A "slow" August ...

Yeah, I know.  I should post more often than once a month  I thought this was supposed to be a slow season on the farm! Let's see, what has happened since last time?  Oh, the bins we were pouring concrete for?  They're up

Yes, It's a poor photo.

The irrigators we were running pipe and wire to?  They are going.

And you can get a Hummer stuck when the wheels get mud packed and it slides off in the trench we had made.

 On a personal note we have been to reunions

and weddings

and funerals

 

and more reunions

Met up with an old school friend we had not seen in 40 years
Took us a while to track Larry down.
He's not on Facebook but his sister is!

 

We've done home remodeling

with help of course.

We've gone on fire runs

and field days

We've worked on irrigators
 WHAT DO YOU MEAN NO OIL?

 No, that rod is NOT supposd to stick out the bottom of the oil level gauge.

Where did all THAT come from?

The library asked if we could come up with a display or two.

Here is one of harvesting equipment

 The 560 with mounted picker was Dad's favorite

And we still have a few projects to get finished before fall

We've pretty much kept busy down on the farm.

I'm beginning to understand what Scot said

When I was driving the gas truck one of my customers said "I get up.  I work on irrigators, I go to sleep."  I noticed later he never mentioned going to bed.  At times I have felt the same way this year.  Adding 5 new irrigators really hasn't been that much of a problem.  Other than the normal start up problems getting all the kinks and wrinkles smoothed over they have been trouble free.

But then there are the older ones.

We replaced the engine on the Drake Place south pump this winter. I mentioned back in September it had some issues (http://bumpusfarms.blogspot.com/2013/09/been-making-water.html) The engine had a lot of hours, the Rockford PTO had a few problems.  Last year we replaced the turbo output because the cast iron rotted away and broke.

 3 little springs that fell out of the clutch.  I guess they weren't too important. and the teeth on the clutch plate are almost gone.  So we replaced it with a new propane engine

I love how quiet it runs.  I've done things I never did before, like replace a gearbox on a tower  A right now I have a safety wire broken on a towable

We're trying to find a wireless solution.  The Drake Place north pump lost the PTO (think heavy duty clutch)  Everyone I talked to said it was fixable. Or for $200 more I could have a new one.  8:00 the next morning I was in Evansville picking up a new Twin Disk PTO

We've done a few other things. Like take out trees

 TIMBER !

 and more trees. Dee can make a big mess pretty quickly

We cut down 2 trees at Mom's and 9 trees at Neal's.  Most of the big wood was taken by neighbors for firewood.  But someone still had to pick up limbs and sticks.  I called for reinforcements

 And then for more fun w picked up limbs and brush in the cemetery

We've also put in water lines

and poured concrete and moved grain bins

And we did something else I've never done, put fungicide on commercial corn

I'm about ready for a break.

Bumpus.farm is here!

WE'RE EXCITED! OK, we're farm geeks, which means we get excited over odd things.  Mike got this email today:

Dear Michael Bumpus,

GoDaddy has successfully secured your domain. BUMPUS.FARM
is now yours, congratulations!  Thanks for registering with us.

No, we're not sure what we will do with it.  For now www.BumpusFarms.us and www.Bumpus.Farm will forward to the same blogspot page.  www.BumpusFarms.info goes to a page we haven't developed yet.

This all developed when we discovered BumpusFarms.com was already registered to someone in Ohio.  Mike decided to jump in and get control of the .us and .info addresses while they were still available.  When GoDaddy announced the .farm address was becoming available we jumped on it.

First post this year ? !

Really? I haven't updated the farm page since December? I guess we have been putting more stuff on the Farm's Facebook page and kind of ignoring this one. Snow, posted roads, crashed trucks, new equipment, just all kinds of things to update.  For now I'm going to put up a few random photos taken since the first of the year kind of showing how the winter went

 We moved the office!

 It is now upstairs and has much more space

 and interesting art work on the walls

 It snowed.  And snowed

 Eventually we were able to haul grain

 Although there were special challenges this year

 Did I mention it snowed?

 Truck tires needed repaired

 And tractors needed repaired

 And trucks needed repaired ...

 although one got replaced

And now we are waiting for it to dry enough to plant.