Chopping Forage Sorghum For SILAGE | Kansas Farming 2024

Alright, we're having some little showers but we're not really amounting to much yet. But today we are planning, if everything goes well, to chop this double crop forage sorghum. This has only been in the ground 80 days. It was supposed to be ready to chop in 90 days. We planted it close to, well it was about June 28th or something like that. And it was almost dead and then we got those August rains and it grew this tall. Now it's going backwards again and there's chinch bugs eating on it. But it's gonna make some good tons. I'm gonna go move the pivot out of it. We didn't have, we didn't pump any water on it but when we chopped the corn over on the other side we had to move, swing the pivot into this. So I'm gonna go get it out of the way, do some maintenance and get chopping. 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. Salinas maybe got some actual rain the last couple days because now it's thundering and something's coming down up there again. There's a little rainbow. Happy cows. Getting a nice little shower here. I don't think it's gonna stop us but it's raining pretty good. Okay we are starting on the double crop cane today. This stuff is almost as tall as an arm straight up so not quite nine feet tall. This one's over eight and a half I would say, at eight and a half, eight, seven and a half to eight and a half parts of the field. Anyway we, it's not quite mature all the way, hasn't quite matured. It does have some leaves down here that are gonna help get that dry matter down but the main worry we have is that it's gonna go down, that it will fall down and then that really slows down harvest. So we are gonna chop it here in the next two days. Now that's some feed. This is where we, where the pivot was stuck so it was basically summer fallowed. Grew some really heavy stuff this year. Can't even see the ropes. The rain delayed us till this afternoon but we're going now. Hopefully can get done by tomorrow sometime. So you can see this is a double crop forage sorghum. You can still see the wheat stubble from what we harvested this June and then we went in right after the wheat and planted forage sorghum and it did pretty good. Had some really well-timed rains. Could have used a little more rain at the end here but from a tonnage perspective it's gonna be pretty good. We are actually hauling this silage of our own to a neighbor's silage pile. We have plenty of silage. We chopped a little more corn than we probably should because this double crop was dying and we didn't think we were going to get much out of it but then of course after our ain't no rain video it started raining and it really really made a pretty good crop out of this. So we decided to sell it to the neighbor who was kind of low on feed. All right we're fueling up trucks. This one needs fuel. Gonna check tires make sure everything's ready for another day of hauling silage. We got all the bales moved off my field. 17 here. A big chunk. About one semi-load up on the hill and then so that means all those paths are clear and ready to fence the rest of the way. So once we're done with silage harvest got more fencing to do. Once again today I'm driving the tandem but we had a cutter breakdown pretty minor so I quit. I quit hauling. I moved my like 10 or 12 more bales off now I'm ready to haul again. You OG Peterson Farm Bros fans you know about this orange tandem from farmer style video I'm farming and I grow it. The Kenworth has replaced the tandem on our farm but this tandem hauled hundreds I guess of loads of silage for us over the years. It's been nice with using our uncle's truck extra truck to still have a radio to use while we're chopping. Okay they're on like the last seven rows or something. We've still got to add up the weights of the trucks uh since we're using four different trucks to get our yield but I think it yielded as much as per acre as like probably between 60 and 80 push hole double cropped milo wood was kind of our original math on it. I assume um Greg and Kendall have been vlogging some today of all of our chopping. I was in in the chopper most time and we're moving pretty fast I just don't feel like I have any time to film especially like safely. We were chopping right next to my house so my kids got to ride a long time the longest they've rode in anything um so it makes it easy when you can just pick them up and drop them off and um so that was fun. We did we were having trouble with the head um that it sprinkled each morning and so then the leaves were kind of wet which is it's kind of hard on any kemper head especially and then this one has quite a bit of wear so over winter we'd like to build up some spots on it but overall the the chopper did good. We got it done we can get a lot more done when it's moving and not causing trouble but it gets the same amount done or well it gets less done if it's broken down and not moving but we got it blown off here and I'm gonna just rinse it off real quick and Greg's doing the chores. Kendall and mom are helping at a church event so we got done just in time at the end of the day it was a good day we had some trouble but we got done what we needed to do and that was good tomorrow um Riley is scheduled to be induced so hopefully by this time tomorrow we'll have a new baby so that'll be exciting. Loading up some heifers here on a pot load today see what they weigh see what they bring all right here's the last six hey come on some of these are branded cattle they were probably bought as weaned ones in the spring in May and April now they're selling come on heifers. Thursday afternoon picking our last field of corn this is the field in front of my house we already picked the north half of it it was terrible and then we chopped some of it as well so it was on that's kind of up on the knoll up on the hill it was pretty bad this year is uh not bad at all it's close to 100 bushel an acre that's essentially what we shoot for on dry land corn is is 100 and so happy about this 100 bushel acre corn um in in a dry year that we've had but because the the north half of the field was so bad it's going to average out to probably more like 75 so you know that's going to be right around crop insurance so a little disappointed but again with the amount of rain we had with the heat we had this corn took a ton of wind so it's kind of it's all over the place the rows don't look very straight so this corn went through a lot and it's just one of those maybe next year type things feels good to be on our last field um we we had more corn this year than we've ever had and it would have been nice if it would have rained more but you take what you can get all right there kendall goes in with the load taking it to the elevator always fun to harvest in front of your house rolling corn to make space for another load from greg's cornfield here's four home-raised heifers one two three four all nursing the calf right now make that up for a cow she came in bread not as big as her all right got this filled finished up corn harvest is done normally we don't start soybeans until basically october normally we would just be getting ready to plant wheat here next after corn but uh the soybeans are looking way ahead of schedule there you know with how hot and dry it's been they look like they could be ready any time so looks like we're just gonna go right from one harvest to the next as per usual no days off no we'll we'll take a couple days to to switch over for sure but corn harvest for the year we had it was it was decent can't complain hey we bought kyle's calves again i think this is the third year we've bought kyle's calves making seed wheat out of the bed hopper style bed other than a silenced truck because it's an end dump it makes it pretty easy to move around in the yard and pretty easy for the seed cleaner guy the guy who comes to clean our seed wheat uh our time slot is tomorrow morning or saturday morning we want to have each of our seed varieties ready for them in different uh you got to have one that's emptying and another one that's collecting looking on to seed wheat trailer got three little trailers like this plus some other bigger trailers for seed wheat my wagon banging it's so high maintenance but it works good enough to put my grain in all right it is seed wheat cleaning day we're gonna get the seed wheat out of this bin and we've got the seed cleaner guy here and he'll clean it and we'll put it in different trailers the classic kansas seed wheat trailers every kansas wheat farmer has sketchy trailers he puts the seed wheat in this is the time of year we filmed farming life yeah i already sang it i sang it as you were undesirable stuff all right i got another couple tagged uh then i kicked three more out onto that grass uh onto that millet so they're out of this pen we got 0.8 uh eight tenths 80 hundredths of rain last night um so that's exciting it should help that that sedan out there keep growing and uh this is all that's left so this is all we have left to calf there's still like two in there but they were not acting like i was going to be able to get them out of the pen myself um so i'll try another day i took the three oldest calves out of the pen good job guys good teamwork very nice her hair looks pretty light colored look at her fingers she has really long fingers thanks for watching everyone check out our music videos linked in the description you can also follow us on facebook instagram tick tock twitter snapchat and explore our website www.petersonfarmbrothers.com see you guys next time