Minkler Farms mid January.

[70ds]

We have been having one of the coldest winters in more than 20 years here in North Central Kansas. The last week we have finally got a break from the cold. We have been over freezing in the daytime for a week now. The snow is leaving in a hurry and the mud is taking it's place. We have been trying to tend to the cattle and haul hay in the mornings before it gets muddy. We are starting to bring some of the heifers home to feed because they are due to start calving around the first of February. We had the feed wagons in the shop checking them over and getting them ready to feed during the last cold snap. Starting now they will be busy taking feed to our 700 cow calf pairs until late April or early May. One of the end dumps was in getting a tire fixed as well. They run on a lot of back roads and have flat tires once in a while.

One of the other wet cake trucks was dumping a load over at the hay yard.

Trying to get the feeding done before the mud gets too deep.

The guys were trying to get some hay hauled in as well. James went back for one more load after lunch.

He needed to move closer to some other bales so he could finish the load and got stuck. So they hooked the 7810 up to it and luckily were able to pull it over to the rest of the bales and some dryer ground.

We are feeding some of the cows on stalks with the pickups. They will be coming home this week so we are just feeding them bales till then.

Minkler Ag has a lot of dry fertilizer to put on once the fields get dried out and the weather will cooperate. They have the spreaders and tender in the shop getting them serviced up and ready to roll. The 7810 was in getting a front planetary seal replaced. It got a piece of twine wrapped around the axle and it cut the seal out. That happens from time to time with the loader tractors. We try to keep the twine off as much as possible. Hopefully it is a problem that will become less in the future now that we are using netwrap on all of the bales. There are still some old bales with twine on them but not many.

We have a 60,000 bushel corn contract to come out of storage this month and go to the ethanol plant. Here is one of the farms trucks working on moving some corn.

Pulling out.

Some of our over the road trucks were parked for the weekend. Waiting to roll again on Monday.

That is all for now. Questions and comments welcome.

[Aaron Jensen]

Looks good Clayton. How cold was it over there?

[70ds]

Saturday the 9th it was -14 in the morning. Thursday the 7th it was -7 with 45 mph wind. Those were our 2 worst days. We had a few weeks of single digits and teens which is pretty cold for this area. It usually doesn't last as long as it did this winter either.

[anthony]

Clayton,

sounds like the weather was pretty cold. Makes for a long day working. I bet James wasn't too happy about crawling through the mud to hook up the cab over. I really like your silage bunks, you custom make them? Keep up the great work. Thanks for sharing.

[70ds]

Thanks. I got the silage bunker from Dustin (774630). He made it out of foam board. It wouldn't be too hard to make. I was just out at his place one day and he had made a new bigger one and was going to pitch that one so I got it from him.