We Baled Up WHAT? | Milo Harvest 2024

Okay, Kalen brought me my lunch. I got a nice lunch, and I was only one pass in from the road, so Kalen just could stop right 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. Okay, I'm working on this couple acre patch. I call it the triangle hill part of the field. Wow, dad has a bull bed. Oh boy! He might have had some cab milo on that one. Okay, following my dad down this pass. My mom is hauling a load that we filled yesterday, and then we've got a full truck now for her to get. And then we have a friend coming after work to run grain cart for us because Greg's in North Dakota today. So, uh, Gino will be Greg's replacement in the grain cart and maybe do a truck or two. All right, we got a windy Thursday. Time to drill some more wheat. So a cool thing about this semi, uh, it was a ag retailer that had it before us, and they plumbed up this auxiliary tank to be able to fuel up their spray rigs and stuff. So we don't use it very often, but when drilling wheat it's pretty handy to not have to pull the fuel trailer out here. We just put our diesel in that tank and then it uses air from the truck to pressurize the tank and pump in our fuel. So, uh, we've we've used it a couple times is all but it's a nice option to have sometimes we kind of forget about it. And then this is the truck fuel over here. So it's a it's a totally separate tank. This is the first time we've done this. Running the old dump trailer with the Dewey's hydraulic bed. Just plug the hose right in. Makes for a nice little travel trailer. If I understand right, this trailer dad and grandpa would haul lime in. They would actually pull it with a single axle grain truck and fill both with lime and go to the field and and dump it. To scoop some. That truck's not full yet. It's just, uh, it's just dominating out here in the middle of the field. This field's kind of a bulb. So the the places along the road, um, don't look that great. They're on that hill. And then down here by the water by the draw it's healing really good. Okay from from here to the road and then over to those telephone poles and those trees. That's all we have left for full season harvest. There's a couple double crop fields. Okay, dumping. I think these last two passes I've combined over the spot where that shed was that we moved to Nathan's house for storage. It had to be a chicken coop. It was right in this area. Okay, dad's putting the last bushels of full season milo in there. I'm gonna push my ladder in. It swings. Swings in. So I left my header trailer at the field. I'm just gonna head to the home place to fuel up. My wagon's pretty full. It's mixing. I'm gonna turn off PTO. Oh my bad, move a combine to fuel up. Hi, dear. Well, it's been a long day of drilling. Gone pretty well. I got 125 acres drilled today, so that's pretty good. I feel like we usually end up averaging around 100. I mean if we get over 100, that's a pretty good day. Theoretically if we would get it going right in the morning and keep the seed and fertilizer to it, minimal delays, we should be able to do over like 150, but that doesn't usually end up happening, but that's a good day. That's a lot of ground covered. You know, grandpa would have been real impressed. So I got done with this side of the creek on this field. Been drilling some of our earlier beans with the cover crop. I can't remember if I've talked about this, but so it's going in pretty nicely besides that there's no moisture, but the ground pretty soft. There was a few places along some trees and on the turn rows. It was pretty hard. I was glad the whole field isn't like that. So we just have about 55 acres on the other side of the creek and then we'll be moving back home. So I'm not sure if I'll come over and do that or Greg will do it, but dad and Kendall were cutting Milo. So maybe they filmed some of that. It was a real miserably windy day is the way I would put it. I'm glad to be sitting in the cab, listening to some music, listening to some podcasts. All right, Friday morning and we have moved over to our first field of double crop Milo. We finished the full season Milo last night. I was gone yesterday. I was in North Dakota on a speaking trip, but they finished the full season Milo last night. So we've got two fields of double crop Milo left for fall harvest and then we've got a field of double crop soybeans. And so that's what we'll be focusing on today. This field's about 120 some acres. So this will probably take us most of the day here. It's also one of our farther away fields. We're gonna have our full crew today trying to get this knocked out. And yeah, the Milo looks great over here for double crop. I mean, this is some pretty good soil over here. Pretty nice field. But it looks really good. All right, harvesting this double crop Milo. Falling down a little bit. This red stuff, just like last year. Had trouble with the double crop Milo falling down. Over there is the white variety and it yielded much better and also isn't falling down. So I don't think we'll plant this this red variety as much next year, at least for double crop. Yeah, I finally got done with this big field. Came up to 135 acres. I did run out of fertilizer. It was just on the out rounds. And I got two bars of fuel left. So it's time to go home. Well, some of these are piddly looking heads. There's grain out here for double crop Milo. There's some spots over 100 and some spots down at like 30. And a few spots that are falling down on the red Milo. So this is annoying because the left side's standing up, but there's like two rows over there that are falling down. So it makes cutting it not as simple. Well, the trouble with double crop Milo when it quits raining is that it it gets way ahead of itself and then it it cannibalizes itself to to try to put on grain because it's it doesn't have enough water. And so a lot of times it falls down. If it would have rained more this this late summer, I don't think this Milo would be on the ground, but we're having to pick a lot of it up off the ground. Okay, well the red Milo was ripe. So we cut it. The white Milo is not ripe. So we're leaving it. So i'm gonna do one more pass here down and get this red. Let's get this red. And Greg's emptying out his combine into that semi. We filled three semis on his acres right here. So what I've cut so far of the white, I think it's gonna out yield the red by hopefully double. It seems it seems really good. The heads look more full. They're kind of filled out falling down sideways a little more than just that straight up single sheet head with the red head. We're already out. The legendary super sweet feet. Nothing like drooling the home place quarter. It's a great view up here. You can see uh, the tops of some windmills over there that are way over by Marion. See almost to gypsum. And we've been here since the 1880s. What do you think about that Henley? Did you know your great great great grandpa started farming on this ground? Isn't that cool? Okay, this calf not doing very good. Uh, it was down there. I've got electrolytes for it and a enema on it right there. So see what I can do. How to bring it up to the farm and take good close care of it with this bucket calf. So I'll probably put them together for overnight. There she is right there. Standing up. I did not drink the bottle. I made for her to drink like one pint. Wow, this calf. This is really good at taking the bottle. A little bit too good sometimes. I got to let her get some air. Turn that bottle inside out. There you can see the smile. These milestones have been on the ground long enough. We are ready to break and bale them. There's traffic going into the pumpkin patch. Can't see much back there. It's so dusty. This will be good cow feed here. There's their corn mace. It got froze too. It was green to start out the pumpkin patch season. Okay, I got a brand new net wrap in there. You can see it turning. It's going to count up to a little over three. Well, I'm glad I got that net wrap in because my dad's going to do some baling in the middle part of the day. I've got an event to go to. Two, three, four, tractor! One, two, three, four, tractor! Well, today is probably one of the busiest days of the fall for our local pumpkin patch here at Sunnyside. I'm baling right next to them. I've got a large audience watching me bale. I'm not sure any of them care, but I'm going to pretend they do. Nathan and Kendall and I just got back from a speaking event in Woodbine, Kansas. Made it back and I think Nathan's drilling wheat. I'm going to finish baling. It's Saturday night. Just kind of finishing up some things. Going to watch the K-State game tonight, of course. Hopefully it rains on either Sunday night or Monday morning. I think that would get all the wheat up that we've planted. And then we got two more double crop milo fields and one more double crop soybean field to harvest. Neither of them are very close to ready. So it's going to be a while before we actually finish harvest. The big chunk of it is definitely behind us. And we wanted to get these milo stubble bales up before the chance of rain as well. Here's the mom. There's the calf. She's looking a little bit more perky, but definitely they need to be back together. Because she didn't really want to drink bottles. I had to tube her. They went right to nursing. That calf would much rather drink from its mom than drink from the bottle. Which I hope she stays on the mom all the way for six months or eight months or however long until we wean them. Well getting close to finishing baling this field. I've been listening to the K-State pregame on the radio. K-State game starts in like 30 minutes. So I gotta hurry to the finish so I can get home and watch the game. Although I do have it recorded. So I'll just be behind for a little bit if I'm late, but nice night. This heifer pair needs a little bit of special care. So we're pinning them up separate from all the ones that are out on the 70 acres. Milo stalks. It's a dusty job. These are the last bales that that Kubota baler will make for the year, I believe. Basically at the end of haying 2024. All right. Finish that up. Pumpkin patches. Still hopping. Letting Owen steer because we're on the the last pass. So he has some wiggle room. Are you gonna steer? Yeah! This game is really important to get off to a quick start. I know K-State's gonna be steady-minded. They're gonna play all 60 minutes. They're not gonna overreact. Owen's first time driving the drill because we're on the last pass. We got that big field done, didn't we? We were drilling here on the home place. Well, it's Saturday, so we had a speaking event in the middle of the day, but it was kind of local. We did kind of a fall festival. So dad drilled while we were there. Yeah, Owen likes tractors. Yeah, so I finished the drilling and they did chores and now we're gonna go watch the wildcats. Say go cats! Good job! Okay, could you skirt your plate toward me so I can get your rice? Okay, we had an open pin and there's a rainstorm coming, I think. So we sorted, scraped the pins and then moved the pin. Now we're going to scrape the other pin that we're going to empty. And uh, it's nice to have that manure piled for a rain. As you can see, the cattle are very fascinated with the tractor. So it's much easier to scrape pins when they're not in it. So we'll run these cattle out to scrape this pin. It's Monday morning and there's a 80% chance of rain here at 2 p.m. So dad's trying to get all the pins scraped, all the loose manure piled up so it doesn't get all messy. We got the combines in the shed. We still got a couple fields left to harvest, but they're not ready yet and we want to keep the combine dry. So kind of just tying up loose ends this morning and hoping that it actually rains. We are on our last field of wheat to drill. We will be doing more drilling, probably going to be doing a little drilling for our uncle. But we have a chance of rain here in a couple hours. When I was drilling these beans on this field we had a chance of rain in a couple hours. I think it did rain that time. So hopefully it'll rain this time. You can see it's kind of dark over here. It's a little more dark farther north. I'm gonna try to quit looking at the radar because I just don't want to see the radar. So it was looking pretty promising and then I looked at it again. It didn't look as promising. We're within 30 minutes of the storms posing to hit. The forecast has kind of gone back and forth of whether it's going to rain, how much it's going to rain, but it's looking pretty good right now. There's some lightning strikes. We really need this rain for the wheat. As you saw there, the neighbors are irrigating their wheat they drilled because we are we are in desperate need of a rain. I'm not sure we've gotten a rain this whole October. And so the wheat's not going to come up if we don't get something on this storm. Some nice off-the-ranch calves coming in. All black. They're way over 600. They're eating. There's some up eating ration, but we'll feed them hay on top of that. They are going to be the noisiest set we've had for over a month, I think. We bought that big of a group of ballers in September, but we haven't since we started harvest. So it'll be loud in my house tonight. We got one colored looking heifer on this big bunch. The rest are pretty much all solid black. But that one definitely has some different genetics in there. They are walking the pen, but they for the most part filled up and ate. Ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch Okay, we're gonna sell them over there. There's 20. And then the other 44 are here. So they got two days left on feed and we'll sell them. Crosby really likes to participate with the calf. That one's for water. Uh, that's just a bigger bucket. There's some cat feed. So all these cattle are lined up eating. That one's a little thin and that one. Trying to get him off here without disturbing other cattle. I slowly walk him to the back of the pen around this corner down where he can see that escape. See away from me. And then hopefully he hits that hole. This one was nice and calm. For me. Not feeling very good though. All right, today is double crop bean day. Here on our only field of double crop beans. We've kind of gone away from them because they haven't been doing as well as double crop milo in these dry years and uh, once again, that's proving to be the case. Not a great yield here. It was worth trying them again and see how they do I guess, but not going to be very fun. Okay, this calf also needed a shot. I got it with the rope. Then I got to get it unattached. There. That calf is a huge mom, but it's not producing much milk. I think she's like a seven, eight, nine. She's a nine-year-old cow. She's one of my biggest cows, but she's going to wean the smallest calf. I can't keep her around because she's got some of the highest food cost. That calf's not growing like it should. It's not keeping up with the others. And had a little bit of a cough, so I gave it a shot. So there it goes running off with its mom. She doesn't like me anymore. I just had to herd some distillers out here to keep them all calm while I doctored the calf. See that? That one and some of these other calves are looking pretty pretty strong and that calf wasn't, so I had to intervene. I think I got my count right. 40 on this side. And then there's more on the other side of the creek. It was kind of tough to get the count, but I got 39 once and 40 once. For those of you watching who have cows, well, calves, how often do you count your calf groups when they're like, you know, two to six months old? Because I can't count them every time I check them, but it's nice to count them at least once every other week. I'm curious, how often do you guys count your calves? All right, we're running on this field of double crop beans. It was a good stand. It was about one rain away, it feels like, but it's easy to say that. These are under 10 bushel to the acre. And here's a draw running through the field that got a little water. Those are probably 40-50. So example A of what our double crops can do without moisture and with moisture. All right, we polished off this field in a hurry. Only made one truckload. Very sad beans, so I didn't film a lot of it. Thankfully, this was our only field of double crop beans. We went with more double crop milo this year. Double crop milo is doing much better than this. We're going to this next field. We're going to double crop milo. Should be our best field. So we'll see how it does. Dad's going to head over here. I've still got to unhook my header. I was helping him with his. All right, there's the remains of the field. We took the combines to the next field, which was a double crop milo field. And then dad brought me back here to get the semi to take it in in the morning. Just a two-man operation today because there wasn't very many bushels. Steele holds his utensil for good measure, but eats with his hand. Thanks for watching everyone. Check out our music videos linked in the description. 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