Wonderful photographs of your operations, I'm really enjoying seeing them. Thanks very much for posting, and for the creative compositions.

Never have been to Hawaii myself but we did take a trip to cancun mexico last year.

Chichen itza ruins of the mayans. Very interesting place, the mathematics that went into the building of many of the mayan buildings was just incredible.

A sinkhole in the jungle.

Well enough of that hot humid country, time to get back home and have a look at our home grain storage facilty.
Ours is pretty special, most farmers that have their own bins have smaller ones with a portable auger that can be moved between each. Ours was like that until 1980 when this 70ft high elevator leg was installed and three of the bins built on up.

Back on up to the pit to dump and then a transfer auger runs the grain over to the leg. It can handle 3,000bu/hour and has a total storage capacity of about 35,000bu. We only haul wheat off the family owned ground here to home, all crop off rented ground and all legumes go elsewhere.

We have a couple of truck drivers with semis haul it out for us, we used to store it all winter but lately have been hauling it out in late fall or winter so we don’t have to deal with controlling the bugs and can sell it whenever we want. The grain runs out the bottom of the bins and back up to the top and down the truck spout. Last winter the weather wouldn’t cooperate with us and wheat prices were going down and the snow wasn’t going anywhere so despite plowing the snow and chaining up the trucks, had to pull every truck up the driveway with a Cat and give them a tug to get going and pointed down the first hill. All the grain goes to the port either at Lewiston, ID or Clarkston, WA where it loaded on barges and makes the long trip down through the dams to Portland.

Another thing that was added in 1994 was the cleaning shed. We save our own legume seed and clean it and treat it ourselves to save money. We planned on doing wheat seed as well but that would be a lot more volume and proper seed treatment is more critical with wheat. We also cleaned, bagged, and sold wheat and lentils for food to people back around 1999 when the y2k end of the world stuff was going on.
Have small bins on the upper story of the shed.

The seed cleaner itself, we have a 3-phase power converter to run it and it can clean about 3000lb an hour.

To set up for different crops, different combinations of screens are used some are round holed others slotted, some designed for the desirable seed to fall through, other for it to ride over it.

All the reject material goes down to the basement where it is bagged.

The good seed can either be transported back to a bin, straight onto a truck or into this bagger.

The crop off rented ground goes to the nearby warehouse, also it is where we buy all our fertilizer and chemicals.

Gee Whiz NIF, didn't realize that the Dworshak Dam was such a big pile of cement......700 feet that's pretty high. We have a fairly good sized dam here
at The Dalles.....not nearly so high, but it pumps out quite a bit of juice.
Part of the spill way.....23 gates........1380feet long:



An aerial shot (not one of mine) shows the unusual shape. They had to 'zig zag'
their way across the Columbia on this project to take advantage of some natural
rock formations. The power house runs almost parallel to the coarse of the river.


A closer view of the power house and the fish ladder on the Oregon side:



The total length of The Dalles Dam is 8,875 feet. The power house has
fourteen 78,000KW units and eight more units that crank out 85,975KW
each......1780 megawatts total.

"Old wrote:

Thanks for the info.....was wondering about the transmission towers shown in several of your pictures.

We have our share of transmission towers around here too, Old Magnet. In addition to the usual AC lines, The Dalles is the northern terminus of the DC
intertie to the LA area. I spend most of my time trying to avoid the lines in my
shots...but did catch them in this one as i was shooting this refurbished Stearman at work. There are two separate lines seen here in the background.
The shorter one is an AC line that was built in the 1950's. The taller towers are
for the DC intertie line, AKA Path 65. They pull AC power off of the Bonniville
Grid and convert it to DC at the Celilo Converter Station just south of The Dalles
Dam. This line extends 846 miles to Sylmar, CA near LA where a similar converter
station changes the DC power back to AC for use on the AC grid in the LA area.The line has a capacity of 3100MW. The bulk of the power flows from
north to south during the summer when the demand peaks in California. (takes lots of air conditioning to keep all of those nuts cool) The line can
work both ways, and at times in the winter when demand peaks up here,
the energy flows south to north. The DC intertie was built in the late 60's.



The DC line passes through a ranch leased by SRS Ranches. You can see it
in the background of this shot. Just behind the combine and to the left of the frame is where they ground the northern terminus at what the BPA calls
Rice Flats ( yeah, I know....doesn't look very flat, but that's as close as your
are gonna get around here) .......details here if you need to know:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_DC_Intertie



A friend of mine was building a diversion terrace for the grower that owns
the site ( the grounding structure is buried out in his wheat field. He hit the
buried cable with his D7F. Not sure what it was, he called the BPA. They about had a stroke and told him to stay a LONG way away from it until they
had the intertie secured. ( he had been assured before he started that the
grounding loop was buried so deep that he wouldn't hit it....yeah sure.)

That episode turned out fine......nobody hurt. Didn't work out very good
for a spray pilot one spring day back in the '80's. He turned the wrong way,
flew right into one of the wires.........sawed the plane in two.. pilot KIA.

Here is one of the planes from Shearer Sprayers working along side the Intertie..........



........and he makes damn sure to turn away from the lines;

Yep Dworshak is 717ft high and 3,300ft long if I remember correctly and used 6.5 million cubic yards of concrete. Power generated is 3 units at 220Megawatts each it seems like.

No fish go past it but because of this dam the chances of removing the four lower snake river dams were lessened, they release extra water from dworshak during mid-late summer which cools the warm water behind the lower dams which helps the steelhead and salmon out, which then makes the environmentalists slightly happier. ( If any dams get removed in the NW the lower snake dams would be the first, they supply almost no irrigation or drinking water and very little electricity but have a big toll on the steelhead and salmon population.) The only real reason all four dams exist is to allow barges to get to Lewiston which is the most inland seaport in the world.

One of the main reasons for building dworshak was for flood control which it has been effective at.

NIF.........great looking set up for your farm storage.......can't think of any in this county that come even close........mostly bins with 10" augers, only a couple of legs. The first bin in this lineup is 10,000bu, with a pair of 12,000
bins behind it. The old tank to the right of the frame was retired a long time ago.



Haul quite a bit right off the combine......first to the MCP terminal elevator
right on the Columbia at The Dalles:





Towards the end of harvest, we have been going to the MCP elevator at Dufur, Oregon. One of the assistants there makes the hot afternoons a little
more pleasant.............

98J- if the operators of the elevators here looked like that we would have problems getting the trucks back to the field I would think

It appears that this thread is on its dying breath, which is to be expected after over 230 replies and a month’s time. Thanks to all who viewed my pictures as well as thanks to all who added their own and got a good discussion going. If anyone else is viewing this and has any more questions/comments or pictures to add please do so.

Here are the videos, they arent great but see what you think. I now can take digital videos so I plan to get a few that will be much better quality than these ones that are about 20 years old.

I have had problems viewing these as it stops and wont continue part way through,but I figured out that if you click the pause button in the lower left corner right after it starts playing and wait several minutes before resuming that it will usually play the whole thing. Both the combine vids end with dumping in a truck so if you dont see that you arent getting the whole thing. Also in the first video the cat goes by twice and for me watching it the picture kept stopping part way through.

First the D6B disking volunteer rapeseed that got going on a wet spring, the radiator was plugging with the blossoms so the air scoop was put on.

View My Video

This next one with the D4D was during the dry fall of 1991, moldboard and chisel plows were being torn up in the hard ground until late in November that year so we pulled out the old disk plow which worked fine in dry conditions, it was used to break land in the 50s and 60s.



View My Video


67 and 69 95Hs at work cutting 50bu or so Lewjain winter wheat.

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View My Video

NIF: Great pictures of your bin and cleaning setup. In fact all of the pictures have been great. Hills make for better pictures than flatland. Later Darrol

Hi your pictures get more dramatic with the marvelous engineering feets of water conservation. one question the levelling hydraulics on the JD harvesters are they manually operated as you travel or are they automically operated by the machine. Thanks N H F. Atlas