NorthIdahoF:

I'm impressed by your "hands on" management of your farming business.

That is something my Dad taught us years ago as well. You've gotta be on top of the figures to remain in business as a successful farmer, else you'll be negated to farming as a means of existence.

I enjoy your pictures up here! Keep it up!

North Idaho Farmer.

I forgot to answer your question about pinched by frost. It was when it was heading out. It happened in late April or early May.

I agree with you on the 6602"s John Deere didn't solve most of the problems until 1975. The cooling system gave the most trouble on the 1971 through 1974 along with the primary counter shaft and that blasted cuss-able feeder beater behind the header auger. Don't want to forget that sorry weak feeder house chain. It took you guys in the north west to design something that was satisfactory. We even tried to use the flat land 3 chain feeder chain. It was better but not as good as what was designed in WA or ID.

Woody I think it is a comfort king cab and I have no idea what ever happened to the company. When the manufacturers started making factory cabs an option the after-market kind of dried up.

Casey

Thought I would put up a few pics and info about some of the crops we grow.

Regular old soft white winter wheat, this variety is called Lambert and has done very well for us since we replaced Madsen with it in the late 90s, it actually is not a popular variety around the region as a whole but us and most of the neighbors sure like it. Now there is alot of clearfield wheat being grown which is resistant to a herbicide that will kill jointed goat grass so an Oregon State variety "102" is very common along with some conventional varieties Tubbs, Cashup, and Westbred 528. The past few years we have grown 2-3 varieties of winter wheat each year. The only reason we dont go 100% clearfield is because they dont have anything that will yield quite as high yet.

Soft white spring wheat, we have grown all "Nick" for several years now.

This is a nearby field of hard red wheat it is beardless and I think they said the variety is boundary

neighbors barley, a new variety "champion" all barley in this area is now feed type because we can no longer get malt contracts as all that barley is now grown under irrigation mostly in southern Idaho. We grew baroness feed barley for years and it was an unbeatable variety until a couple years ago.

neighbors bluegrass field, this is where the seed comes from to plant lawns, golf courses and everything like that. Seems like northern Idaho and western Oregon put together produce 90% of the nations grass seed, it loves wet springs and dry summers. I was really wanting to grow some but the bottom fell out of the market with the housing crisis.

Have two neighbors that grow some and they usually crank the swathers up in the evening when the humidity gets above 30%, too much seed falls off if its drier than that. They then run all night until the dew starts drying up in the morning. It is then harvested with combines with pickup headers.

There is alot of hay right in this area as well because we are so wet and have so much pasture in the area that the cattlemen need hay. We dont do any hay but have 50 acres or so that we rent out to two neighbors. Everyone here only does one cutting usually late June through mid July.

There are limited amount of oilseeds crops like canola, rapeseed, and mustard grown here. They look a cabbage plant when small then bolt and grow tall with yellow blossoms.

Clearfield canola at harvest. The pods can shatter pretty easy in the wind and the seeds are very small, canola and rapeseed are black while mustard seed is yellow or brown.

Now for the fun crops, legumes. We dont have to put any fertilizer on any of the legumes which is very nice these days.

Black peas or Austrian winter peas. Usually only a couple thousand acres grown for seed in the nation each year. The vines can get to be 7ft long when in full bloom.

They fall over and dry up by harvest in a thick mat. Spring peas will only get a few feet high but also lie down in a mat so a company in the palouse came up with a floating cutterbar known as a pea bar that cuts the vines off and lifts them into the header. 22' pea bars are very heavy to put on and take off during the middle of harvest so we would like to just leave them mounted on separate headers.

the pea seeds

now for lentils, a few years ago the estimate was that 80% of them were grown within 100 miles of Moscow, ID. Now north dakota and montana grow a higher percentage than they used to.

Similar to peas, sensitive to disease, and must be cut off right at ground level, some farmers with bigger combines will swath them first or just try to straight cut them but the best way to harvest them is with pea bars or lifters on headers 24' or less.

they ripen very unevenly

they can also be a nightmare to control weeds in, can have a very profitable crop that looks like a shitty weedy mess just because the weeds especially dogfennel dwarf the lentils. We spend lots of time off the combine cutting dogfennel off the reels, augers, out of the feederhouse, etc. during harvest when the crop is weedy.

This crop was fairly clean but you can see the white dogfennel blooms in the draw.

All our lentils are exported to countries like Spain, India, and Turkey

I would say over half the farmers in this area grow lentils at least some years but on our farm we have grown alot of them for many years.

Garbanzo beans also known as chick peas, they are harvested a bit later than most crops but can be cut several inches above the ground so no pea bar is needed.

We grow large Kabuli type beans in this area.

The guys up in the palouse have it very easy growing legumes, deep topsoil with every little rock. However done in our area we have an enormous amount of rocks in our fields especially near the canyon. Usually hire teenagers and go pick the fields by hand after planting is done, usually takes a week or more. Throw the rocks in the front end loader on and on trailers behind four-wheelers. Then roll the fields to smash the small ones into the ground and mash up the clods, still end up with rocks in the rock trap on the combines and occasionally have ran rocks into the separator. Thats one advantage of walker machines over rotarys, when rotary combines like the IH 1470 came out guys soon learned that a single rock could do $10,000 in damage.

Pulled all these rocks off a 50 acre field in the spring of 2007, plenty of bigger ones too but we throw them out before seeding to prevent damaging the drill.

This is what a rocky spot looked like AFTER picking, usually if the ground is soft we can leave the ones smaller than baseball size for the roller to smash into the ground.

Well theres a book for you all to read, got any questions and ill try to answer them.

North Idaho Farmer:

Thanks for the education. Your pictures and descriptions are fantastic!!

Tom

North Idaho Farmer, sure liked the posts on your farming practices. Did not realize you had so many rocks. I guess you never get rid of them all. Keep coming with your interesting posts. Darrol

I also have really enjoyed this thread. I always look forward to posts from NIF and 98J because you both always have such great pictures.

It is interesting to see what other do, having grown up in agriculture in California's central valley. It is also nice to see so many pictures of just a regular day in someone's life.

I always carry my camera, but need to be better about taking pictures of stuff that I see all the time right now, so don't consider particularly interesting, but will be fun to look at years from now, or fun to show others now.

Thanks again to all who have contributed to the pictures and discussion.

Pete.

NIF.......tell the truth now, do you catch yourself humming 'Rock of Ages' as you
work at clearing, shall we say, obstructions??? For years on my personal farming
wish list...a hand phaser ( as on Star Trek)....you know, just pop open the door
on the 'ol D5 and blast a rock or two to blazes. I have found something a tad worse while out in the wheat while trying to shoot a few pictures of harvest:



Nice job on the crop pictures above. Where............is the Club wheat???????




Silver Seeder in Club....this one is called Crew....a multi line cross ( 5 or
7, I can't remember which) thus both red & white chaff;



The current Club.....and the best one that I ever threshed, Coda. White
chaff, bearded, weighs up (61-62lb test weight is common) and harvests
real easy.





Put this into your good looking spreadsheet set up: Average price PDX for
Soft White Jan 2010: $4.83/bu. Average price PDX for White Club Jan 2010:
$8.20..........

Darrol- nope shallow tillage and no-till obviously reduce the new rocks but they will still work to the surface by natural means of ground heaving and such.

These all were pulled up with tillage equipment, mostly moldboard plowing 8-9" deep.




This rock was sticking up near a access road between two fields, started digging it out and gave up, the basalt we have is really heavy so the cat wouldnt have pushed it out
.


98j- a phaser may be nice at times but my personal favorite would be a rock pulverizer that would grind all the rocks up into sand and give us a bit more topsoil.

As for the snakes, we luck out and dont have any rattlers up around home. Down on the lower ground we have seen a few though. Had one beneath the combine header when greasing up one morning, another time a great big one was coiled in the road.

The place that really has some rattlesnakes is down at a friends ranch right along the Oregon - Washington border in Asotin County. They make the drive down this canyon to check on the cows every day and one year they were killing 1-2 snakes a day in the spring. I had a close encounter with one there as well almost stepped on one sunning itself on a rock.



Ah yes the club wheat, never have grown any of that, but had one neighbor that tried it a few years ago, only pic I have. Coda and Chukar are the main varieties seems like I heard. Did anyone grow club wheat in 09 over there? the price on it went way up to where it would pay to grow it but the field men said that there wasnt an acre of it the whole country over here. I am sure a few farmers planted some last fall but I dont think the price difference will hold, plus around here the clubs lack alot of having the same yield.

A field man who had spent considerable time up in the Columbia Basin before coming to our area once told me ' No offense, but this area is pretty much a
backwater'...and he was right. Our rainfall pattern is such that it pretty well limits what you can do dry land. Like one of the guys from California mentioned
in this thread, the moisture comes here from November through February. Sometimes it quits then. Those years can be.......trying. The total water year
moisture is 12 to 15 inches. The timing of it screws things up for crops other
than fall seeded wheat or barley. IF....you could count on a late May or early June rain, then you could do a lot more with spring cereals or alternative crops
like canola or mustard. Given the big switch to no till here, a viable alternative
crop would be a huge plus. There are always a few experiments going on around
here to get us to that point.......but nothing as yet has jumped out to replace
fall seeded cereals, mainly soft white wheat. When it gets the right conditions,
soft white can do pretty good here. A shot from a couple of years back...
early June, just after heading.....Tubbs soft white......looking north, Mt Adams to the left and on the right, Mt Rainier up near Seattle. Got the
late May rain this time, and things are looking good:


As I mentioned above, some growers are trying some new angles. One of the
most aggressive is this neighbor to the west of the shot seen above. Looking
out across a lot of good looking wheat coming on, his field of mustard really
stands out:



A little closer look with Mt Hood looking on. Even if a grower is successful on
the production side with an alternative crop such as this mustard, then the
next big road block must be met......where to go with it. This mustard was
binned, then had to be transported all the way up to Pendleton, Or to be
processed.



This grower followed up the mustard in 08 with a spring wheat crop in 09.
It did pretty well. Usually spring seeding here is a salvage operation ( freeze out or a weed disaster) .......pretty hard to make it pay. This shot of a 1470
on SRS Ranches is spring barley actually. The plan here was to break some
disease cycle and especially to get after our old pal, jointed Goat Grass. The
yield was so so.......around a ton. A break even deal ( after the CRC insurance kicked in) at best. But it did do a lot to help clean the mess that the boss inherited when he took this lease:



The 8010 in the same barley.....this was '05.....the 8010 was new out of the
box & our ace foreman took NO time in checking her out on some steep ground:



A follow up shot to the first in this series. Harvest time in the same draw as seen above, a little to the west. A mid morning shot with Mt Adams & Mt
Rainier again in the background. Just above the combine is a field that is
being chemically fallowed.



From the evening before. This WOULD have been a killer shot, but some Jackass let a slash burn get away over in Washington and the smoke was doing some serious screwups to my picture taking



Salvaged the evening however with this one. The 8010 at work in some 100bu+ ( on the yield monitor) Tubbs. The whole field didn't do that much,
but this end sure did a lot to prop up the average. When we do get a handle
on some viable alternative crops like the ones NIF has shown above, I am sure that we can push the no till yields even higher.

NIF.........the first picture in this series .....(These all were pulled up with tillage equipment, mostly moldboard plowing 8-9" deep. )

.......am I mistaken, or is that Leaverite????????

The rock in the second picture for damn sure is.