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Southeast WI | My farm operation is pretty small by today's standards - 500 acres of corn and soybeans plus about 12 acres of squash and pumpkins yet. It's certainly not full time and by starting with absolutely nothing 35 years ago other than an agronomy degree (no school debt) everything we've done here has to be efficient and cost effective since there was no fall back to help out.
So this post is targeted at young guys and gals trying to get a foot in farming in today's world. Here we've melded technology with old equipment, used "new" practices like notill and striptill and try to do most every operation ourselves. As an example you can literally pay for a nice trailer sprayer in one year vs having custom application. We've paid for gps/autosteer equipment just by doing our own broadcast fertilizer applications in the fall. The EZ button is to call your supplier and have those operations done, however there's literally 1000's of dollars one can save by doing it yourself. I look at it this way - what else would I be doing with my time after work those days. Oh yeah, watching TV having a beer. I guess I can sit in a comfortable tractor several evenings in fall and spread fert.
I said we have old tractors but all 3 have autosteer, we've put nice K&M Grammar air seats in them so they are comfortable and keep the cabs upgraded when they get some age on them. Same with equipment as one of the first things we put up 25 years ago when we bought some land was a shop. It was just a tin box with a concrete floor for 7 years that we eventually finished and have floor heat. Each piece of equipment gets gone over each winter to minimize breakdowns. This year I stopped once to put a wheel drive chain on the corn planter. 300 acres of corn 52 tractor hours, 190 soybean acres 31 tractor hours and spraying 600 acres to date 26 tractor hours.
I'm not breaking my arm patting myself on the back, im just trying to show some young and not so young folks that you can be efficient and get high yielding crops in the ground very efficiently.
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 PXL_20240501_223651064.MP (full).jpg (169KB - 4 downloads)
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109 hours to put a crop in
