Friday, October 4, 2013

2013 Silage Harvest: Week 6 Recap

Another week of silage harvest is in the books, and a few more tons are in the pit. Wet, soft ground early in the week and equipment trouble on Wednesday limited us to only 12 hours of actual chopping time, but we were fairly efficient when we were running.

Whoops! #nobueno
I guess the big news of the week happened Wednesday afternoon. With 3/4 of a load on my silage wagon, I attempted to pull my equipment downhill across a field terrace in order to start chopping a new pair of rows. I've executed this maneuver many times without incident, but not this time. I tried crossing the steep terrace at too flat of an angle with an unbalanced load in my wagon, and THUD!...the wagon and its 3.5 ton load tipped over and fell to the ground. It survived the fall relatively well, though, and we were back up and running Thursday morning.

About the only other news worthy of reporting is to mention that we did pull out of our hill ground on Friday morning to harvest some of the sorghum in our creek bottom fields. With the ground down there still a little soft from Monday's rain and more rain expected for this Sunday, we decided it would be worth our time to move even if we could only get a handful of acres. I harvested most of a 5.5 acre field (only got stuck twice), and then sent three loads out of another before we shut down for the day. I'll chop another couple of loads Saturday morning to use in our cows' feed ration this weekend, and then we'll probably pull the equipment back out Monday. The chopper has a few bearings and sprockets that need to be replaced, and we can probably knock out all of the remaining sorghum in our "hill ground" while waiting for the bottomland to dry more.

We still have a long way to go before we finish the harvest, but we're getting closer all the time.

The wagon has a side that's bowed out and is now topless,
but she can still get the job done after her fall.

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