Good morning Riley,
Being a grain farmer is a set of real extremes. Spring and fall can be terribly busy as you are working against time. Summer is not so bad, most spraying. Always working on equipment spring, summer and fall. Winter is the biggest challenge as again you are working against time with something like loading railcars. CN gives you 48 hours to load, don't tell you when the cars are getting dropped off, sometimes drop them off in poor locations. This time we had to hire and pay out of pocket for an industrial loader to move the railcars ourselves as we couldn't load them where they'd been dropped off.
Then if for whatever reason you don't get the cars loaded in 48 hours they can charge you demurage even if they don't come to get the cars for another 5 days!
So regardless of the weather during this 48 hour window you have to get it going, wind, stuck trucks or whatever.
Then of course doing railcars in the summer is a lot more enjoyable, just hotter sometimes!
Why does grain heat? Usually due to being stored when the grain was too moist, too hot or something like a bin roof cap being left open and rain or snow getting on the top of the cone can get it to start heating. If it is caught early enough it can be dried but it likes to start heating in the middle of a bin most times and that is more difficult to keep track of. For bins you can get temperature sensors on a cable that run the length of the bin, for the bags we use a probe on the end of a rod. But it is hard to sample everywhere and so sometimes you get nailed.
Dad had a bag start to heat that tested 13.9% moisture within two months of being combined, dry is 14.5% so we're still scratching our heads on that one.
So yesterday -11 with a 40 km wind, this morning -24 with a 4 km wind. As long as the equipment all starts and we can get down the trail in the field we should get the 2nd railcar done today.
Honestly, if dad was not old school Ukrainian I'd hire the road grader to clear the trail. Dad somehow thinks saving $100 but spending two days himself with a tractor/snowblower is saving money. We view some things totally differnt. I enjoy doing certain activities like reading and I'd rather pay someone else to do work for me so I can spend my time reading. Dad is from the old school where your time is worth nothing so it is crazy to pay someone else to do something you can do yourself. I tend to look at the cost of getting someone else to do something for me and what it gives me the free time to do as a result. Paying someone $100 to grade a decent trail in a field for me or spending 14 hours and having to run my tractor to do it myself? Excluding the tractor costs I don't work for $7/hr anymore.............. Generational differences I suppose.
Now to see if I can do another interval run this morning before the grain loading begins!
Cheers,
Garry
It's easy to offer help when you can't do anything about it.
