Meet the Farmers

Some of the early planted wheat is up. Took advantage of an early rain to get into the field early. Wishing I had more acres that look like this. Sometimes we don't get any wheat up until November.

Doing a little planting this afternoon with my tractor buddy. Was going to do more, but something in the PTO electronics that run the hoist on my seed truck decided to go on strike. Always something to fix on the farm!

Life has been pretty busy between farm work and family life, so I've more or less been taking a break from posting anything. We wrapped up harvest a month ago. Here are some late-come photos of the 2024 crop. Overall better than we expected, with yields coming in about 20% higher than our long term average. It's good to be done with harvest, and hopefully all the hot days are behind us! Scarcely done though, and we already have the planter in the field for the 2025 crop! More to come!

Life has been busy around here. The Lonerock fire, one of Oregons monster wildfires, came uncomfortably close on Sunday and Monday, coming within about 3 miles of some of our wheat fields. A lot of farmers and ranchers showed up with water and dozers and discs to help in the effort. We helped cut some fireline with our disc along Hale Ridge, which was as far north as the fire progressed towards us. It is still burning uncontrolled to the SE, but our neck of the woods is currently safe. While relatively little wheat was burned, our local ranchers saw thousands of acres of range go up in smoke. Hats off and prayers for our firefighters that are still out there battling this blaze in the sniffling heat.

While the wheat is beginning to mature in the fields, we are trying to wrap up a few projects around the farmyard. Today we completed the scale deck overhaul. It will be nice to have a working truck scale again...one which I'm not worrying about the deck collapsing beneath me each time I drive over it! My grandfather acquired the working parts of the scale from a no-longer-in-existence grain warehousing company in nearby Ione, Oregon in the late 1950's. In redoing all this, I think we used about 3x the wood preservative I originally thought we'd need. Hopefully that means my kids will still be using the scale if they take over the family farm in another 25 or 30 years.

Among other spring projects around the farm, one of them is replacing the timbers on our truck scale. Ours is a dry climate, but the scale pit stays humid and eventually these beams and many of the deck boards have become too rotten to bear a load. We got everything out. Next we'll start placing the new beams, which we were able to get custom cut from a local business, Eastern Oregon Custom Lumber.

The semi-arid desert we farm in still holds a lot of different wildlife. I found this caterpillar eating on a wild carrot species that grows on the hillsides. Google lens identified it as an old world swallowtail. We see the adult butterflies of this species on and off all summer, but this is the first time in recent memory I've stumbled across the juvenile stage. God has placed his beautiful handiwork everywhere.

The wheat is growing! This is our Hard Red Wheat looking towards the old school house and grain bins. It's hard to believe that we'll be harvesting in only about 50 days (give or take), especially since it's been so cool here in Oregon this spring. I tally 3 days above 80 so far for the month of May, and many days have failed to hit a high of 60.

Haven't posted in awhile because life has been busy. It's spring time, and new life is appearing on the farm, whether its the yellow Arrow Leaf Balsamroot flowers on the hillside or the additional wheat that we planted in March! The biggest new life around here is the addition of another farmer to our family. We welcomed a new son! I'll have to start training him on the tractor here in another year or two.

Bethany has been up to more sourdough shenanigans. These are some 75% whole wheat english muffins using our Hard White Wheat. She later tried with 100% and the results were about the same. Very nice rise, and the kids approved. 😀 The vote from the littles is always a good one to get!

Big news! 😀 After lots of work and planning, we finally finished our facility upgrades and are now an approved processing facility! This means we can now sell flour and other processed wheat anywhere in the country, as well as to retailers and foodservice establishments. You can now order our Hard Red Winter and Soft White flour from our website. Hard White is coming as soon as I complete the labels.

February is often a slow month on the farm, but this one has been busier than normal. First, we top-dressed with some additional fertilizer since it's been a wet winter. Then, we've been hauling wheat to fulfill some early contracts. On top of that, we just finished some custom grass planting for a neighbor. Finally managed to get it done between rainstorms when the ground wasn't too muddy to drive on! Looking forward to some warmer weather this month, but so far the forecast is for showers, wind, and hard frost!

Recently our one employee and myself attended an annual SAIF farm safety training. For non-Oregonians out there, SAIF is our states primary workman's compensation insurance carrier. Working farms have high rates of accidents and fatalities compared to most industries. This is largely due to the seemingly endless variety of tasks performed under an ever-changing variety of circumstances. The conference was useful in helping us understand not only how to comply with state law, but actually mitigate or eliminate risk around the farm. It's hard to sum up farm safety in a photo, so here is a shot of the training material. Any farmers out there? Feel free to share your own experience improving safety on the farm!

Like much of the country, we also have been blasted with arctic air and buried in enough snow to make the landscape seem like tundra. Besides the opportunity for the kids to sled down the driveway, the cold also affords a good opportunity to cool the grain down for longer term storage. Here I have our home-made generator setup powering the blower fans on two bins, since most places on the farm have no power nearby. The temperature is about 5 degrees when I took this. Unfortunately, we hadn't added quite enough diesel treat to the tank, and when it got down to 0 the fuel gelled... so when it warmed up slightly the next day we added a bit more to keep it going.