a year of fundamentals and learning how to play the game the right way.  The main thing we want out of our team is for them to look at us at the end of the year and say they can’t wait to play next year.

We broke from our color scheme on the farm this year and bought a John Deere tractor which has brought me much joy(sarcasm) in the form of all the ribbing I have taken from friends and neighbors.

Weather has created some interesting situations this year also.  We have had a flipped pivot, some minor hail, gone from dry to wet and experienced relatively cool temperatures so far outside of one 100 degree day.

We have also decided after two years of subdivision living that it is time to be back on the farm and will start the construction of our new house in the next couple weeks.  The mailbox is up, plans are done and we are off and running with it.  I spend a lot of time talking about the disconnect from agriculture in our society and we felt like we were contributing to that with our children.  There are many benefits of subdivision living like neighbors, kids for our kids to play with, socialization, etc, but we also enjoy the peace, family, responsibility, work ethic, freedom and privacy living on the farm provides us.  So, back to the home place we go!  Wishing you a safe and prosperous spring and summer season.  The Weeks Family

 

The beginnings of our new house at the farm.

I

Everything ready to go for 2013 planting season

Flipped pivot

4 Wheelers, Hunting, #agnerd-ing and Some Snow – A Picture Show of The Last Few Weeks on the Farm

A little post harvest 4 wheelin' through the harvested soybean field on our home place

 

Deer Hunting

 

 

#agnerd-ing out by checking soil types while going through the field with a soilweb app on the iPad while sattellites steer the tractor for me.

 

Received a little snow last night just in time for Christmas!

 

Our Farm Week In Pictures 10-6-2011

We have been very busy around here.  Harvest is in full swing.  We will finish with soybeans by tomorrow and switch to corn.  The yields on the soybeans have been very good, but there are some larger varietal differences than I would like to see.  Sounds like a front moving in will bring rain by Friday evening and we will head to Lincoln Saturday to watch the Huskers play Ohio State.  We did get in a few days of goofing around before we got into harvest though.

Sailing with my Uncle Gary at Lake Hastings. The kids really enjoyed it and learned a lot about sailing.

Shooting pop cans with the bb gun a couple days before harvest started

My son and some of his buddies having a refreshment on the shop deck after an afternoon shooting pop cans with the bb gun. Shooting cans with 3 boys is a great chance to teach safety with firearms to prepare them for hunting season.

Area that the sprayer missed. What a mess.

Doing some welding on the flex head we use to harvest soybeans. It is an older head and requires quite a bit on maintenance and fixing during harvest

Farming, Kids, Golfing, Wine, Country Music, Leadership, Community, Networking, College Football and Sushi

One of the things I really came to the realization of this weekend at the Agchat Foundation Conference is that as hard as you try to be yourself in your online conversations, the real you doesn’t get across until you have those in person conversations not limited by 140 characters or the time we spend in our endeavours to promote agriculture. So, in light of that, this is a blog post to introduce you to me. This is not our farm, what happens on our farm, or an agvocating post! It is a post about all of those things in the title that are me and create the fire inside.  In short, how do all of the words in this post title fit together?

Many on here know and have experienced my intense passion for the occupation in which I work, but there is much more that lays the foundation for who I am. I view my interests as rather diverse for a country kid raised on the farm. I am equally comfortable in Wranglers as I am in a Business Suit. I enoy being covered in grease, sweat, and mud while working but enjoy an evening of golf with my wife or friends at the country club. There is nothing better than charburgers on the grill and fresh sweetcorn, although to me equally good is great sushi and a Sapporo.

I love Country Music, but a little Eminem now and then with some Nickleback suits me also. Taste testing different local beers is something I love to do, and I also enjoy the experience with wine. Leadership roles come naturally to me, but I can serve in structure of an organization effectively. I can carry a hard edge when working, but have three kids that soften me more with age. I love college football, parrticulary the Nebraska Cornhuskers and also have an artsy side that appreciates greatly the gifts

artists have as I don’t play an instument and the only drawing I can do is a picture of Snoopy!  I like to Hunt and Fish, but also enjoy a night on the town with my wife.  I have a strong feeling that all need to serve their commuity in some kind of volunteer capactiy as working for something besides money is satisfying to me. I used to love politics, now it infuriates me!  I believe strongly in the community in which I live and will continue to fight to preserve it for my kids. But most of all I just want to be a good Husband, Father, and Friend!So while this gives you a glimpse of the things that drive my passion and are parts of my life, the one thing I realized and heard over and over this weekend was how important your real life connections are and that you must find a balance.  I am very fortunate to have a very diverse group of friends and family in my life.

Future blog posts are going to try to reflect our lives as a whole on this farm and not just the agvocating that we do.  In order to effectively communicate our thoughts and ideas relating to agriculture, you must know who we are also.

Farm Week In Pictures 7/31/2011

This is a quick update of what we have going on right now.  We have been super busy with irrigation, spraying, mowing, etc.        

This is a view from the end of a corner tower pivot. It was stuck at the time and I was running it from the top as we got it out of the creek bed.

This is one of our wells powered by electricity. It runs on 480 volts. We pump around 1100 gallons per minute on this well. It is a gravity farm where we run the water in between the rows to the end of the field.

This is the water running down those rows of corn.

My son and his two buddies in our soybean field on our home place. For perspective they are all around 4 foot tall.

Our Farm Week in Pictures

This is a picture of my son out in one of our earliest planted fields last week.  The pivot irrigation system is in the background.

This corn is just beginning to canopy the row which will help conserve moisture and control weeds access to sunlight.

Cleaning up the planter to put it away for the season.  We try to store most high dollar equipment in the buildings to reduce wear on them.  Who needs a Ferrari when you have $130,000 planter you use one month a year, or a $$300,000 combine you use the same amount of time?  Production agriculture is a very capital intensive business.

Growing Your Own Food

Sometimes I think Farmers get a bad rap and are accused of being

against the whole locavore, grow your own food movement.  I personally do not think anything could be further from the truth.  Fact is that Farmers like to grow

things.  I know, ironic isn’t it, a farmer likes to get down and plant things in the dirt, nurture it, and then eat it.

We have had a garden as long as I can remember and will always continue to do so.  I remember as a kid helping plant the garden and eventually, it became my little farm as I grew up.   I have always loved having fresh vegetable to eat, I just wish there w

as a way to grow them in the winter when the wind chill is -20.  See, I am a whateverisavailablethatisgoodforyouavore.  I grow the garden in the summer and my wife sometimes goes to the local farmers market, then in the winter I rely on the southern and western US to grow the vegetables and fruits that we enjoy during that time of year.

So, since we are talking about gardening and growing your own food, what have you done this year to grow your own food?  In our garden this year we have 4 varieties of tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, eggplant, jalapeno peppers, bell peppers, green beans, yellow waxy beans, asparagus, broccoli, pickling cucumbers, burpless cucumbers, acorn squash, butternut squash, butttercup squash, zucchini, yellow zucchini, gourds, pumpkins, and some sweetcorn.  Let us know what you have growing and why you grow it.  What do you do in the months you don’t have fresh vegetables and fruit to pick?  By all means, during theses months that the farmers market are open, go for it and go local.  In the middle of winter, let’s be thankful we are blessed with a phenomenal agricultural and transpor

tation system that allows us to enjoy all of these things year round no matter where we are located.   Count our blessing that we are a country that can feed itself and feed itself well.

Our Farm in Pictures 6-3-2011

Here is a few photos showing the progress of our crops this week.  The one crop I did not include is the alfalfa which is ready for the first cutting to be put down.

The last picture is of our electrical controls at our bin site that were blown down in the wind a few nights ago.  We were lucky as the storm weakened by the time it hit us.  There were pivot irrigation systems and bins destroyed by the same storm to the north, south, and west of us.

This Time of Year.

Been a while since I actually wrote something, so I thought I would update everyone on what exactly we are doing now that our planting season is over.  This week we have been cleaning up the planting equipment and getting seed corn ready for returning.  This included breaking down the plastic boxes which carry our seed to be shipped back to our seed corn company.

It is also a time to get caught up on mowing, spraying, and general maintenance on the farmstead.  We will be spending some time also hauling last years crop to market from our bins.  Storing some of the crop has definitely paid off this year for our farm.

In the field at this time we are getting ready to side-dress fertilize the corn crop.  We wait until after emergence of the crop to fertilize it as you gain efficiency from your fertilizer and can put on around 10% less than if you would put the fertilizer on prior to planting.  We use GPS technology to precisely apply the amount needed to specific areas of the field based on soil samples that we pulled earlier this year.

We are also readying our row-crop cultivators to put up a “hill”.  This is for our fields that we irrigate with gravity irrigati

on.

In between all of this I have started tearing the deck off of our house that we moved into last December.  The supports underneath were not constructed properly and we have had to tear the whole deck off and start over.  Thank God for a tool called

a Sawzall.  I will continue to post pictures of the crop throughout the growing season and try to summarize them every week.  Hope everyone enjoys their summer vacations, our busy seasons are in full swing, although we did find the time to get away for a little Husker Baseball during one of the rain delays during planting as evidenced by My son and his friends in the picture!

Farm Week In Pictures

This is a picture of some of our soybeans pushing thru the soil.  The power of the plant is amazing!!!