Saturday, June 25, 2011

Hilling Kern

We are currently taking our last pass through the corn fields. We hill, or ridge, as some people call it, so we can irrigate. After we're done hilling we'll lay out pipe. Which sucks. We have to hill to make a trench for the water to run down. Our fields are leveled to run a certain way, so you lay the pipe at the top end, and the water runs to the bottom end, hence the term "gravity irrigation." I'll take pictures when we lay out pipe, which will make it easier to understand. Not many people use pipe anymore, but we have to around here because we have a lot of small fields where a pivot wouldn't work or make financial sense. And because there are some landlords that won't put up pivots even if they would work. I took a few pictures so you could see how it works. There isn't much going on with the hiller - there's a small shovel on the front of the unit, then there's a hiller bottom. That's it. 


Here are some other pictures. Yes, I got to go 7 MPH today, which means I was covering a little over 20 acres an hour. I did about 150 acres Thursday, but only got about 80 yesterday. Yesterday was a bad day. I was putting fertilizer on one of our fields while hilling, and apparently we got the bottom of the barrel fertilizer, because every couple of rounds I had to stop and clean out my screens because they were filling up with gunk. I was not pleased.





1 comment:

  1. I love your pictures.
    I'm used to only knowing farming from driving past fields and seeing changes. It's fascinating to know more about what's really happening.

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