Thursday, January 20, 2011

I Suck At This Challenge Thing

Sorry, friends and neighbors. I know you all anxiously await my ramblings every day, but I've come up short on many occasions. In my defense, I had to move snow last night. That was a good time. I shouldn't complain too much, though, because it's paying the bills. Bills. I remember when I didn't have any of those and I was making $300 a week waiting tables. 16 year old boy + $$ = dumb. Those were the days.

I'm starting to get tired, but I don't feel like going to bed. I like to hoard my time. It's supposed to snow again Saturday night, so I want to spend as much time in my leather recliner as possible before then. 

I just remembered I didn't get a chance to run a "regular" feature of my blog on Friday. It's called: A Piece Of Farm Equipment I Think It Would Be Neat To Have. I think that's what it's called, anyway.




This is a Geringhoff corn head. What's so special, you ask? These are chopping corn heads, which means they destroy the corn stalk as you pick corn. This eliminates a pass through the field for us, as we run a shredder after harvest/in the spring to do the same thing.

Here. This is what corn stalks look like when we get done picking with our corn head:




You can see that they stick up out of the ground pretty far. Now, this is what a field looks like after a Geringhoff head has picked corn:





Pretty cool, eh? I think it is. Like I said, it's really cool because it eliminates a pass through the field for us as we would have to come back after harvest and shred stalks down to this same length. It would also eliminate a piece of equipment (stalk shredder) and would save us fuel. The downside? They're expensive. I believe they're about $80,000 new. A John Deere 894 corn head like we have goes for $20-30,000. A shredder like we have goes for about $10,000. You'd have to save a lot of fuel to make up for it. Dad and I have talked about buying one but can't convince ourselves to do it. So, yeah, I think it would be neat to have. Not going to happen, though.

3 comments:

  1. With a name like Geringhoff, it's got to be good.

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  2. Now out here on the prairie some would use the taller corn stalks to graze cattle and catch snow but that may not be a concern out there in Gods country.

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  3. As someone who appreciates the lack of snow drifts along 34 because of the taller stalks, I agree. And as a cow, I also agree.

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