Idaho Farming
After many years of grass seed farming I got a chance to do some Idaho farming. I've traded grass seed for alfalfa and some Teff grass.
Swather
Many fast spinning knives in there!
I grew up on a row crop farm and have spent many hours driving tractors, but I've never driven a swather. Now I can say I have. Swathers steer off the front tires and with a hydrostatic transmission it can turn into a carnival rather quickly!! Ha! The steering is really sensitive. A little turn, gets you big movement you can spin around on one tire and be off down the field in no time. Now the weird thing is, is if you are going in reverse you have to steer backwards! If you forget that and start to correct it, you start spinning around really fast! You can go four or five revolutions before you figure out how to make it stop! I have to go slow and think about it so I don't spin around.
Click to viewThe other weird thing is both the tractor and swather drive off of gps. I do have to turn around on the ends. In the swather I can set it to drive straight, follow pivot tracks(curves) or even squiggly lines. I set start point and an end point. The first time I tried to set a pivot track line I drove two squiggly and it couldn't figure out what I wanted. Ha!
The other amazing thing about driving swather is the speed! Most of the farming I've done is much slower. Like s combine maxes out at 2.5 miles per hour. The swather in a smooth field could go 13 miles per hour! Crazy! Most of the time I was running 9-10 miles per hour. In one field I hit a pivot track that was much deeper than I thought, grabbed the steering wheel and went for a bit of a wee ha ride through the field. Another field was really hilly and I had to hang onto the arm rest to stay in the seat and it felt like a bit of a roller coaster ride coming over the crest of the hill in another spot. That field was a 6-7mph field.
I did drive some tractor using a disk, harrow, roller thing. It had three different hydraulic things going on. One controlled the front section depth, second controlled the back section depth and the third raised and lowered the whole thing up and down. We went over the field twice. The first time was easy because you got to the end, picked up the whole thing, turned around and put it back in the ground. So, one button, turn, get steering clicked in and get it back in the ground. Second pass was, lift the front out, lift the back out , start turning then lift the whole thing up. As you complete your turn your resetting the depths of the front and back making sure your gps hasn't picked up some weird line and putting it back in the ground. All that happens in about two-three minutes. You're also trying to make it as even as possible so you don't have to make a bunch of passes finishing up the field. I love the challenge of getting it all done in one fell swoop!
Command center of the tractor
A thing of beauty! :)
I also planted some Teff grass for hay. Good thing we used gps because it was really hard to see where you had been. That tractor had a short wheel base and was really rough to ride it! Yikes! Hats off to Tyler, who spends a lot of time in that terrible thing! The sheep I work are right across the road and it's been cool to see the grass come up and know that I helped make that happen!
Seed drill
Command center of the tractor pulling the seeder.
Shows the line I'm driving on. Blue is planted, grey not.
I don't know that I'll be doing any more farming. I'm the backup person. If the other three guys are busy, that's when I get to step in. It's been fun to get to use all the new gadgets and how to learn to drive a new piece of equipment! Love doing it here in Idaho too!