Wheat Harvest in Kansas

My brother harvested his first wheat crop this summer and finished up right before the 4th of July. It wasn't the first crop on our family's farm, he is now the 4th generation of farmers in the family!

This year was the first year we had our own combine and harvested our own crop. We normally hire what is referred to as a custom grain harvesting crew. They travel from the Southern US to the Northern US following the ripening of the wheat crop to harvest wheat for farmers at a set fee. Farmers call these people, "Custom Cutters." Farmers often hire custom cutters because you don't have to invest in all of the harvest equipment and incur the repair costs that it requires to maintain all of the machinery needed for harvest.

Even though it is still extremely dry in Southwest Kansas, the wheat was better than we had expected. We got a few late freezes in April and May that really set back the wheat and made my dad and brother nervous about the yields.  It was no bumper crop, but it just wasn't as terrible as they had expected.

Want to learn more about harvest? Check out this video from the Peterson Farm Bros!

Want to learn even more about harvest? I thought of some of the vocabulary that we use on the farm and you might find it useful to learn more about these words.

• Yield: this is a term we use to describe how much of a crop we harvest per acre of the crop planted. We usually talk about yield using bushels and acres. Some other countries use tons per hectares. 
• Combine: a piece of machinery specifically used for harvesting grain. It operates to reap, thresh and winnow the plants in order to gather just the grain for transport to the nearest grain elevator, barge or train. Crops that are harvested with a combine are wheat, oats, rye, barley, corn, soybeans and flax.
• Bushel: a bushel is a volume measurement used by farmers to describe an amount of grain. It is equal to 1.244 cubic feet or 32 quarts. 
• Test weight: this is a measure that farmers will use a lot in conversation. It is the measure of the weight of grain in pounds per volume in bushels. Wheat has a standard weight at a specific moisture content and it is 60 pounds per bushel at 13.5% moisture. 

Sometimes we forget that, in agriculture, we have our own lingo. I like to post about that lingo so that you can get a better understanding of what it is we do on a family farm.  Heck, there are even multiple words that all mean "Harvest" and are used with different crops. Many of these terms are regional, but it's interesting to hear people talk about how they all harvest their crops.

Synonyms for Harvest: 

Corn: shell, pick, shuck
Beans: run, cut
Wheat: cut, thresh
Cotton: pick, strip
Silage or Hay: lay down, cut, chop

Enjoy!

Tera

      

Welcome to My Family Farm

You've seen a couple of our member's highlight their family farms. Farm families are proud of the food we provide for world. We want consumers to know where their food comes from because it is a pretty special business we are lucky to be a part of.

Want to tour some more farms? Most of our members have a cattle or grain farming background so we don't get to share with you the diversity that exists in American Agriculture. Here's your chance!!! Check out this website to tour some farms:

Real Farmers Real Food 

Remember that Miss America, Teresa Scanlan, celebrates agriculture by advocating for and supporting Real Farmers Real Food!

Enjoy your tours,

Tera

Spring Break 2011: SWKS or Bust

I just got back from a long-awaited, luxurious break in tropical.....

Southwest Kansas

The only thing actually tropical about SWKS right now is how terribly dry it is. I haven't seen it this dry in a long time and the farmers in the area could really use some moisture. This fall, KSRE documented only .65 inches of precipitation in my home county. It's a "farmer rumor" that we have not received more than .11 inches of precipitation since the first of the year.

And even though I didn't get to hit up a beach on my spring break, I had a blast out at the farm and helping my dad. I got to clean out our calving barn because during calving season it tends to get a little messy! The best part of my trip was getting to check in on these little babies:

One of our first calf heifers, #123, with her baby heifer ready to nurse.

We have a set of first calf heifers that calved in the beginning of March. First calf heifers are female cows that are having their first calf. They take extra attention and management to make sure they raise a healthy calf.

When compared to older cows, heifers have a lot more calving difficulty. When a calf experiences a difficult birth it requires special attention because they often take longer to nurse and may have compromised immune systems. That makes getting them colostrum even more important than normal. If you don't remember what colostrum is, check out this post.

Two of our heifers, #123 and #125, nursing their calves.

We have all of our cow-calf pairs out on the corn stalks directly behind the farmstead, which would be where the yellow star is. They can walk up into the pens where the red star is, and get water and some extra hay that my dad puts out a couple of times a week. We also have protein lick tubs available for them. Our calving barn, blue star, is close to the pens so we can walk the cows up to it if they are having any trouble. Inside the calving barn is a large chute and three pens. That way, we can keep a cow and calf inside and out of the weather if needed. Obviously this winter, we haven't had to do much of that because the snow has not been an issue. Sometimes dad will keep a pair in the barn if the wind is terrible when it gets cold.

It was a much needed break from school and studying to be back on the farm and involved in production agriculture again! I also got a chance to explain to my little nephews that the cows Papa works with everyday become the beef that we enjoy on the dinner table. That is why agriculturists take pride in the animals they raise, because it feeds hungry mouths. The food we produce at our farm feeds my nephews and yours, and that makes it imperative that we produce a safe, nutritious and affordable product.

My Best,

Tera

Welcome to my Family's Factory Farm

Frobose Family Farms

Fortunate enough to be home for the Thanksgiving Holiday, I thought it would be an appropriate time to highlight our beef cattle operation back home. We raise quite a few cattle as a family, not a factory!

I am very grateful to have a great family and a fourth generation farm outside of the small town of Pemberville, OH. For those of you who read my last blog, "Animal Welfare Judging", I briefly described that our team assessment involved evaluating a covered beef feedlot. This assignment struck particularly close to home as we operate a covered feedlot back home.

Since beef feedlot production systems have been criticized heavily over the past few years, I thought it would be beneficial to show some pictures of our feedlot, where we house approximately 100 head of beef cattle for approximately 150-200 days. Because we live in an environment that recieves 35-40 in of rainfall each year and about the same amount of snow, raising cattle outside in a dry lot situation is really not an option. We feed our cattle in the original Frobose barn, built in 1868, and have built additions in order to provide appropriate space for the amount of cattle we raise. We aren't about to haul out manure and fertilize our fields as often as would be ideal because of the added rainfall, so we provide straw or corn stalk bedding throughout the year in areas where the cattle rest.

The cattle on our operation are fed high quality ingredients including shelled corn, oats, a soybean meal supplement to provide additional protein, and a red clover hay as a forage to maintain gut health. Our cattle also have free access to wheat straw in order to prevent acidosis, a condition that can occur when cattle eat too much grain and not enough forage.

Our cattle are marketed through Ohio Signature Beef, a branded product line that our family and other Ohio producers created in order to provide an outlet for Ohio consumers to purchase a high quality beef product that was raised and fed in Ohio. Through our production system, we choose not to implant our cattle and we do not give antibiotics to our cattle in order to provide beef that some consumers prefer. Oftentimes cattle can get sick and need to be given an antibiotic, and in such case we market them through other outlets or often just process them and put them in our own freezer at home, because we know there are no issues with antibiotic or hormone residues in beef raised with traditional methods.

I hope you've enjoyed the story of our feedlot operation, if you have any questions about our family farm and dispelling the idea of factory farms, please feel free to email me at frobose@ksu.edu

Thanks,

Hyatt

Welcome to My Family's Factory Farm

It is with inspiration from an excellent article written by Marlys Miller, an editor for Pork magazine, that I write this post. The article does a great job of clearing the air and posing the question of what it is that actually defines a family farm. I've thought a lot about this very subject this past semester and found that it is more helpful if a consumer can be welcomed on to a family farm to learn first hand how they would categorize it. So without further ado, I welcome you, to my family farm.



This is my family's farmstead. It is located 5 miles outside of the bustling metropolis (sarcasm) of Satanta, KS. My father is the 3rd generation of Rooney's to work on the farm. This google map is not exactly current because there are cotton modules sitting in the field west of the house (cotton is harvested in late fall) and we have yet to replenish the hay bales this season (we bail corn/milo stalks and that won't happen until harvest early this fall) that are sitting in the middle of the lot in this photo.


Rooney Agri Business is what my family's farming operation is called. It consists of 3 equal partners - my dad, my uncle and my grandmother. We have 4 hired hands who help with the daily tasks on the farm.






We grow corn, milo, wheat and cotton. Most of our land is irrigated with pivot irrigation systems and located in Haskell, Grant and Stevens counties.



My mom helps keep the books for the farm and argues with dad when the office gets too messy. When we were younger all of us kids helped dad out on the farm. He liked to make us walk sprinklers and change nozzles, "for fun!"

We also have a herd of registered Maine-Anjou cows. We are able to utilize the dryland corners off of dad's farmland by letting the cows graze the wheat in the winter into early spring. We also calve all of our cows out on the corn stalks close to the farm. This provides extra feed for the cows during the colder months and a warm, dry bedding for the baby calves.

My family takes pride in our farm, they have for several years and will continue to work hard to keep it viable for future generations. We have a large operation that covers a lot of acres and feeds a lot of mouths, but that doesn't mean we still aren't a family. It is easy for me to define the parameters a family farm and dispel the idea of factory farming because I grew up with it. For an average consumer, it's not as black and white.

Family farming is alive and well in the U.S. You can not judge by the number of acres that are worked to give scope to a farming operation. The best way to find out is to see whose hands are doing the work, and on 98% of American farms in 2007, those hands belonged to the family.

All my best,

Tera Rooney