We Built A Shed Out Of Scraps

All right, I'm feeding for Kendall today, so doing his chores. She wanted to give a quick shout out to these big grip handles for our buckets. This was something that any farm kid, you know, growing up, you know, the handles always break off of these and then it hurts your hand when you're lifting full buckets of stuff. But we've got a couple of big grips now and we use them mainly for these buckets that we're using every day to load mineral into the, uh, the feed mixer. Uh, but they work really nice, feel really good in the hand. They got grooves where your fingers go. Yeah. You can check them out at the, I'll put the website on there. 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. Hey everybody. It is a Monday, uh, evening, been an irrigation day. So, uh, I'm starting up the river pump now. Uh, we've been working on the lagoon pivots, uh, all day. It continues to be, uh, Mr. Unreliable, but we don't have that much water to pump through it. So, uh, it would be nice to just, uh, update that system, but it would also be nice to have gallons to pump through it, but we're trying to just empty out the little bit we have this year. So it's running now. I think it was running when I came over here. I'll check it again. I'll check it pretty often. Uh, the first night and, uh, we'll see what happens. We, uh, had, uh, some wiring issues and actually we still probably need to go get a part and replace a part, but we have it, we have it working for now. Um, we messed around with some, with a gearbox. We changed the gearbox and that wasn't it. We, and we changed, we checked a motor. Um, but we finally decided it was, we found a bad spot in the wire. Frustrating is I kind of knew about it, but I had kind of forgotten to get that when I was doing all that other, I didn't get it written down. And so that ended up probably being the main problem. What's weird is it works sometimes and it does another time. But we're going to get this fired up. Our week straight of rain chances turned into, we did get 90 hundred. We really thought we were going to get more than that, or at least we were hoping so. Uh, but, uh, we're going to keep this water running for sure. Just wait out. It's supposed to be pretty dry and hot now for two weeks. So we're just going to have to put blinders on, work on what we can control and, uh, pray for rain. Our late crops, you know, they'll be able to hold on for a while. That's why we plant them late. So they're small. Uh, the corn, I'm afraid we're going to be needing to get our, our, uh, new to us chopper ready to go, because if it doesn't rain for two weeks and it gets hot, it's going to be going backwards pretty fast. That's that. Let's get this baby primed up. Some updates on the progress of this new pen. These are some big old posts we got from the utility company. So we're building a shed out of them. All dad's idea. All right. We've basically got the frame done. We're going to put this last angle iron up here and then we're going to put the roof on. Well, once we got this thing to run and the pivot to walk, we've just left it running for almost 48 hours. Now, and that's basically all our water. So then it went down and back. I guess I'm going to let it run a little longer, but it's only a couple inches from the suction screen. So hope the core is happy. We did what we could. So this is our lagoon, which is designed to, uh, never, it shouldn't ever fill up or run over what, you know, it catches all the feedlot water. Over there is a pond that can fill up and run over and we can pump out both of them. And then we have quite a bit of water to pump on a crop, like several, like a multiple passes. Well, we basically got to go down and back on one fourth. Well, on about 30 acres, that's all we got this year, but it was more than last year. Uh, didn't take long. Well, we got a surprise half inch of rain out here at the home farm at the feedlot. We're hauling, uh, two loads of cattle in this morning. Uh, Nathan and dad are busy working on that fencing project over there, but I'm going to haul the two loads. See if we can get these cattle brought down there. Definitely nice to have some rain, see some puddles. Unfortunately, no rain at my house, 10 miles West, because, uh, there's just a little spotty storm. Um, so all that corn over by my house did not catch this little half inch rain, but Hey, we'll take it where we can get it. It's supposed to be over a hundred degrees the next four days. So this'll certainly help the crops out here. Be able to withstand that. All right. I made it in with my second load. I'm going to unload here in Salina and they'll be sold at sale barn. All right. The next thing we're doing is getting the old Morton building sliding shed doors. We're going to make these the roof of this new pen building. They've been sitting here in the grass. So the reason we have these doors is because we got that power lift door. That's real nice. But, uh, we took these sliding doors off to put that on and they've been sitting over here in the grass. So we're finally, we finally got a place to reuse them because we're building this, this, uh, shed out of those telephone poles. So between the telephone electricity poles and, uh, we're reusing poles, we're reusing doors for the roof, got all sorts of stuff. All right. There's the other door. We already moved over here, leaning up. It'll do the West half and then we'll lean this one up for these half. Then we're going to slide them. We're going to lift them up onto the top. That'll be the roof. All right. There we go. We've got a roof. Like there's a door. The door has become the roof. Okay. There it is. We've got a roof. Got a fresh load of sale barn calves in today. You can see some of them going to town on that water back there. They've been here since early this morning. This is their second round, second batch of hay. They're a little bit longer haul. We're giving them two rounds of hay. See how they get started here in the Kansas heat. This field is poking above the wheat stubble now. This double crop milo. There was lots of moisture here when we planted. And I think that this field got more than the half an inch that Nathan's rain gauge showed. It rained while I was on my vacation. Pretty nice crop of calves coming. I can generally handle it when one of my cows loses their tags. I got two cows right next to each other, both missing a tag. How am I supposed to tell whose calf is yours? They look pretty similar. I think they're probably sisters. Rugby's put up today. A day of putting used lumber on our shed. That's ready for ten. It's a little hot, so we let some of these cattle in the shade. Okay, so the process of using our used ten is started. Zipping this on. It's been a little bit windy this morning, so hopefully it's not this windy the whole time. But we got it up. The cattle are having a little bit of heat. Letting them into that shed for shade in the afternoon. Cute. What happened to the fork? Since there was... This tank works better for calves. They're reaching into that one. I spilled a little stiller on the pickup, so thanks to a 6-10 heifer, we're licking that up a little bit. Don't want to let it go to waste. All right, these ladies are heavy breads. Eight months. Seven to eight months along. A lot of them will already be basically crossing over that eight months here in the next couple weeks. So I'm giving them a little distillers. It also really helps me catch them in the arrow grip heeler whenever I can just bring these totes from from lick tubs full of it and they come running up into the catch pen. So they'll be on this paddock that's got a decent amount of grass. And then the next paddock will be the paddock I catch them in, I think. There are three calves here. They were some of those feedlot heifer ones that were bred before we bought them. They were accidental. So there's a couple of them and then the white face is a late spring one and we're gonna make all three of them fall calvers. So I'm gonna keep them, make them fall calvers. And the other ones of these will go to the calving pen. The other, those three pair will go with the heifers that are about to get a bull with them in November. I did not do a whole lot of filming. When we first started building that pen, then I think Greg showed you quite a bit of that. And I went on vacation. We went to a couple towns in western Kansas. Did the Dodge City Boothill Museum. Went and saw Walker and Laura, which I think I'll put a clip of our girls riding Walker's horse in here. But that's where I've been working on that project. Of course, rotating cows around these beautiful Kansas green pastures. The pasture growth is pretty good this year, even with low rainfall, just because we had some stockpiled moisture coming into the spring from those late winter moisture events. So the cows are pretty fat and happy. We're a little understocked compared to what we were a couple years ago. So that's mainly because I'm retaining heifers and I'm going to fill my pastures with retained heifers instead of buying more bred cows. Definitely had to go through some really hot, hot days. But I'm excited to calve these. Ladies out, we're going to calve like five days later than we did last year because too many of them came before the due date. So I had to move their calving date back a little bit this year. So this is one of the areas they have shade in this paddock and they've definitely eaten a lot here and dropped a lot of manure pads because they got shade and a pond in this corner. So they've knocked this grass back quite a bit. Crosby, how many ponds have you jumped in today? Is that number two or number three? This pond he jumped into recently, we kept him a little more clean than the first pond. He was muddy coming out of that first pond. All right, I'm gonna close this gate here. Okay, the M7 had its longest break of the summer and time to swap third cutting alfalfa. Starting to pump another evening. It doesn't get to under 95 degrees till the sun's about down. And what time is it? I think it's nine or it's getting close to nine. I felt ahead enough on water that through this, it's like a four or five day stretch of 100 degrees or 95 plus. So I've been just running it from kind of now until 11 a.m. or 12. Takes longer to get over it, but I think it just does a lot more good. But sometimes if you get behind, you got to run it during the day. I'm hoping for cooler temperatures and maybe even a rain in the next few days for everything that's not irrigated. So basically everything besides this field. So it's getting kind of dark, but you can see 107 degrees and wind is getting to this corn. This is dry land too, but it's hanging on. But then this is probably had a little more compaction or just thinner soil. Then you get to where it's irrigated again and it's green. Definitely starting to see that bad stress from the heat where it's not irrigated. So I have no idea when we're going to be chopping, but I think it's going to be sooner rather than later because this heat is basically frying the worst spots and then we're just going to have to blend it all in. These ones, they're going to weigh heavy. If we only get 62, they're going to weigh up pretty heavy. I might end up getting 80. Come on, hey! Last time they weighed 878 and it's been two and a half weeks. Well, the grain market has been in the tank here since... Sometimes it sets, you know, seasonal highs in June, but it started going down in June. It's been down in July. We are thankful we have cattle to sell because its market is not in the tank. We broke our best deer price ever and I don't know if these ones are going to weigh quite as heavy as them. So I don't know if they'll break the total dollars price, but we'll see if they can break that 253 per pound mark. Not going to be the most abundant alfalfa hay harvest. There's the neighbors finishing up. They got two swappers going on the same field here. And cattle have access to both sides of the bank. This is the kind of stuff they do. This heifer thinks she can just do whatever she wants. Just giving a little corn to these ones on weeds. Okay, on this side we've got some forage sorghum to chop. The chinch bugs hit this pretty hard. We planted it earlier than forage sorghum is kind of, you know, recommended, but we wanted to have some forage sorghum to chop along with the corn and to put on top. Right along next to it we have this millet. I kind of overlapped. I even overlapped a little bit because they're both forage. We like to put this millet up early. So it's at its highest nutrient content. It should be a lot taller, but it's dry. Parts of it, I didn't necessarily stop at the best spot in the field. One thing I do with the swather, switching from alfalfa to sudan, is I whiten out the swath pattern with these here. Just allows it to dry a little bit better. Makes the windrow a little wider. It's not as piled up. So that the sudan that's at the bottom of the windrow gets just as good of a chance to dry. So I made this outside pass. That's with a narrower windrow. I'll make this windrow wider now. And it just changes these. So with where the full length conditioning rolls, throw it. Catches here and then throws it together. I'm not going full speed yet as I'm doing the out rounds, but I'll get up to... I think I'll be able to even go faster in this than I was in the alfalfa. Okay, something's up because I got a bull out walking in my millet. And I don't have a bull over here. I do have some heifers out there I don't want him to get. Actually, I guess those heifers are already bred. So all the cattle here should be bred. I better write down that brand. There's some pretty nice hay. All right, swath. Okay, off they go. There's one of our home-raised ones. There's quite a few of them in this group. You're the last one, buddy. Don't be late. Okay, came out of the pen pretty good. I didn't feed them much this morning, so they're still hungry. So that's why it's easier to move hungry cattle. You ready to get off the bus? Set of steers for salmon hay. Let's see if this group is worth over 2,200 bucks. I had like one, two and a half weeks ago. June 26th was a pretty good high in the market. So I don't know if they're going to quite beat that. All right, we are putting up the third cutting of alfalfa. And it's not great. It's not great. We have not gotten enough rain. It's not going to make very many bales. But there's some parts of it made a decent windrow. But story of the last three years, we haven't gotten very good alfalfa. A lot of action at the sale today. Pots. I started that line of pots. So I was the first one parking that little line. There's some over here. I gotta go get a second load. It's a pretty high percentage black group. And it's some home-raised ones. They're a little fleshier than the ones two and a half weeks ago. But I think we're gonna get a pretty good price here. Okay, Greg is gonna haul them in. And then he's got to get the 38 that I bought while I was in there between the two loads and haul them home. Him and my dad and Greg, well him and my dad Nathan, they put up the third cutting of alfalfa this morning. So that's what they were doing while I was loading cattle and buying. All right, dropped the second load off. And now I'm gonna park and go in and pay for the ones that Kendall bought. And then I'll, after I pay for them, I'll go pick them up from the unloading or the loading dock over on the far side. It's like quite a few trips here today. One, two, three, four, tractor! Well, calves didn't make it till this morning. But we're glad to get them. For the most part, they went straight to the bunk to eat. There's 40 of them in that group. And then 41 that I got from Celina yesterday. Okay, so here's the ones caught in Celina. There's the new pen we're still in the finishing touches on. There's the ones we got last week. There's the slow doers from the ones we got last week. The other ones are in a big pen. So we'll get all these lined up. Probably won't work them, vaccinate them until next week. I pitched hay to them and now my dad's probably gonna give them a couple buckets of pellets. Say pizza day! This is a big bite. 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 www.petersonfarmbrothers.com. See you guys next time!