Re-Building A Feed Wagon

Okay, got another three fields done today. We had a meeting in the in the middle of it while the wind was kind of blowing. Another nice day. Another nice sky. Meet the Peterson family. Our dad, the three Peterson brothers, and our families farm together in central Kansas. Our family farm started in 1882 and has been raising cattle and crops ever since. Please subscribe to this channel and give us a like and a comment if you enjoy the video. I made it over here to Greg's. I just have one field to do over here and then Riley's coming to pick me up. So I was gonna vlog in my lawn. Wait, a true grain farmer would already, you know, have this totally gone through in their shop. Usually we hook on to it like first week of April, you know, or whatever. I'm gonna try to get it hooked on to here in a week or two. We need to put discs on it to look over everything else you need to look over on a planter. Run it a couple years on these discs. We definitely need to kind of go a full run through. I can't do much right now, but I thought I'd come look at it. Well, it's kind of like the sprayer. I, you know, I knew there were some things that need to be done. We have some really nice weather now. We're trying to get our our first bulk of field work done. Now we can get a lot done in March before planting. We have to rebuild the one feed wagon. All right, it has like holes in the bottom of it. It really needs to be done before the planter. So I'm gonna have to be itching to get my planter and do the feed wagon first. We also have two different speaking trips. One was supposed to be in January, but it got it got postponed to February. So now, anyways, I'm gonna have to do all this all these things when I just want to be going over the planter getting ready. But hopefully we'll still have time to be able to get everything done. Always things to do, but it was good to see you planter. Okay, so I I did one water tank. Now I'm doing another water tank. Just walked by it. I was carrying the brush. I thought I'm gonna do that one, too. So I'm gonna clean this water. It's got some feed particles and stuff in the bottom. So we'll get it a little bit clearer. We're putting new cattle in it. So their water flowing back into it. I cleaned it as good as I could. And the cattle aren't uh They're not picky. They were all up around me before I started moving. Like what are you doing to our water? It is a Saturday, so I finished the last wheat field this morning. It was over by Greg's place and then we got the truck and sprayer moved back here to the the feedlot, the home place. This afternoon while listening to the K-State game, I fertilized the brome. Which we just have like really small patches around. So it's kind of a challenge. Now I am fertilizing some triticale. The reason we are doing this, I'm planning on chopping some. We kind of liked chopping a little triticale to get us through while we're waiting to chop our ball silage and have it in a separate trench and then you can kind of bounce back and forth. Kind of mapped out a weird shaped field and we didn't want to chop the whole thing. And so then I don't want to fertilize the whole thing because the rest is just going to be a cover crop and we'll plant beans. If you guys remember we we put up a big pile of silage last fall. So um, we think we could almost make it all the way. I mean it just kind of depends on how many uh cattle we feed in the summer. Which depends on a lot of factors and even this spring, you know, it depends on if it gets muddy again. Right now we're nice and dried out but we like having this option and coupling it with uh chopping through this low area where it could get muddy. And if I killed all that and then it got muddy and we couldn't plant through it because it had a heavy cover it's just one place where we can we can be confident that we can take that cover off and maybe get it to dry down more and it's kind of weird and it's going to make it kind of hard to spray. The rest of the field because I'll have to spray the rest of the field before I um before we chop this I'm pretty sure so we'll see how it works. I think I squared it off pretty good. This will also give us kind of another test strip of kind of how the beans yield after chopping versus after leaving the cover. Then we still have some fields that won't have cover. So we can kind of see how the yield does and hopefully we have actual rain during the summer and actually grow some crops this year. That'd be great too. So I've switched to the streamer nozzles, which is what I'll use on the second pass when I go back over the wheat here. So what I did is this field like goes all around here. I'm fertilizing this low area where it runs into this pond because it always gets real wet and it's very highly productive through that low area. I have confidence in high tonnage through that low area and then I'm just kind of squaring it off working up this hill. This was also the earliest drilled triticale we did close to the feedlot. And so it's already the biggest. We're picking up some extra nitrogen, which is what a cover you know you want it to do. But I'm giving it some bonus nitrogen just to be able to ton out. So we'll get more tons off of this 20 acres or so 20 to 30 acres and put enough of a pile that we can put a tarp on. We have lots of corn silage and sorghum silage from last year. We got her done. Now it's wash time. Okay, so I'm standing on the top of the hill. It's an 80. I'm going to try to burn this. I wanted to burn it last year. It was kind of too dry. We didn't get to it. You don't see the trees from here. This is probably the most treeless part. There's a lot of evergreens coming up on the north end and it's got some weed problems in places. Just not necessarily weeds but plants that I don't necessarily want. Some old world blue stem. Fire's not going to fix everything but it's going to stimulate some change and benefit the ecosystem and the grass and therefore my cows. So I'm driving around with this rig. I'm collecting some barbed wire and some other things and kind of writing down some notes. I went to a prescribed burn association meeting and so I'm kind of trying to outline my plan for how to put this into action and they can help you with some of the steps of getting it done and the best way to do it because they have so much experience doing other burns for other people versus I've only burned one kind of two times in five years. So I wish I was as in tune with nature as like Greg, Judy or those ranchers that just understand all the thing about the biology of everything that's going on. But what you can't easily tell this time of year is that the cool season grasses are greening up and the warm season grasses are still brown. That's some things I'm observing today. If you want to get the timing right with your burn so that it ignites those there's enough standing material that burns and then the green shoots up right behind it with the spring rain. On the podcast I listen to like working cows podcast. They talk about how you have to love your grass more than you love your cows. That's not easy to do. So, but it's better for everyone if you treat your grass right. Here's some of what I think is called an old world bluestem that it looks like there's a lot of grass here, but they stop eating it far away through the summer once it's not in the same vegetative state anymore and so a fall burn is better to get rid of old world bluestem, but I'm not ready to try a fall burn yet. I'm gonna do a spring burn on this maybe a couple years we can try to patch burn off some of these spots. Somehow this pond looks pretty good. It's pretty full. The other two ponds are well, one's empty and one's still just a puddle. So I'm still not going to be able to rotationally graze this quite the way I want. In fact, I might end up just grazing the whole 80 at once. Most of the time probably find the safest place to lay while I'm running my feed. All right, you got to get out the way steers. We got a manure hauling crew coming into this pen. I parked it in a way that might help me get out and leave the pen. It can be kind of a wing there. I also got my dad in here. Four-wheel back there bringing up the stragglers. Anyway, I'm coming in here to get this wet stuff. Everything that's underneath this it's kind of wet and it's not going to dry out under three feet of that. So I'm going to come get that scooped up out. So all this area that's out here farther around the piles can dry out. Like here, it's dry ground. That's because we've been in here scraping it to spread out wet wet stuff. Another day sorting done. I sorted on a Monday today because Nathan and dad are each going to be going different days this week. But I think we got 62 here. We sorted through like 155. This one has a foot issue. I'm going to take a look at in a shoot. This wasn't the paddock that I was planning to graze, but there's a lot of old grass here. I'm going to graze on this north. I'm just driving along the wire making sure there's no shorts. And then I'm going to get it hot. And I'll check the barbed wire around the perimeter as well. This pond over here, it's the first year. It's the first time I've had water in it in two years. Two grazing seasons in place. Okay, my mom called. She's the one who's down here. She was the only one down here with the cows. She also had two grandkids with her. My dad saw one about to calve this morning when he fed. And so I called my mom to see if she could look at it. And she said there was three calves in the pen. Which was, you know, more than there was this morning whenever dad fed. So I'm here to kind of make sure the ones are pairing up with the ones, you know, the ones that have their calves. I see three right away back there. Plus there's a couple over in the other pen that we were going to move out onto this little patch of grass in my dad's yard. So I got a lot of tagging to do. Okay, we had three born this morning. This one still trying to figure out how to nurse. The other two have a little more pep in their step. Okay, the bread heifers are preg-checked and ready to go to pasture. We had cattle out this morning. No fun. All right, Greg and I were in Jackson, Mississippi yesterday. Speaking to Mississippi FFA kids. We got back at like midnight or something. I didn't get that much sleep. But anyways, project for the next couple days, hopefully it doesn't take too long, is to work on this feed wagon. We got the the liners in the floor are wearing through. So we got some new liners. To drop in there and weld in there. I'm going to cut out some of the old, maybe lay it on top of some. I don't know. We'll see. The augers are easier to take out. Also got it wearing through right there. So I need to weld something over that. So the augers aren't too bad to take out in these wagons. So I think I'm going to try to take out the two bottom augers, leaving the top two in. But we'll see. It'll be a little operation. Okay, so we got these big old augers and we got some bolts on each side and we'll lift these bottom augers out of here. Okay, so we're going to try to pick these up out here. It's a cold south wind today, so but we had to, we got to pull them out outside the shop. So we had to pull it out in the wind. All right, there she is. Took a little wiggling to get it. I think it was maybe rested against that side. I don't know. Looks like we maybe need some gliding. Okay, we're awfully close to having this one side out. I got the lever lifting on it and there's a there's an iron frame piece behind here, so I couldn't just I didn't just want to totally cut through it. So anyways, I also, that's where my my plasma cutter was kind of wearing out. So I'm gonna, I didn't go very deep to get the rest of it out though. I was prying on it by hand and I decided to work smarter, not harder. Well, sir, the problem with the feed wagon is it's got a big hole in it. Got her loose. All right, I got the new one slid into place. I think I had to do just a little extra trimming to make it fit in nice. I think it will fit. I think it's ready to be welded in there. But I'm gonna call it a day. And try to get going on it tomorrow morning. On the other side, I think I'm only gonna do like a two and a half, three foot section. Because it's already been replaced farther back in that back corner. Well, the back just doesn't seem to wear much so I'm gonna save the rest for later to put in the our truck. Our feed truck takes the same liner, so I'm just gonna do what I need to do. So hopefully I guess I'm hoping I could still like get the bulk of it done tomorrow. Maybe just finish up a few of the like wall pieces on the... Okay, I'm back this morning. Got it fitted in here and getting some welding done. Dad is cutting some flap pieces out for the wall where it's just a couple little spots where it's thin in the wall. So it takes a lot of welding but... I'm gonna move over to this side now where I cut my other piece in about half because the the back of this is just still pretty thick. So I'll use the other half of this one in the feed truck probably. I cut it out ahead of time so that I could match my cut and use this as a straight edge. Use the new one as a straight edge to cut out the hole. So that's what I'm going to work on now and then slip that one in there. The the length of liner I had was the exact length. So that's why I did the hole one on this one. But here I was gonna have to cut it anyways. This isn't as thick as what I'm putting in there. I mean, it's definitely worn a little worn but I would expect it because there's not near as much pressure back here at the back of the wagon over time as there is up here. So I would expect that to last as long as this front one that's already been done. If we wear the front out and back here you know, then we'll have the option to redo the whole thing at once kind of or trade it. So like I said earlier if if you're a young guy or girl that you know has any interest in fabrication or whatever, I think there's going to be lots of availability that and working on engines mechanics and stuff. I think there's going to be a lot of availability because people everywhere just seem to be be looking for self-motivated people that can take care of themselves and learn how to do something and do it themselves. They're having a hard time finding people to hire. And so I think those jobs are definitely going to be out there. Okay, here's the end of today. We got the two floors in. I covered up all my bad looking welds with some better ones. And we are adding some a few panels on the sides. Wearing the most. Well, not a few. We're adding one there and we're working on one. Dad's been helping. We're getting her done. As good as used. Okay, so after a bunch of a bunch more welding. Kendall is helping me clean up and we're gonna get the augers back in here. That's all your welding electrodes. Yeah, I went through a lot of them. Be nice to have a wire welder, but then I'd have to relearn how to use one. So we're doing the wire brush on each side where the auger has to slide in because it was kind of sticky coming out. We might oil them a little too just so they slide back in good. And then we'll have it for the weekend and for I'm leaving on a trip. So that's why we're trying to get it done. Likely in another year or two. As much feeding as we do with it. We'll have to do some more of the wall and some flighting. But that's just kind of the nature of the game once a feed wagon isn't new anymore, so. We got to where it'll go a while for now. We lowered this in with the chains. I got my bolts in before Nathan did so I guess I'm better at this even though it's my first shot. They're both lined up, yeah. We talked to dad on this radio so he could hear us so we didn't have to make hand motions. Probably should have done that while we were taking it out. Say hi dad. Okay, so we were missing one nut in the process, so I got out to get another one. We got that side tightened up. Well, we got three out of the four sections tightened up. Just tighten it up like that. I only tightened one out of the five. Thanks for watching everyone. Check out our music videos linked in the description. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, Snapchat, and explore our website See you guys next time.