The farm I love

I am posting a few photos for those who do not know much about farming equipment and farms, and those who like looking at other people's farms. I am including our current projects, such as our house. Also, I am including a few photos of what we did today.

First, those who do not know what a combine is, depends on what kind of combine we're talking about, there is the Conventional combine, Sperry New Holland, International Harvester, White, and  Allis Chambers. There is also the Western Roto Thresh, but they are not producing that combine anymore.

They are all similar on design on the outside, but the machine on the inside are completely different. What a combine basically does is takes the stalks of grain, runs it through a few process, and in the end the grain seeds are seperated from the stem, creating straw.

We own a Conventional combine.

And when we unload the grain into a truck, we dump it in this long yellow pole called an auger. It has a what it is called is an auger drill. It's inside the cover that carries the grain up so it can get dumped into the grain container.

This next machine is what we call a round baler. It picks up hay that has been cut and left in rows on the field, and put them into rounds of hay.

Bales of hay.

Next up are our rows of silage. Silage is basically chopped up hay when it's freshly cut. The white plastic is to cover it and keep it fresh. Unfortunately, it's like a plastic bag, once a hole forms, the seal is broke and air gets in, and some of the hay goes bad.

Our second row of silage.

This is what we were doing today. Corn silage. We run the tractors over the corn silage to condense it, so we can fit more silage in a smaller area, then we cover it with the white plastic to keep it fresh.

The people we hired to do our corn silage were a huge help, they didn't quite finish today, but they got most of it done. The truck drives along the corn combine to make things more efficient and faster.

This is our dairy cow barn. It currently holds around 90 milking cows, we have approximately 20 dry cows in a pen away from the barn. Dry cows are cows that are expecting a baby calf right away. Once the cow has her baby, we move the cow into this barn to milk her.

These calves were born in approximately the last 2 months. We can hardly keep up with the number of calves being born. We are actually in the process of expanding our farm.

This is our current project on the farm. This is the back view of our house. We are expecting the house to be done by mid-April. The windows and doors have already arrived, but we're waiting for the guys to come and install them. Next will be the siding. It is about double the size of the house we are living in, so we're all pretty excited for that.

This is the front view of our house.

I'm hoping to post some more pictures of the farm, there's alot more to see!