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.

The King Corn and Captain Kirk

WOW! Has it really been a couple months since I posted anything here?  I guess I've gotten busy and distracted and then just out of the practice.  I'll have to improve a bit.

So what has been happening? We finished harvest and fall tillage and are deep in to out mid-December "I really oughta's". You know, I ought to work on equipment, catch up the  books, get ready for Christmas, on and on. 

Oh, and I want to welcome any readers of the Christian Standard. Last month there was an article I had some problems with so I wrote a response.  I included the url for the farm website.  When CS published my response online it included a link to here.  So if you read "The King Corn and Captain Kirk" and my reply you may have decided to visit us here..Welcome!

Let's see, needs some pictures.  How about these I took today?

If you are on Facebook stop by the Bumpus Farm page and say howdy

Hello Amy from Cell One ...

Amy called as I was drilling wheat this afternoon.  I told her if she wanted to see what I was doing to look on the farm web site. Here is the tractor I was driving

I was pulling this

With it I can plant wheat 30 feet wide with every pass through the field.  This little box is my GPS unit with autosteer

It plugs in to a little antenna on the roof that reads signals from several satellites to determine its position.   This tractor is "auto-steer ready" which means I plug in a cable from the tractor to it, touch the button (see the green steering wheel in the lower right corner?) and it steers itself. I just fold up the steering wheel and let it go

Which frees me up to talk on by Blue Parrot headset through my iPhone

Make sense now?

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Something we are working on ...

I've had the URL www.BumpusFarms.info for as long as I've had www.BumpusFarms.us.  I just haven't done much with it.  I started working on it in 2011 on a different site with different purposes. It kind of got shoved on the back burner and ignored.

Wordpress operates a bit different than blogspot.  I think it may offer a few more options if I can figure them out. I'm hoping to do more with it, so kind of keep an eye on it and see what develops

Bean Harvest has started ... FINALLY !

Some years we are done with all beans but double crop by now.  We have been driving around looking ... and looking ... and all the sudden WOW ! Those changed overnight! So we started Wednesday afternoon.

First problem: We were expecting to go to milo before beans. So we had to make some combine and head adjustments and clean out the corn from the combine.  Milo screens out well in processing.  Corn does not. So I got up in the combine with a leaf blower and a shop vac and cleaned for a while.

We finally got to the field. Beans ranged from 12.3% to "boy those are green" in the same field.

Once we got the field done we had a new problem.  Almost all our beans are seed production. That means we need to put them in a bin. The problem is we haven't actually used our new toy, yet. Since seed beans are very quality sensitive there is a benefit to using a conveyor instead of an auger. But you can't dump a hopper bottom in our conveyor. This Spring I talked to Chris PIne at Yargus Manufacturing (LAYCO if you're an old guy like me)  and bought a reconditioned unloader. 

We were a bit different than their usual customer.  We wanted hydraulic drive instead of electric.  They said if we would run the hoses that was no problem. So after a trip to see Steve Shawler at West Union Hydraulics last week we were ready to go.

 

It's a bit of a hassle, because you have to pull the truck up and then roll the unloader under it.

But it works and was about $10,000 less than a drive over.  So we have beans in the bin and the only auger that touched them was in the combine.

Now we are all ready to go and ... yep, beans are still too green everywhere else.