Farming Fridays! - The Farmer's Daughter USA

Seed Delivery!

Our soybean seed was delivered this week. Unlike the corn, the soybeans come in these really big bags that have to be carried around with the fork lift.

The soybeans we’re using this years are Round Up Ready 2 from Stine seed. I’ll explain more about that next week.

To put into perspective how many seeds are in these bags, try this: each bag has enough seeds to plant 30 acres with 15 inch rows. Put another way, there are 40 actual bushels to a bag and each bushel contains about approximately 140,000 soybean seeds.

Want to take a stab at the price of each bag?

About $2,000 each. (One bushel of soybeans is about $50. )

By the way, the USDA predicts that there will be 81.5 million acres of soybeans planted this year. Compare that to 76.533 million acres last year that were planted into soybeans. U.S. farmers planted 77.198 million acres of soybeans in 2012.

That’s a whole lotta beans!

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The Dangers of Farming – Illustrated

Hey, Farmer’s Daughter readers! Unfortunately, corn harvest is still on hold. We’ve actually started on soybeans, which is the usual order of things.

Combine with soybean head and filled to the brim with soybeans

Soybeans are just about half of our operation, so we’ll be busy with that for a few weeks now. Normally, the soybeans are harvested first and on Wednesday we started the process of combining beans.

I drove through Indiana this week and corn harvest was definitely underway down there. It was very exciting to see all the combines and trucks running around. (And, don’t worry, I slowed down and even pulled over when I came up to a combine on the road!)

However, just because we weren’t harvesting the whole week doesn’t mean it wasn’t an exciting week. One of the lesser discussed aspects of farming is really the danger. I’ve posted a lot of photos of the equipment we have, including the combine above. Inside there are a lot of small working pieces and it wouldn’t take a whole lot for a finger or a shirt tail to get caught into a piece of the equipment and be gone before you know it.

But the smaller tools can also be dangerous. Just ask my dad.

He’s had his share of injuries. Power washer into your thumb? Apple tree limbs fall on your shoulder? Jump off the tractor a little too high and a little too hard?

Those hurt.

This week he had the chainsaw out to cut up some wood for our wood burner (which now heats the barn, as well as the house). As he was standing on a pile of wood, cutting through a piece, the chainsaw slipped. He managed to cut through his boot, socks, and got a nasty scratch on his foot.

Nasty chainsaw cut

Chainsaw hole

Thankfully, all he received was a scratch and not something much, much worse. Mom found him sitting in the living room and not exactly sure he should take his boot out and look (after all, the blood wasn’t gushing out).

Unfortunately, these are the types of accidents that can easily happen each and every day (but, thank God don’t!). There is no worker’s compensation when we get hurt — it’s just a risk of the business. We make it look romantic and beautiful — and it certainly is — but farming is also exceptionally dangerous.