Chopping OATS 4 Feet Tall!

today we are swathing and chopping [Music] oats um which is something we don't always do here on our farm but this year we had a really cool opportunity this field you see behind me here and across the road uh we got to do a little short lease on uh from the land institute which is an institute um here by celina that does research on crops like kernsa and other perennial grasses and they're doing a lot of really cool things actually you should check them out google the land institute celina kansas but basically they had a few months in between some things they were doing where the ground was just going to sit idle so they asked us if we wanted to plant some oats this spring to chop and harvest for silage well we jumped at that opportunity for sure and the crazy thing is it has rained so much here in may that these oats i don't know if you can tell how huge these are these come almost all the way up to my shoulder um they're you know probably four feet tall and they're going to make some tremendous feed for us so we are really excited to chop these oats today it's a beautiful day here in kansas some nice clouds i'm going to fly the drone up as nathan swats all of these oats and you're going to get to see the kubota dmc in action and uh this is quite the field for it to get started on so i hope you guys enjoy this drone video [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] you [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] all right i hope you enjoyed that footage um dad got here with the chopper uh while i was filming so that was nathan driving the semi truck there's mom she's just getting here dad's got a full dump wagon load and then this truck's full so i'm going to get ready to take it we're probably not going to chop very much tonight because it's it's still a little wet but this is kind of our open time frame to get this done and so we are still going to go ahead and swap the whole thing and we'll just have to let it sit in the field for a little bit so there's going to be plenty of footage to come but i'm going to go ahead and head back to the farm with this load all right there's another dump uh while i wait for this to go down here uh so yeah you guys have probably seen a lot of random footage here so it takes several people to chop oats uh so today it'll be i'm trying to keep up hauling on my mom's helping hall um we have i'm gonna be driving to the field switching them off and then pushing in between dumps so every load that i bring in i dump i push up if there's already a load there and i dump my load and then i push up my load and then i've got to get back to the field before the next truck comes so here comes mom in with another load so i'm a little behind all right so i gotta have two hands to fill to uh push up here but essentially i think i counted up with um some failing about how many things we have to do and i think we have 11 pieces of machinery that we've been operating this week swather rake tractor bailing then we have chopping and three trucks plus the push tractor so that's five plus three so that's eight and then we have um the drill and drilling beans planting beans and then spraying so eight plus three is eleven so eleven different things we've been switching around and so we're trying to get the raking and the hanging and the chopping all done when the when the forage is with the right moisture [Music] and then do the drilling kind of later in the evening when it's almost dark because you can drill with the set with your gps pretty easily in the dark i finished my field after um it was it was pretty much eat you know after evening when i finished my field last night drilling and then uh either you know one thing couple things have to be sitting still all the time so right now i believe the planter is sitting still but all the silence trucks are going um and the baler is sitting still but once we get to a stopping point with silage i'm gonna hop out of this and hop to the baler and bail the brome that i um raked this morning so most years we do not uh chop oats in june um but with the opportunity that we had with this field oats were the best crop to put in and it made a lot of tonnage and uh the rest of the i mean a lot of that ton is going to be in the form of hay bales and some of it will be silent on this pile here this how much it's made so far also most years we get our first cutting of alfalfa done in may and then our brome done before our planting window and then we do planting beans and then planting milo and then wheat harvest well this year um we have the extra thing with chopping the brome had to be done the same week as chopping and planting and drilling both crops at the same time because all that rain pushed it back so this is this is a busy week uh for our even i mean even for our farm this is about the top of the business that level that we can get there's there's also a sense of urgency that we have as we're planting into soil moisture and so we want to get the crop in as early as we can especially those couple irrigated fields that we have we have a new field of irrigated beans we put in we wanted to get them in as soon as we could so we could utilize that moisture that's in the ground and then get get the water pumped on it early well the uh the last time you heard from us we were just getting started with this field i think it's been kind of a busy week i haven't been able to vlog as much we are planting uh beans with both the air cedar and the planter and we are spraying a whole bunch of fields i think we're spraying over a thousand acres this week and then we've been chopping oats um kind of in the evenings in the meantime so we'll you know feed cattle and spray and plant and all those different things kind of in the morning and afternoon and then we come over here to um swath and chop in the evenings well today is probably day four of chopping in the evening and uh we've had a few breakdowns on our chopper this week so that's another reason it's taking so long over here today we had a major breakdown and so we called in backup which uh is my friend ryan hahn and his family they do custom uh chopping and they got a big old john deere chopper that they uh they brought over here and uh they're in the other field right now but i'll get some footage of them chopping it's pretty impressive machine over here to the south the field with the pivot in it that's my friend from high school zach short who many of you might remember from the fire accident a few years ago so it's kind of cool to be uh we're farming this field next to zach one of my high school classmates and then uh ryan is running the chopper over here another one of my high school classmates so it's kind of like a high school reunion out here all right y'all there it is that big old chopper and they've got they got a ring going in front of it so it goes a little faster and there's our chopper sitting over there broken down get well soon 58 30 get well soon all right finish swathing they're still going i'm gonna do a few more loads tonight i'm gonna switch off one of the semi drivers so we can keep going we're gonna try to get this field done tonight and then that's probably all we'll chop we'll probably bail the rest our turn style is getting pretty full as i i hope you've uh i think kendall's been filming some of the trench silo [Music] so [Music] well i hope you guys enjoyed the video today this is a few days later after we finished chopping you can see the pile of oats behind me we make silage out of oats you can also bale it and use it for hay but it actually makes pretty good silage people don't realize that we've chopped oats before and we chop wheat sometimes i think the actual terms for oat silage would be like oatledge and wheat silage would be like wheatlage so that's that's our small trench silo over here so this is kind of what we usually use during the summer when our big trench silo is empty so we have emptied our big trench silo this is what you see in a lot of our videos that we fill way up high with corn silage or sorghum silage but in the summer we are in the spring we usually chop some wheat or some oats to get us through the summer feeding cattle until we have more corn or sorghum silage this year we ran out kind of uncharacteristically early we didn't chop as much corn last fall because the price of corn was so high and it and the yield was so good we had like really good corn on our irrigated field and so we didn't really want to chop it when it yielded so well but basically we feed silage we feed hay we feed some grain screenings and we feed some distillers and we feed some some rolled corn so that's typically our ration we put some mineral in there as well so our nutritionist for the cattle will tell us you know how to mix different things to to give the cattle what they need as far as nutrition requirements and oats can definitely provide some some really good nutrients some they're really high protein and so they're going to work really well for us hopefully over the summer as we feed cattle and uh in the fall in august or or uh yeah basically in august we will be chopping to fill this trench silo so you can check back then uh or look at our videos from the past to see that process it's been really busy um on the farm we are done planting soybeans with the planter now so we are changing the plates here at the shop to milo that's all we have left to plant until double crop so a double crop will be here after wheat harvest we'll go in with a second crop after we harvest the winter wheat that'll be next week probably but all we have to do this week is to plant milo whereas last week like kendall was talking about we were doing about five six different things kendall says he still has a lot of alfalfa to bail so we don't just have to plant milo we gotta get the alfalfa done and there's still some spraying to do but it's not nearly as busy as last week was so we're looking forward to having a good week this week so hopefully you guys will see us in another video from this week but until then we'll see you next time [Music]

Channel: Peterson Family Farm

Views: 27,609

Rating: 4.9808841 out of 5

Keywords: peterson farm brothers, family farm, peterson family farm, peterson farm bros, farming, agriculture, chopping oats, john deere forage harvester, filling silo, silage harvester, silage harvest, oat silage, drone video

Id: Kjqp4U19O-w

Length: 17min 53sec (1073 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 14 2021