Interesting weekend....
We had good luck and bad luck working on the tractor this weekend.
We finally got the 3rd cylinder sleeve out, and broke a new one putting it in, then I found microscopic cracks in the other two we had already installed. That's another $100 bucks ordering new ones, and we won't get to start on it again till next weekend.
The other news, is that I bought my first actual piece of farm equipment completely by myself this weekend. (Ok, Joe helped me load it on the trailer and haul it back home.)
I found a 75 bushel, ground-driven John Deere manure spreader in really decent condition (out of craigslist). I paid $700 for it (trust me, that's a deal for one of these) and now all I have to do is haul a dump truck or two worth of horse manure over to the farm to use it this fall. The manure is FREE from a horse farm.
To put this in perspective, a ton of fertilizer right now is running for $600 - $700 a ton. Being as I need about 2 to 2 1/2 tons for the whole farm for a year, that puts me at anywhere between $1200-$1400 for 2 tons, or $1500 - $1750 for 2 1/2 tons. That's per year, and just with the prices that are set currently.
Since synthetic fertilizer is pretty closely tied to the price of a barrel of oil, I watched the price spike to $1400 a ton this summer. You can imagine what that would spike my input price to for my small farm.
Irregardless of fuel costs for hauling and spreading, I should justify my investment in about 1 season in saved input costs. Plus the benefit of using a natural fertizer instead of synthetic, and building organic material in my soils to boot.
I need to give it a new coat of paint, grease up all the chains and gear boxes real well, and oil the wooden floorboards up, as I'll probably only get a season or two out of the floorboards till I have to replace them, but that's not too bad. Now I need to come up with a name for my new toy.
I'm happy!
We finally got the 3rd cylinder sleeve out, and broke a new one putting it in, then I found microscopic cracks in the other two we had already installed. That's another $100 bucks ordering new ones, and we won't get to start on it again till next weekend.
The other news, is that I bought my first actual piece of farm equipment completely by myself this weekend. (Ok, Joe helped me load it on the trailer and haul it back home.)
I found a 75 bushel, ground-driven John Deere manure spreader in really decent condition (out of craigslist). I paid $700 for it (trust me, that's a deal for one of these) and now all I have to do is haul a dump truck or two worth of horse manure over to the farm to use it this fall. The manure is FREE from a horse farm.
To put this in perspective, a ton of fertilizer right now is running for $600 - $700 a ton. Being as I need about 2 to 2 1/2 tons for the whole farm for a year, that puts me at anywhere between $1200-$1400 for 2 tons, or $1500 - $1750 for 2 1/2 tons. That's per year, and just with the prices that are set currently.
Since synthetic fertilizer is pretty closely tied to the price of a barrel of oil, I watched the price spike to $1400 a ton this summer. You can imagine what that would spike my input price to for my small farm.
Irregardless of fuel costs for hauling and spreading, I should justify my investment in about 1 season in saved input costs. Plus the benefit of using a natural fertizer instead of synthetic, and building organic material in my soils to boot.
I need to give it a new coat of paint, grease up all the chains and gear boxes real well, and oil the wooden floorboards up, as I'll probably only get a season or two out of the floorboards till I have to replace them, but that's not too bad. Now I need to come up with a name for my new toy.
I'm happy!