Up until now, work has seemed to be going slow. I know that isn’t necessarily the case, but we have been staring at the same planter sitting in the shop for three weeks or more! There have been many distractions: It took parts of several days to walk through the grain facility changes, dad has been burning fence row piles from cleanup done in December, and many days are cut short so I can be at kid’s activities or officiate basketball.

I think the tide is turning now. It looks like the millwright crew is close to finishing the first phase of the grain facility project. Equipment should begin moving out soon and most of the remaining work is on the ground.

The soybean planter will be finished up today except for a couple of odds and ends that await parts delivery. If need be, those can be done in a day when we bring the planter back in to install seed discs, recheck tire pressures, and do final pre-planting tests. As we enter March, kid’s activities will thin down for a few weeks and officiating will wrap up.

The corn planter is next up on the list. It should be a quicker turn around. Like the soybean planter, we are adding equipment to band additional fertilizer in a 2x2x0 dribble application. With low commodity prices, we are looking to get the biggest bang for a buck in fertilizer and will likely forgo most broadcast applications this year.

Working in an unplanned project

Unfortunately, we did add another item to the list last week when the motor on the wheel loader failed, blowing a hole in the side of the engine block. We tried a couple of times to figure out how to move it home to start the tear down. But with no motor, we had no way to raise the bucket or steer. We finally settled on having the wrecker come out and hoist the wheel loader onto the lowboy trailer and haul it away.

We found a takeout motor locally. Hopefully everything matches up and the installation is quick. We may do some tear down, but we will have a local truck shop swap the engines, as that work is not in our wheelhouse.