Grain Sorghum Harvest Begins! | Kansas Milo 2024

Hey everyone, it's the Peterson Farm Brothers. Today is National Farmers Day. Farming is a big job. We face many complex challenges such as weeds, pests, and disease, as well as the unpredictability of the markets and the weather. Through all this, farmers try to produce food and products for the world, and farmers have come a long ways throughout the years in how we deal with all these challenges. The amount of scientific research and development that goes into both crop production and livestock production is truly amazing. We are thankful to innovative companies like BASF who play a huge part in improving agriculture for farmers like us. And as we celebrate National Farmers Day today, we also want to celebrate the agricultural community as a whole. Happy National Farmers Day. Well, it took us longer to get them out of the pit than it did to separate it. We got our calves on the left, some of the cows on the right, some of the cows we already dropped back. We're gonna put them in a side-by-side pen for fence line weaning. 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 So the old tire on the feed wagon bit the dust last week. You can see this one's pretty old too. Then we found out you can't really get that tire size anymore, so we had to get the whole assembly. So now we got a shiny new rim on our feed wagon. Finally got here. It wasn't too busy when we had to, uh, well it's been kind of busy. This has just been parked here, so it'll be nice to have it back. We're gonna get these here, cows and calves weaned. So I've been trying to help with chores every morning before heading to the combines as we usually do, but today we need to wean these, so it might take a little extra time. K-State football on the air. Cutting some beans. What could be better? Okay he's off of there. We finished this side of the creek and we're on to cut a nice bean field, which will be one of our neighbor's fields. I'm already ready to go. I was faster than Nathan. Well really I just quit before he did and I made him finish the last little strip. We got like five things here though and only three drivers. This is how we roll. On to the next. There's some double crop beans. They'll have to be cut later. We're driving right past them though. Look pretty good. They got some late range. Well they would have been late range for normal beans. They're maybe mid-season range for double crop beans. They're still growing. K-S-U Wildcats. Say it again. K-S-U Wildcats. K-S-U Wildcats. Cutting beans. This train passes and we'll have to carve out the field. Cutting around it. Some of these are pretty green but they're testing dry. Well I'm out of fuel. I'm just left with a truck that I had basically full. It's not a super far haul so they're gonna leave with it. Time to turn this machine off. She did good for me today. Cut a lot of beans. Cut more than the other one. I out cut Nathan because I am a superior combine operator or just he had a bad luck day. Doing some service. There's Greg with our dry poor creek fuel trailer. Name brand. This morning we are fixing this center draper belt. We had to stop this combine Saturday evening. I don't know why I did this. If anyone wants to enlighten me they can. I don't know if one side was too tight or if it wasn't trailing right or if we hit something but anyways five hundred dollars later we're putting a new center belt on. So I gotta take all these nuts loose and pull it out put the new one in splice back together. Okay out with the old in with the new. At least I got a shady spot to work. It's Monday. We've had a day full of breakdowns so far. Nathan was fixing the belt on the 9770 and then was fixing a knife the straw chopper of the 9610 and we've just we've just been working on stuff it feels like all day but it's four o'clock we finally got both combines going and then Kendall came now with the grain cart. We were cutting without a grain cart because we were chopping silage. Mom, Dad and Kendall were chopping silage with our neighbors but now we've got two combines grain cart two semi-dryers we should be should be in business. These are some irrigated beans for our neighbors Wheat Ridge Land and Cattle. These are same neighbors that we're chopping with so we've got some of our crew chopping with some of their crew and some of our crew combining with some of their crew hauling so it's a lot of collaboration today. This field is by the interstate so if you've driven by on I-135 today you would have driven by us maybe seen us. I just brought the semi to my field I guess we're gonna do it next. We got an audience for this one we'll have Bubba and Uso watching us while they munch on their hay. I was gonna bring down some cows uh to put in a different pen to graze the field across the creek uh tomorrow morning I was gonna work them I think that's gonna have to wait till Wednesday I don't want to miss out on cutting my field. I can work cattle while they're cutting beans but not if I'm cutting my field. Well it was kind of a typical Monday. Mondays are the worst. But we got some beans cut we got done with this big field that we started Saturday. It's all that darkness over there. Our neighbor's over there picking some corn with the gleaner. He's on the other side of the interstate but we're gonna just leave everything here for tonight. We were gonna try to get started on the next field but it just got kind of late and dark. Here's your coffee cup. Oh thanks. You emptied out your cab? Emptied my what? You actually emptied out your cab? Yeah I did it just for you. Great job I'm so proud of you. I got all your trash too. My trash? I don't know somebody's trash. How did that come by? You think we should go get the grain cart just to line it up too or just leave it out there? Do I have to take you to your house? No dad's pickup is over across the creek so you need to take me there. I just finished my chores. I got to deal with one animal and then I got to feed my bucket calf. My wife is watching a JV football game tonight with the kids. They're not home yet. We're really playing truck tag. My dad has my pickup he just left with it. I drove Nathan's truck with the fuel trailer up here when I left the field and then Nathan's gonna grab my dad's. Well yesterday I didn't hardly do any cattle stuff because I had fixing stuff to do. That means we have some more cattle stuff to do this morning and tomorrow morning. But hey cattle been paying the bills. We don't just want all those soybeans to pop out there but we'll keep taking care of this stuff. Gotta catch up with Kendall. Nathan and I just sorted in 4B so we separated the steers and the heifers. There's 41 heifers. I gotta count these steers. Two, three, four, five, six. Don't take of me. We're having a family uh car ride. Why not mom? We've even got Laura with us. We've even got Laura on the uh speaker phone. And dad dad was on the other phone a little bit ago so we're riding to the field looking. Them machines all lined up ready to go this morning. Yeah the original OG, OG Peter 6. Moving the combine to the next field. Three Peterson brothers. I call dibs on the combine. Roll out. All right we made it to mom and dad's house. We're gonna go cut that field on the hill. We had to cross over this wire. I crossed over it and Greg crossed over it. Didn't put it down. Now all of our overaged heifers are out and I gotta come back in. All right girls what are we doing? I'm just going to ride in the combine. What are you cutting in the combine? Grady's not sure about this. Yeah I got a video of that. We got one jump in the in the truck basically by noon. Nathan wanted to do every last thing taking care of the combine. I mean all three of us were doing the combine. Nathan's going with the checkpoints but Greg and I are cutting now. Hopefully it'll be semi's today. Broken sickle section. Kind of still going over there though. Harvesting by the uh Sunnyside pumpkin patch here. Beans look green and they seem a little green but every load has been below 13.6. So we've just been cutting. On to the last pass here and I think it's been um I think we'll have a full fourth semi. Seems like they're gonna end up somewhere around 40 which I'm pretty happy with based on the year. Well so far with our beans we've cut a really bad field. We've cut a really good field for the year and then this this field's kind of average. Maybe what what we expected so it all kind of averages out. These are nice nice tall beans. They aren't yielding quite as as good as they look. They look pretty good but they're at least easy to cut because they're nice and tall and dry. So we're mowing through these pretty fast. This is a 90 acre field here and say we're over half done already. These poor heifers got locked off of their feed while we harvested that field up on the hill. But we didn't take too long and now we're getting out of here. Also we were gonna leave them out there but as soon as we crossed the wire they started following us and we're gonna cause trouble. So we had to shut them in the pen. Don't worry we'll let you back out. Try not to get shocked here. They were ready. Ready to head back out there. I gotta get the other one up. Yeah don't even think about it. You got plenty eating out there still. Well we're kind of running out of dry beans to cut. We might patch around a little tomorrow. We're also gonna work some cows and calves. We might switch to some milo but we're a little worried the milo is going to be the same way. There's going to be some late green sucker heads that we'll have to leave some patches. But also we could go to drilling wheat. We got a lot of open ground to drill wheat. So at the end of the day it's only October 1st so we're way ahead of schedule compared to some years. Of course it means that it was another dry year but we've had some okay yields. The field we cut today was 39 bushel to the acre so you know you hope for 40 basically so and you're pleased with anything above that. So we were only one bushel off of that. The field we could to go to tomorrow is here. This is where half the field was a cover crop and half wasn't. And then I pumped a little bit of water. The end row where there's years of compaction is all green. Then where there was no cover crop is less green and I think we could cut. Where there was a cover crop is a little yellow a little green. I'm guessing that'll be a little on the wet side. That's kind of what we ran in today. The first couple loads were dry from a field but then we got to like the wetter part and we hauled one load in that was a little too wet. But all right it is a uh gonna be a cow day. Maybe not completely. We'll probably still cut a little bean but we got to get the new fall pears. We're mostly done calving. They're running out of feed here at the farm so we got to run the calves through the chute and then haul them down and put the cows and calves on a new field of forage down by dad's place. So I'm gonna take the grain trailer off of this semi and hook it on to the cattle pot because that'll just make a lot less trips than using the stock trailer. It doesn't take too long to switch over. You know once we're done we'll put it back on the grain trailer. So we'll see how smoothly everything can go and and how much we can get done today. All right you can see the cows have got this cleaned up. Kimball is up there leading them in and then dad and I are gonna be on cleanup duty getting any stragglers. We're gonna drive around. Like there's one calf out there straggling behind. The cows, most of the cows know how to lead. Some of them are new and then of course the calves don't know how to lead so it's always fun with new calves. That's why we try not to have to move them too much. All right we had two stragglers that didn't want to cross the fence but I think we might have them. Don't jinx it. Don't jinx it. Went about as good as you could ask for so far. Go on buddy. Your mama's up there. Up there. There you go. It's much safer to haul them separately and we need to give some shots and stuff to the calves so that's why we got to separate them. And we try to do it as fast as possible. We'll have a real nice place for them to go afterward. Now we get to separate them. It's so loud you can barely talk to each other. It won't be very long I promise guys. So noisy. Taking a day off from harvest to catch up on cattle stuff. We got some baby calves here. We're working. Their mamas are complaining that we're taking them away from them for now. All right we're just about done with all these calves and we'll get them back with their moms. Everybody will be happier. A little turmoil. We got him. Got him running. There was one mischievous one. You've got to get him a name. Was it 247? Yeah. All right so while they're working the cows and calves it's kind of a two-man job. So I'm gonna go to blowing out all the filters and radiator on the combines. We've been harvesting farther away from the shop so we blown them out like with the truck air a little bit but gonna do it real good. Nice and close here. I did my best. It's a windy day so I did my best to park the combine to blow the dust away from me so we'll see if my strategy works out. I'm putting on my glasses. I guess I'll grab a dust mask as well just in case because I hate soybean dust. Everybody always hates on milo dust when they see us cutting milo. I believe strongly that soybean dust is worse than milo dust. It makes my eyes just hurt when you get a face full of that stuff and I know milo's a little itchy. Usually it's cooler when we're cutting milo too but it's a lot of times hot when we're cutting beans around here. If everything works and you don't have to get dusty that's best case scenario. All right getting them unloaded here at dad's. We'll let all the cows and calves match up here in in the pen probably and then they're gonna start west of the creek over there. So we'll probably let them match up and calm down a little and then open them up out to the where they'll be grazing. Well today has been a weird harvest day. It's four o'clock and we just got in the combines. We've been doing cattle stuff all morning and now it seems like these beans are a little on the wet side so we might have to just stop. We've been going hard for like a week or longer but we might have to just stop. We might have caught up. Well we did get one more load of beans cut after doing the cattle stuff but we're kind of out of dry beans to cut. We're on our later planted ones and these actually probably got more rain throughout the year. So we might go try milo. I'm putting in these cover plates for milo on our copperhead concaves. I could have put them in for beans too. The beans we've been cutting so far have been so nice and dry we we didn't really have any pods in the bin anyways but as we've been getting to these wetter ones then there's some harder threshing ones and for milo these are recommended. All right this first field of milo we're on. I don't know if it'll be our best milo. Probably. Real nice flat ground down here and then that hill is pretty tough. It drags down the yield but now we're on the low ground. You see I didn't make it back. We also don't have a... we lost our grain cart driver. We're getting a little ahead of the trucks but we're almost done. I gotta move this truck over there across the waterway. All right we're delivering some food to the milo field. What are we eating Blair? Zuppies, doughs, muffins. I don't know what the other... the combine is but I see one. It's coming towards us. Uh-huh. Well the first milo field is wiped off. They left me a full grain cart and the combines are on their road to the next field. Okay we've moved on the next milo field. This one has uh you know up here up here on the top the weed the weeds aren't as bad as down there but you can see there's plenty of them. This field um isn't doing too bad. It's doing better than last year. We actually did second year milo here for various reasons which makes the weed control probably harder and the chinch bug pressure higher and yet you know it's averaging 60 it says which that was low on the last field so maybe 70. This would have been a good candidate for like a late late planted corn like June planted corn which I've been tempted to do but I've I've resisted because it just seems to uh further complicate and diversify things but I would have been able to get better weed control and hopefully better chinch bug resisting. There's places where it says 80 to 100 so I think the yield will go up as we cut the better ground but this is west of the interstate again where it just it just rained less over here so it's just kind of what we're seeing. Okay well started hearing a clunking noise. It was the return elevator slip clutch and there's a big old chunk of something stuck in there so we got to get it out and then figure out where it came from I guess. When we got it out I thought it looked like a fan blade sure enough so I don't know I guess we'll see what happens. So dad just switched to the green cart. I switched him I just moved into the tall man with a load of cookies in it. It's supper time now I've got to have the ultimate self-control test here. Well it's been an eventful day. Mom and I went and helped our neighbor do some custom silage chopping so I was running a silage truck for most of the day. Finally got done with that around four and then came out here to the harvest field and switched Kendall and dad. They had to go do chores. Not that I could become two people but I took over for at least one of them and then the grain cart's sitting still now. But a nice evening, nice sunset, nice scenic milo field. Love harvesting milo in the evening. Love that red color as the sunlight hits it. So it's been a long day but what's nice is that probably the most most relaxing part of it is right now so I'm gonna enjoy that. All right quitting for the night. Nathan's talking on the phone to dad. Kind of see the combines. Can you see the stars? The stars look awesome tonight but you can't really see them on the video. Still a little glimpse of the sunset. You still on the phone? I was I was admiring the the stars and the sunset. If you look up you trip on the milo stalks. 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.