I Spent One Year Farming from Scratch

now after helping my brother farm for a few years I decided to buy my own land and start farming so I found an old 4020 and both the tractor and land will need some work to get back into production we'll spend the next year working hard in learning while making plenty of mistakes along the way from making small square Bells from scratch to growing my first corn crop and in the end we'll see if we make a profit I want to just kind of service it get familiar with it get fluids changed just basic stuff um and then it might have overheated in the past at one point so figure that out right now it's at the man Family Farms and so I was going to have them kind of help me too uh and figure things out cuz they know a lot more about the stuff than I do I can fit on a trailer I can pull a small disc with it and get this ground ready for this spring right away that's why I'm buying this so he already drained the coolant hydraulic in Oil we're going to do new batteries there's the seat also got a light kit for it LED light kit so that'll be a upgrade these two work right yeah this one works too the tractor was built in 1966 it's got 7500 hours on it it sounds like the clutch was rebuilt maybe a couple decades ago right now the hydraulic couplers on the back are leaking and that's why it's all dirty back there it's got the Synchro transmission not the power shift and then maybe down the road I'll get a canopy for it but so far enjoy the tractor paid 8,500 bucks for it [Music] oh [Music] all the way up all right so the 4020 is done and now we're going to go pick up a disc with it I just bought a disc like 5 miles away from here and we are 30 Mi east of my farm and so jump in the 4020 go hook up to the disc then I'm going to have Josie drve behind and Hazards with the pickup and then we'll take the disc in the tractor to the farm before the sunset so all the lights work the only concern we have is that we don't know if it overheats cuz the previous owner said it might overheat [Music] shoot that's an easy fix yeah that's what it looked like this hose right here blew on the engine block heater which you can see right there look at that that hole right there so what's ironic about this Spencer is my buddy lives about a mile up through the hillside there he says what are you doing driving a 2020 if you have any trouble and you need my trailer I'm just getting it unloaded so thanks for jinxing us Kenny well we had these they had these on here but he must have had it farther hydraulic set up this is they're way too long we don't need those so we're going to put John Deere tips on here which Josie our lovely assistant is holding here we're going to put these on here cuz these are John Deere tips these are ISO tips so this is old school new school this is old school this is new school yeah so we're putting old old school back on because this is old school tractor hey guys quick shout out to my brother Grant and the team at Squad belt for releasing a mobile game focused on true American farming with realistic fields and everything from old Farmall M tractors to a brand new case quad track check out American farming link down below this is where it's going to sit for at least a day or two tomorrow's Easter and then so we're going to replace that hose on the other side on the block heater probably replace this one too while we're at it obviously top off the coolant and see if we're good from there we're 5 miles into the drive it was 5 mies from man's place to get the disc and then we're about a little over 25 Mi away from the farm so at least we know figured out one thing that's wrong with it so this is the disc it's 14t wide it's a John Deer tires hold air the hoses look fine this is what I'm going to use to tilt up the ground all right we fixed the hose and topped it off with coolant so we'll see if there's any leaks all right we got it hooked up Hydraulics connected raised up as far as it'll go then we replace two hoses in here and this is the one that broke all right we're pulling in We Made It this is the [Music] [Music] farm so that disc isn't doing as good as I would want it to but I paid 800 bucks for it bought it literally last minute just 5 miles away from where uh we were working on the tractor so that worked out [Music] [Music] good [Music] there's 8 mph winds out of the South Perfect Day rained a little bit last night just a bit and then uh it's it's April 10th so the grass is pretty green underneath we diss around this piece we're going to burn this 20 acres then there's about 10 over there that we'll burn we started in that corner and it came to this [Music] corner perfect it's the next day after the burn the ash isn't too bad I think back burning it was a good idea it burned it really thick and good we're getting all this cleared out and stuff and should work good just two of those big trees probably cut the stump with the [Music] chainsaw [Music] so we're just wrapping up getting all the brush piled up but this is kind of the finished product the slow back burn worked out really good I'm going to jump in for the first time with the 4020 we got some extra weight on that I want those roots gone or I I want the little trees uprooted somehow so I think the disc will do it we have the extra weight it's going a heck of a lot deeper we did a little test strip there but uh the disc isn't great I wish it was heavier but we we made it heavier and hopefully it doesn't break or anything 2 days into actual clearing after the burn I think it's going pretty good and we're taking our time getting it really really [Music] clean [Music] this is 30-year-old CRP so the roots are holding on still this part of the process by far was the most timeconsuming my parents will come out at night to help pick up some sticks Grant's here in the tractor and I'm staying ahead in the skid steer smoothing out like all the holes an Hills and when the neighbor was transplanting the trees a lot of times it wasn't perfect great so I'm just staying ahead of them here we bearing went out on the disc here which I wonder why that happened maybe has something to do with the log we put on it um I just got to take off the old bearing part of the old bearing still stuck on here and kind of nothing was left so I got new stuff hopefully it [Music] fits it should be good it turns by hand it's not too hard or anything but it's not crazy loose coverter pins in the seal in the back should hold for what it's [Applause] doing finally done with this would be the East field the 30 acre field finally done with it got everything I can walk away from it and they dropped in hydr Tanks off and so they'll be doing that I got to run over and dis the the West Side the smaller of the fields on the other side of the creek real quick very surprised that this held up the gang squeak quite a bit there was not there's no squeak one of these squeak really bad [Music] [Music] [Applause] awesome to sit in the tractor and farm the farm the Long Way versus going around and we're able to go through the Waterway here and going through the Missouri Crossing it's a little tight maybe in the future I might put in a cross in here that's that oh that's tight well I think if that can make it through our planter should be able to maybe the markers on the planner rub the only thing I think is I would widen out I think this is a hair tighter than uh the other side but worked out good we'll get connected to the other tank and finish last five acres no broken Shanks that was super surprising it was now time to drive 90 Mi with my brother's tractor and planter to the field I had borrowed a neighbors fuel cultivator and hopes to be planning the next day we got there we got shut down by 5 in of rain over the next next week and learn what happens to field tile when he gets clogged with tree roots thankfully I had my lovely assistant Josie here to help get the planner and tractor ready for the long trip down the road while she was airing up tires I was switching over from soybean back to Corn plates and we got everything greased aired up ready to go of course we had to fuel up it was going to be a 90m drive and then she took the truck with the side by side and she met me there and gave me a ride home I think top speeding this 23 24 mph so I guesstimate 4 hours hopefully nothing goes wrong pulling it with the tractor you have all four hydraulic cylinders down pressure on four tires first if you're pulling this with a pickup with no Hydraulics you only have two so it should uh be less weight on wheel bearings tires it should ride a heck of a lot smoother so here we go quick stop at the halfway point make sure nothing's too hot Josie's already head of me she's brought her book today is just the drive up their day supposed to get some rain this morning we did and then possibly rain this afternoon too but tomorrow's going to be like 80 the day after that 85 as long as it's not enough rain to to not go which I don't think it will be it will be planting tomorrow all right we made it 4 and 1/2 hours later that's about how much time it took everything went good it was about 4 and a half hours so a little more than I thought did burn a lot of fuel that's for sure grode a lot smoother with the I bumped the tire pressure up to like 25 see if the planter fits through me Hydra bar did I think the planter will but the planter is pretty dang big pretty wide nice and easy Wren that cultivator I think it's 28t wide how' the Dy pull it's good it's getting no issu too right so the goal today is is to repair this Waterway main that broke it's an 8 in tile it's been sucking a lot of dirt through it the hole I was standing to in the previous clip is right there and if you follow the Waterway buried three deep below in the ground is a clay tile and the reason why they call it a clay tile is because it was actually made out of clay and back in the day decades and decades ago they used old trenches at 1 mph and slowly dropped in these clay tile the purpose of this clay tile is to drain surface water and to lower the water table so then your crops can yield better now somehow this 8 in clay tile has broken and in the past years it's created the suckle while it rains it's also sucking down dirt through the opening and taking out to the creek so it would be nice to just get this repaired we can drive right over it it's flowing quite a bit of water and that is 8 in plastic to Clay it dumps where the excavator is into the creek down there I think it's broken right here but we'll keep walking back and probably connect hopefully to he there's a good [Music] [Music] spot I think I should have brought my uh mud boots forgot to bring those [Music] the best way I found to make connections from plastic to clay clay being a bit bigger than the plastic is you got to make some slits to expand it and then once you slide it over you can tile tape around it to make a good seal here I am measuring out the distance getting a rough idea do the same thing on the other side so you have Clay and Clay on one one side here I'm using the excavator bucket to kind of dam up the water so we aren't getting flooded with water fit in the downhill side and then quickly run to the uphill try and shove it on there and now I'm realizing yep we made it a bit too long so quickly run to the downhill side cut it make it a bit shorter that was kind of a pain and everything worked out good so the biggest thing is to back fill it properly to seal it up and that way you don't have like a big chunk of dirt right next to it and it doesn't back fill right [Music] once we patched the sinkhole and drove the tractor down the next few days it rained a total of 4 in and we found a problem with the tile you can see right here water bubbling up and I think it's a tile I don't have a bunch of experience identifying this type of stuff Waterway comes through here neighbors property I know there's an 8 in m most likely that would run at the lowest point which would be the middle of the Waterway so maybe the tile makes a turn or there's something here that backed up all right so we're going to get muddy this is above where I made the last tile repair so guessing this is going to be an 8 in it's flowing Uh something's broken obviously bunch of water's flowing up where I put those flags and then it flows down into the Waterway and there's a bunch of standing water so we're going to dig figure out hopefully everything works and I brought my swim trunks in case I got to go swimming we're going to have Grant run the excavator [Music] today so at this point we knew water couldn't go Downstream and as we were digging water was filling up in the hole that means the blockage is Downstream and we haven't yet confirmed that the 8 in main eye patch is the same one we're working on here this could would be a different tile I'm near to the farm don't know any of the tile history don't have tile map so we kind of have to dig hit the tile find the tile find out what the heck's going on and then go from there so we're going to be digging some holes wait I hit it with the shovel yeah I think we're filling up are we all right there's the tile the tile was right there all right now we'll see if it's clog now at this point we've confirmed it's the 8 in clay man I went down there with my hands and felt it and so we said screw it we're above the blockage let's straddle the m and start digging a trench backwards in hopes that we we keep breaking it breaking it and then it starts sucking water once it hits it's a clear spot or a spot that's not broken and while we were doing this I thought to myself wait a second about right where the excavator's sitting there was a big big tree that we took down of course the roots from the tree are clogging it but we still aren't 100% for sure and we need to rule out other things like the repair I made a few days earlier I could have botched that repair and that has blocked it all the way up here most likely not but we do need to rule that out before we start digging a mile long trench so in the course of the last week we've gotten four and a half close to 5 in of rain and we're still here trying to figure out this tile diverting some of the water coming off the Waterway we're back to where I made this uh this fix and we're going to we're going to rule this out we're going to rule out that me connecting this didn't make it we're figuring things out oh there we go where the is [Music] that we suck sewer tape up there I think this thing goes 40t nothing it's flowing good so that means our blockage is down there now there's a giant tree over there that we think might have caused the blockage that Spencer tore out we're going to go check Downstream of where the tree was somehow kind of get it open without breaking it too much and then throw the sewer tape up see if we can feel that blockage and maybe we'll be able to just break through with the sewer tape and feel the [Music] blockage all right so there's a bunch of I mean that route right there we found going through the crack so that's uh that's a big route we're standing on the where the big old tree [Music] was take it [Music] flat [Music] so there's a big tree here that blocked this hole 40t to we're just ripping out the old main it's there's going to be a bunch of water that's going to flow down here cuz this is all backed [Music] up I'm going to slowly let this down hopefully we get this all drained down with water and then get it on the same grade [Music] okay so most importantly we want to make sure it's still flowing it's still flowing over here so that means we're on grade good now that both connections are made water's flowing good no blockage no roots in the system anymore we literally trenched out the whole section that had roots in it and once we get this done in backfield I got to go make three more connections and Patch [Music] those [Music] we got it all back filled and made sure to grade it out the best we could because part of where we dug is going to turn into the field so after making this repair in all the patch jobs water's flowing fine there's been no issues after some pretty heavy rains and at this point we got to wait a few days for the sun to come out and dry everything out before we can start field work and [Applause] planting all right everything's going good this is technically the second pass on the CRP area and then we're doing one pass on the soybean and it it's breaking up pretty good I mean it's still clumps but that 5 in of rain we got I think helped break it down once we get done here we'll finish the 5 Acres then the 12 on the other side if you remember that was all water about 5 six days ago now we're on the other side of the creek just got down over there this is like 10 12ish acres here this spot here is by far the worst grass came back a lot quicker now we're planting we're about halfway done with the 30 Acres we're jumping in and out making making sure everything's uh right all the adjustments are made and seeds going where it should be so there we go up over the [Music] Waterway back [Music] down [Music] we're out of seed I think it was row two or three got it all filled up with seed should be good 18 Acres done 30 total so 12ish left all old planning was going smoothly but then Grant and I started to notice the planner rows were looking quite squiggly and not straight now the guidance system we have on the 8110 is an atu2 200 so we started to make adjustments to the monitor by changing the sensitivity levels and after doing that things would straighten out but then about 10 minutes 15 minutes later things got squiggly again and we would have to make more adjustments after a while playing with it we got it to a point that was good enough or better than I could do by hand now after thinking about it for a while I assume possibly driving it 90 mies down the road and some of the road was quite bumpy could have messed up the the globe on the roof it could have messed up the steering wheel system that's mounted to the steering wheel so I ended up not getting that much footage of planning because this was my first time really planning by myself and it being a new field I just wanted to focus make sure everything was going right it was really cool to see after the 5 in of rain just how fast the field dried once we fixed the tile in the Sun came out but we did end up planning on May 20th which is no big deal it would have been nice to obviously plan a bit earlier but if we had planned it earlier before that rain a lot of spots would have flooded out so given the weather I think everything turned out totally fine and we are planning at 2 and 1/2 to 2 and 3/4 of an inch depth seed depth and then the population we planted at was 33,800 and this is a ground drive 12 rail planter and the seed I planted to start out with we had a couple extra bags of whiffles 7876 that we wanted to test six rows on so we could see how it compares to Pioneer 1164 the fuel cultivator I rented was a case 4800 it had the spikes instead of the drag Harrows on the back and didn't really deal with too much of bunching up I was a bit worried we got rain for 2 three weeks and the grass relas started to come back I was worried the field cultiv would Bunch up not do a good job but it did 35 days after planning the corner merged in 7 to 8 days I planted at 33,800 population and the worst spots I saw were were the previous sod areas that hadn't been farmed in a few years and those were the lowest I saw were 29,000 but honestly at more so averaged around 30 31 which I was very happy with and up to this point the local co-op has already applied both pre and post spray 30 lbs of uan were in the pre-spray and 150 lbs of in hydras with the planned top dressing of Ura would put us up to 225 lbs of nitrogen all in all planting went really good the Corn's growing some spots are rougher than others but we got a bunch of today and hopefully we get out of this you know drier weather there's 5 Acres of overgrown grass that needs cut and bailed up and I'll show the whole process from mowing to making a square bail and then at the end we're going to total up how much money we made and how much we spent on equipment and see where we [Applause] [Music] stand [Music] so I brought the 4020 back from the farm and reading the odometer we put roughly 50 hours on it this spring between discing running around picking up rocks and stuff super happy with it the only thing that we had issues with is when we were trying to drive it down I blew that one coolant line so the main reason I brought the 4020 back is back there there's about six about six acres of hay that thinking I might be making square bales out of so I bought a sickle mower online at an auction and I'm going to pick that up tomorrow it's about a 7 foot long maybe 8 foot it's a John Deere number nine so hopefully everything works on it paid 300 bucks for it and one of the main reasons I bought the 4020 one I knew I would need it right away this spring for that farm to disc it up and get it ready but then also it's super easy to trailer and we don't need like a big goose neck or anything and according to online it weighs 8,500 pounds at a th for the front loader 1500 for the loader in the front and the bucket it kind of felt like it was the skid steer back [Music] there so I really know nothing about this mower well we turned on the PTO and it uh worked a little bit there but the main thing that I saw and again I don't know much just watching YouTube videos trying to figure it out is this spring is broke and my understanding this spring is that raises and lowers the whole unit um so when you lift up with three point because this doesn't have a hydraulic uh raise up and down for the mower this spring will bring you up like 30 in or just enough so you can so the mowers off the ground the sickle bar mower I bought is a John Deere 350 and it has a 7t bar it ran kind of good right away that main spring is broken so it doesn't lift up off the ground and later on I figure out I had a couple adjustments wrong and got it cutting a bit better but I paid 300 bucks for it so I think I got a good deal some CLE bar mowers were selling for like $1,200 $1,500 you know working in good condition keeping the cost of the tractor out of the equation I paid 300 for the CLE bar Mower and then I'm going to go pick up a rake that I paid $300 for it's they're kind of in rougher shape but it'll work for what I [Music] need so this is a new idea Hy rake I'm guessing it was made somewhere in the 50s 60s there's a serial number on it but I couldn't find much looking it up online and the reason why I bought this is I thought I'd be able to drive it home and not have to trailer it but after a pulling it down the road a couple miles those back wheels just were going crazy and I couldn't go over 10 15 mph so I thought trailering it would be best it was a bit of a pain to get on the trailer but once it was on there SAR strapped it down and it rode just fine home it's a Gear Drive rake I think it's a bit wider than the traditional like two wheel rakes that are sometimes gear driver pulley and yeah the only downside is I can't really pull it down the road too good maybe I'll mess with it in the future and get it to go down the road better but right now it's just good enough so with this being my first time ever around a sickle bar I thought the best way to figure things out is just to run it and that was pretty painful and I had to stop a lot of times the biggest issue I found out later on I didn't have a hitch pin in the hitch that then lowers and raises the end of the sickle bar and so essentially when I was going through the field the end of the sickle bar was just dead weight on the ground and any uneven surfaces on the ground or a big clump of grass it would catch and then it would hit the trip bar and you'd have to reset it and the sickle bar wouldn't go anymore and prior to me figuring out that I didn't have this hitch pin properly installed is I tried to fix the spring so I bought like a cheap one and the spring like hook part was broken so I cut it off a spring I bought tried to weld it on that broke in a couple minutes so that didn't work coupled with the bar always tripping the sickle sections themselves weren't weren't too sharp and the whole thing was quite dull so it didn't cut very good so I got off the tractor about 100 times by resetting the the trip lever and then also just shutting off the PTO and unclogging the bar and so there's three acres that you're seeing right now up top then there's roughly another two on the bottom so I timed The Cutting of this hay absolutely terribly and I probably shouldn't have done it and waited till this weekend it's Friday now anyway yesterday it rained another inch and I thought the mower would work better I just kind of powered through it obviously as you can tell it didn't cut too good I had to leave some spot to we have hydrants in the field two of them it feels all dry to the touch now it's been I mean it's been 90° for a day here and kind of windy so thinking I'm going to rake it up Avil it tomorrow or the next day depending when I have time this stuff I cut I cut it would have been 2 days ago now had one day of rain on it so the underneath is still a little wet but the top you can tell starting to dry out pretty much this first time is just like literally learning how to do it just bought all the equipment like days before and stuff so one thing that's kind of cool about it right now it's in neutral so you just pull this little guy back then push it in now it's in I think it's in Reverse now and then you can you got to it's a little tricky but if I drive forward a bit then I can put it in forward so starting out I lowered the rake too low and you can see it kind of bind and then eventually after a couple passes it it was working fine but then the the tines kind of started to bend and after the third or fourth pass it wasn't raking complete and leaving like 20 30% behind so I messed with it a bit more and adjusted a few things and I couldn't get it any better I ended up doing the whole field like that thinking I couldn't get it any better but the next day I said there's got to be a better way I put it in reverse and actually the timeses then kind of reset back bent back I'm going to rake it one more time get it absolutely perfect and then we will bail it tomorrow today's going to be like 90° not too windy but should dry it anything else that's wet and we should be good to bail [Music] oh [Applause] that looks way better before it was picking up like only probably half to three quarters of the hay on the ground so anyway that worked way better I wish I would have just done that from the beginning so in between Mowing and raik and the hay I ended up finding a John Deere 336 Square Beller and I think these were made in the early 7s and I believe they're the models after the 24 the John Deere 24t Square balers but yeah brought it home and one of the first things I did on it is I had some time and I just replaced the jack on it the the one before just seemed weird and I didn't like messing with it seemed kind of dangerous honestly so just went to Tractor Supply grabbed one off the shelf and welded up the the little bracket for it so I did end up paying $3600 for it which is more than what I wanted to but after doing some research and looking online it sounded like if you're going to spend any money on a hay operation spend it on the Bor so I ended up kind of splurging a little bit on the Square Bor but it was nice I was able to purchase it from a nice gentleman and he showed me how it worked and it had just went through the dealer prior and replac a few parts on it so that was nice and it did end up working good for me and after raking the hay I was going to bail the next day but then all of a sudden a pop-up thunderstorm showed up and it looked like it was going to downpour in an hour so I was like hey let's hook up the Baer so I had my dad come out and we just hurried and bailed and it ended up not raining and it but it did rain like a mile north of us but it was kind of stressful and we were just running as fast as we can probably not the best situation to be in damn d not the best stacking St d all right so the the rain actually kind of held off it was just scattered thunderstorms but the hey was totally dry I was just going to wait till tomorrow so I think we're like 120 Bales or something I didn't have the there's a bail counter on the Baler but I didn't it it wasn't connected or anything first time like ever stacking baales and stuff I kind of screwed up I think the first layers I was pushing too hard in and then uh I think having the back on the wagon when we're going down some the Hills anyway it started to lean forward at the end just made a little a little more difficult than it needed to be so anyway I guys stopped out as we were going and we might be able to sell some Bales to them too where I'm at there's a lot of people with horses and like kind of small acores with livestock but I've sold about 64 so far just people stopping by wanting to buy 20 or 40 I got to count it but I think we got about 80 left we're going to go sell it all at once just to the lady down the road so so hopefully everything works good I might throw a strap on it or something I only got to go a couple miles [Laughter] and the hay rack was one thing I didn't purchase this is my brother's he bought it last year probably this time for a farm progress show that we were at showcasing his new game American farming so it's kind of cool we put like iPads on it and kids could come up and play the the mobile game that he's working on so I was able to save some money on that and it came in handy to haul this down the road a few miles so the total comes out to be that we made 141 Bales and I sold them at $5 a bail and that's cuz about 60 70% of them were pretty small at first the Baler was kind of chunking out some small ones I know how to adjust it now and then also I lowered the price because they it got some rain on it but I before i r I let it dry I think 3 days I was going to let it dry another four but then rain was coming so that was my idea price it kind of low it looks like really what I should price a normal Square hay bale for is anywhere 68 bucks around here is what I see 141 bales that $5 bail comes out to be 75 bucks so I spent I spent 350 on the rake 300 bucks on the CLE mower 3850 on the square baler and then 8,500 on the tractor it'll be interesting if I can get two cuts off this or probably just one but this ground was wasn't being used for anything anyway and thought it would be fun to figure out how to do this and uh I haven't I haven't mowed it's about one and a half two acres down below so and that should be some some thicker stuff kind of sits a bit wider uh so we're going to probably do that next it's going to rain tomorrow and anyway just over the summer see how many Bales we can make and how much money we can uh kind of bring in off ground that wasn't being really used for anything all right so there's a lot of things not perfect about the sickle bar which is fine it still cuts and everything but two things I I did when I cut the three acres was we broke this little section got a replacement there some of the sickles are pretty bad and then I think the whole bar kind of bent right on the end here there should be a little uh there's this little thing that bolts in here and that acts as like a Cutting Edge too and that's kind of all worn out and a lot of these sickles are just bad bent cracked we'll we'll see how crazy I get but thinking about replacing all the sickle sections so in hindsight I should have just took the whole sickle bar off with all the sections still attached then replaced the sections I needed to and then also bend it at that point I just didn't know it was it it's really easy to take the bar off there's just one bolt you you take off and then it kind of Pops free and you slide it through I mess with it here grinded off some of the rivets and then once you grind the rivets and then they heat up and expand and and then you try and tap them through they actually don't tap through that good so here I'm trying to like bend it back into shape and stuff like that the end the last like four sections I bent that end of the bar I had too much grass it wasn't cutting good and I think I was just jamming through it so I tried tried my best to fix it but once I decided to take the sickle bar off things went a lot smoother and I learn you just put it on a lip of a ice and you can bang out those old rivets and like super easy if you have a heavy hand H so I was able to do that on about half of them but unfortunately it did grind some so I did spend another two hours because once you grind it it it it doesn't like to shear and it doesn't like to punch out I changed the sections out from rivitz to bolt so I can repair them easier in the future and you do have to adjust the guards for that the guards on the sickle mower need to have higher clearance so I had to get four new ones I think so they didn't rub rub on the bolt in the nut but once I slid it back in the bar here then we were cutting good and I think I have everything on this mower fairly well fine-tuned and just a few times does it trip on really uneven ground all right so there's a mix mes of about 2 and 1/2 acres down below so up there is the 3 acres in the shed and then down here is uh used to be pretty big brush last year this h Hill Side was like pretty thick stuff I'll finish all this so it all is kind of growing up some of it's weed some of it's not the best stuff but a lot of it's just whatever grass you call it maybe bro I I don't know much about grass but anyway this is what we're going to cut we won't go that high up the hill just kind of cut it down where we drive down and stuff with a pickup so it doesn't rub on the truck but we'll do this and then on the through here there's the creek and we'll come on to the other side and knock that out [Applause] all right it should cut like a dream now and I think one of the things that hurt me a lot is it cut so bad I had to get it I felt like I had to get it really low to the ground and then that caused it to hit you know rough spots and then it would trip so maybe now that it's going to cut better I can go faster as long as the ground's not too rough and then I can go higher so then they won't trip as much so we'll see and then also I've been going like 1200 RPM stuff online some people say like all the way down I see 800 RPM and then I see like 2500 rpm so we're going to try different speed see how that goes all right that worked awesome third gear like, 1500 RP p.m so much faster I think anything is better than what I was doing before this stuff has a lot of thistles in it probably whatever I bail here I'll probably just uh put it on the burn pile there's half of it's going to be weedy [Music] thistles so this is round two two days ago I cut it it's like 2 and 1 half acres down there super super rough we're going to go extremely slow Grant's going to fall off the rack or something we got to pick up some Twigs before we start too probably and uh hopefully everything goes good this is kind of narrow at some spots hopefully that tire clears that's probably a little too steep there's a lot of big like wood chunks out here cuz there was a tree down and stuff so like I said pretty rough pretty rough stuff it'll be [Music] rough [Music] even after running the mower and the rake through it and picking up as many sticks as I could see there was still quite a bit left behind and sometimes it would get bunched up and a couple times it sounded really bad when it was going through the Bor but we did end up breaking a shear bolt on the flywheel got that replaced I kind of tried to do my best to keep as many sixs out of there as possible and it was just pretty rough ground not too much you could do as you could tell last summer this place looked quite a bit different so it was kind of cool to take some hay bales the year after but it it was kind of rough on the Balor and I probably shouldn't have bailed it but the hay was dry and the hay was good it was making good baales and this main section made good baales but over by the creek on the smaller little plot we have did have quite a bit of thistles and in kind of a lot of weeds and spots so when the Bales did turn out bad I just threw them in the burn [Music] pot so we ended up making 70 bals off the bottom two acres that put us at a total of 211 Bales on the total first cutting and that's a revenue of around $1,505 which was pretty cool and I did end up selling them all at $5 for the first time I just wanted to get them sold as soon as possible and not take up too much storage in the shed for that long a period of time obviously I'm not going to make a lot of money doing these Square Bells but I thought was a fun way to kind of get outside get a workout kind of go back old school with the small square Balor and it was cool to meet some neighbors and people who wanted the square bals they were really appreciative of [Applause] it everything was going smoothly and I was now mowing near the road when I had the bright idea right there I turned onto the road and thought I'll make a quick pass along the gravel in the ditch Edge and clean that grass up and 30 seconds in this is what ended up happening there was a hole I didn't see through the grass it kind of pulled the tractor in once I hit it I made a few attempts to get out of it every time getting closer and closer to the edge I thought I was far enough away I would be totally safe and the only smart thing is I had the roll over protection system on and I ended up just yanking it to the left flooring it hoping that I wouldn't tip and I would be able to ride into the ditch and then drive up and out a different [Applause] way and this is what the ditch looked like as as you can tell I didn't make it very far down the road by the time I flipped over and it was a pretty steep angle ditch but I wanted to include this segment of me being idiot to remind people not to be an idiot like me and be a bit safer on tractors and also this is a reminder to always put up the r protection system on whatever piece of equipment you have whether you're in a small tractor big tractor or just a zero turn mower it's probably smart to have it up even if you think it's never going to happen cuz honestly I was so far away from this ditch in my mind that this was never going to happen and you could kind of justify not having it up but it's good I did I got the tractor flipped over thanks to a neighbor's help and now the engine wouldn't turn over and it was hydrolocked cuz it was on its side for a little too long and oil got into the cylinders and it was locked up and I did start trying to start it right away which looking at it now online I guess you're supposed to let them sit for a day or two hopefully the oil drains down and you don't have any issues of hydrolocking and I pulled the valve cover off now because it wouldn't start after after letting it sit for a day what I'm going to do now I think is drain all the oil out of the engine here are the glow plugs I'm going to drain all the oil I got brought a little portable shot back suck out as much oil as I can and then hand crank it with the glow plugs cracked try and get all the oil out of the top of the engine refill it with oil and see if it'll start and the only way to get to the glow plugs was to take the cover off it would have been nice if I didn't have to but don't really know what I'm doing just looked online YouTube and asked some friends what I'm a little worried about is leaves falling in here or something all right there we go we're getting oil out there we go for after I got the tractor started I checked for leaks made sure there was enough oil in the engine and it did smoke quite a bit at the beginning and it slowly got better and better in about an hour in it went away I'm guessing that was oil on the exhaust manifold and then just oil that was getting burnt in the end it was a good learning experience both to be a little safer when driving the tractor and then also how to fix it once I got oil into the cylinders and I got everything mowed and finished up and ready for Harvest so I just wanted to mow the grass along where we're going to drive in and just kind of clean things up and maintain it and before the whole tractor flipping Fiasco I had some guys come out with their drone and we ended up spraying some funger side and also Source on the corn right when it was starting to tassel have G now once they landed they would fill 10 gallons of product and switch batteries the batteries were being charged on a generator and only took 15 minutes to charge so three batteries can keep them going all day I timed them and it took a minute and 30 seconds on average from Landing to taking off again on one flight they can do roughly 5 acres and they typically get 35 Acres done in an hour in these shots it is late September the Corn's going to mature really quick dry down and lose a lot of its leaves and color now it really stands out the different hybrids in the trial that we're doing what was cool to see those stripes that I was talking about those seem to kind of vanish and go away you couldn't tell anymore but unfortunately the best part of the field where we had that planting issue the fact the seeds weren't there obviously you can't fix that but it was awesome to see the corn was about 11 ft tall in some spots and the ear was head high so crazy tall corn and I was praying that a windstorm wouldn't come through and blow it all over and doing ear checks they were coming in at 19.3 around on average and then it looked like the whiffles were a bit shorter at 39 kernels long versus the Pioneer at average 42 long which is awesome to see and when you go online and do yield calculators it was looking like we're going to yield above 200 for [Music] sure we're doing a project on the fton the goal is to get a hitch made for this that is about 20 22 in off the ground this is about 33 in off the ground to have it 22 to pull wagons to pull the gravity wagons the material I got is 38 of an inch thick here's more five 5x 5 in square tub in again 3/8 another 38 plate I got the material from the shorts or a scrap pop I'll pop up some pictures of what I'm kind where I'm getting inspiration for this there's a few ways to go about it but there's some guys that did on deuce and a halfs and I only seen one guy that did on a f ton that is something I want to do but I want to drop even lower w there we go all right so we got the big clevus off it's over there and I just got the left service one off this is the emergency line for when you're hooking up a trailer and you put your glands on the side here and hook up and so there's a little bracket and I'll cap this off just like I put a plug on here but the idea is we're going to have a plate I'll probably put four hopefully I can get a 34in drill bit through here four bolts and then it's going to drop down in the bottom about right here and so it's going to look like a field goal post and this is going to be our horizontal piece 3/8 in 5x 5 in square tube it's so it's going to be straight down about 24 25 in 24 25 in and then that tubing across hits right in the middle and I'll try and reinforce it elsewhere and this is what we got for our side plate this is half an inch the only this is the only half inch I could find this is a 4T by 8T plate this is the smallest sheet I could buy but that means I have plenty of room for air but I want to have it bolt on so that I can take it off because the the fear with this is when I back up with something it's going to hit my hitch before it hits like the pumpkin or whatever but before the tires are able to ride with it up so if I know I'm not going to use it for like months and months and months and I'm going to use the truck a lot moving dirt and stuff I'll be able to to take it off there we [Music] go all right both tires are off all the stuff in the way is off that big cevis that was right here that's out of the way so I think we're officially ready [Music] [Applause] [Music] here was the idea so this is three 3/8 thick this is/ in thick I spent a lot of time drooling these holes half in/ in the reason why it looks absolutely terrible is cuz I was originally going to do six and then I was like oh wait I'm only going to do four and then the drilling was harder than I thought and so that was combination of changing plans over and over that's why it looks bad other side has two 3/4 and three half in holes but half in/ in and so that is uh lock nut on the inside and then I'm thinking we're going to weld all around both sides we'll leave it sticking out we're going to do instead of the 2-in receiver or shank whatever you want to call it it's going to be 2 and 1/2 so it should be a bit stronger and that's a thought and then maybe have triangle pieces here there's going to be no tongue weight with the gravity wagon it's all going to be uh forward and back maybe a little side to side but it's mostly going to be jerky and yeah those are pretty strong so hopefully this works we'll cut off as much excess we need I made it a bit longer just in case and maybe take off some back here just for room if things move and stuff so it's coming together pretty [Music] good so we got it all welded up ended ended up we we danced between the stick welder and the the Mig or the flux core we're going to do I think gussets here this is more important I'm worried about this right here the side plate bending because the excess Force getting pulled on it this way that's why I went with half in side plate and then 38 cross member 5x 5 in this looks pretty thin and I don't see any real reinforcement now he doesn't drop as low as I do it's pretty close and he did do some angle iron there later in the video you're going to see me do gussets like like this all around trying to strengthen as much as I can do a spine in the back so if you guys have any tips or tricks or feedback that you would have done differently let me know in the comments I'm always open to feedback and learning I'm getting ready to cut out a hole for the this is a 2 and 1/2 in receiver I was thinking about a 3 in but our our 5x 5 in tubing would it take it so I tried to get the heaviest Duty receiver I could find I'm going to try and weld up more supports for this and stuff this is just a 10in receiver so I'll plasma cut that out hopefully I made the front markings and the back markings right everything's been going pretty smooth the drilling of the holes took a while and uh I was able to do these gussets here try to make it as Overkill and beefy as possible so with the/ in plate the 38 5x5 in tubing and all the gussets we made it should hopefully hold up because I want to be able to take this off whenever I want to and so I I don't want to attach anything to the frame of the truck or well to the frame of the truck so it's just five bolts on each side here's how it's looking so far again this is flux core welding so it leaves us a bit of mess a lot of splatter and stuff but on my machine I'm able to weld thicker material flux core that's why I'm doing it and I ended up thinking that this would be good to a uh 38 in little plate here almost to create a spine for this plate if that makes sense cuz I was worried about when it's up there it bending this way and stuff so I think it's coming together very interested this is the final key little worried how the receiver is going to go in but I got a lot better with the plasma [Music] cutter a little bit of slag in there but that was dude I have gotten so much better I mean it's not like perfect or anything but you literally can't be when I cut out when I cut out these for the 5x5 it was so harder and I was so like more okay that that was pretty bad one but these are pretty straight I got a little messy up top there but there we [Music] go that looks good that actually went through completely so I'm going to leave as much down here as I can to add support so I'll go look at what a typical receiver how far it sticks out with the hole and then I'll leave like that much and do some gussets down there and try and make that bulletproof [Music] too [Music] you want to jump in don't tell me [Applause] time look good good it's on there keep going it's looking good I [Music] mean we got our full thanks to Old Lincoln so this would be a good representation especially when we come down the hill pull up the hill I might try low at first uh one thing I want to see and we can see of movement is how it butts against this like you should see it swing you can tell it's and we aren't even we're using this little you know thin thing in there too there should be some slop in there right so but hey you're sitting pretty Square straight down so it looks good let take give it a shot yeah [Music] hey guys quick shout out to my brother Grant and the team at Squad belt for releasing a mobile game focused on true American farming I've been playing the game during long car rides spending more time on it than I probably should be but I genuinely enjoy playing the game and think it's a blast check out American farming link down below our trailer 2 7K axles and we probably gotot 12 to 15,000 I would say in here at least 15 cuz this is and so we're just seeing back here how this hitch rides with all this weight you can see it's solid you see the suspension moving yeah heck yeah so this is more down forest or tongue weight tongue weight this is way more tongue weight wherever going to experience with the wagons cuz the wagons have a front and the rear axle and the front axle is a steer axle um and so yeah the the biggest thing is the sheer weight of all the Grain in it pushing forward and back so this is a great test I think this is a good test and we're we're going rough Offroad this will be kind of like field conditioned I think you're ready for f heck yeah I didn't even move yeah solid he should yeah and now it's time to haul gr's combine to my [Music] field [Music] [Applause] how were the cones Cones were good no problems whatsoever power lines and bridges you cleared perfectly yeah plenty of clearance and uh no problems at all you're good that's right we're good we're good [Music] by the time we got the combine hauled up and ready to go it was now midafternoon and sorry about the annoying buzzing sound in the combine that's a sensor that's broken and we couldn't figure it out for the first couple days all right I just got back with the first load we filled the wagon like half full just we filled it up with the end rows here so I can get turned around Grant right right now is running on Gary's the neighbor who is running the grand cart this is basically going to be our Runway here for Gary to gr cart through Spencer's Farm we're going to go do Gary's now here's the fence line between Spencer's farm and technically my new Farm now first time we got equipment on it we are rolling with Gary these guys 4640 and then a uh 650 Bushell cart there it's working good [Music] we got Gary full there man I love his setup the 4640 and the 650 demo it's about like a perfect combination we are getting rolling for Harvest Day 2 here got the comine started got Gary's tractor warming up while they were harvesting I'm running the wagons into the local clop it's nice that it's only a few miles away and gravel roads for most of it I timed it it takes me about 40 minutes for a round trip and when I'm back they have a cart full which is perfect timing and we got the last six rows and there we go she is done she he is done now we're heading to Spencers I think the game plan is I talked to Gary Gary's going to let us use his cart which is actually going to work really [Applause] [Applause] good [Music] here we are opening up the 30 acre piece and I can't imagine how Grant combine for days on end with the buzzer going off like that I got so andway right away I scrolled on forums until I saw how to get it turned off later on the sun was going down when we were finishing the end row so we quickly filled up Grant to take one more load in perfect you're good all right this was a uh of wet dirt mud and this is big I mean that's up to my knees right there so Grant came through here with the wagon fully loaded and I didn't show him exactly where not to drive like this right here is the wetest spot dry dry well somewhat dry he went right down the worst spot so I am surprised the wagon did not break something the amount of force that was getting pulled through here and here I mean the 6x6 is going to rip it off all right so it's Saturday the second day of harvesting here and we ended up finishing Garry's and then now we're on to mine and I think I got about 10 acres done of the 40 roughly 43 Acres that we're going to do here so the 5 acres here um really got taken out by like the the trees and then all the trees here but in the middle it was yielding pretty good did all the end rails on the 30 acres and haven't touched the other side of the creek the like 11 acres we got some deer eating all the corn for I shot out the back of the combine all right I might have spilled a little bit of corn no corn goes to way that's right sacrifice the Hat it's good enough get we got to feed a little for the squirrels B we did that okay so your first Farm harvesting what are you thinking so far but probably Farm average will come in around like 180 190 with the enr and everything combined and I'm excited over there there's the enr should all be good over there so if we section that off that'll be a good representation hopefully the combine doesn't plug up a bunch we'll go slow and then we have all the time in the world today and finish tomorrow Grant earlier mentioned the corn head roller in one row was acting up a few days earlier when taking out my n rows well that went away when we were in Gary's corn and his being drier there weren't any issues until we switched to mine with my stuff not being as dried down and the stocks being so tough the warn out roller started to really struggle and bunch up to keep the combine moving and not stopping every 10 ft we increase the header speed which unfortunately causes a little bit more header loss and then just slow down the ground speed of the combine so it seem like those were the best two combinations to keep it from bunching up the least amount as possible and when lifting the header up you can see how worn out those roller fins are but I can't complain we're still moving and yields are better than expected all right we are on the far East next to the railroad tracks here and we're getting off the endros and then right now I'm in Pioneer and the one we just did to the left is whiffles so we'll be able to see what yields better and all that kind of stuff so oh that's what happens so that is not good one of the rollers is bad and it plugs up reverse it we I think we dialed in the yield monitor just about perfect this next load should be accurate down the middle of the field and we'll see what it yields the [Music] we were thinking about taking that row apart it's not the row that I just undid but we're thinking we'll just kind of grind through it keep an eye on it and I've been keeping such an eye on it that I missed that other row that hasn't clogged all day it's going like 2 month n we'll just go slow through it hopefully we don't do anything do any more damage load yields up to 230 so things are yielding better three we got kind of uh our own jobs here so my dad's running the grain cart here Gary's grain cart he let us use which actually works really good cuz we don't have to unhook wagon and uh that works super nice and I'm Trucking Spencer's military truck and sp's combine [Music] for so that buzzing noise is the straw Chopper warning alert going off this pulley system drives the back of the straw Chopper it kind of like shreds all the stuff that comes out the back there's a sensor in this cover here behind this cover the bearing going around and around so if that bearing were to go out and it wasn't spinning anymore the sensor senses it and it says hey stop before you plug up the back and damage more stuff so we swapped out the sensor that wasn't the issue we chased up some of the wires that wasn't an issue and I've been reading more forums and found one that I hadn't read before cuz this issue has been going on all of Corn Harvest and Grant's been combining the whole time I don't know how he lives with it he said he just put it in the airpods and turned up the music but I'm getting n of it and so I'm wondering I think we over greas this bearing at one point and shot grease everywhere that's what I originally thought was wrong with it on the sensor there was Grease We swapped out the sensor swapped it out to this one I think all we have to do is take I'm unplug this guy right here and plug it into this and that's the bypass when you're harvesting a different crop or something I don't think I don't think you want the straw Chopper and so some people don't want that buzzer going off when they're going the whole time so I think there's a built-in bypass and we could have saved Grant like 3 days four days worth a headache so I unplug this guy then just plug this in this totally makes sense and I think this totally makes sense I don't know why I just didn't see it on a forum before or I didn't find that I'm going to test that out first if it doesn't work sensor bearing indicator spinning all right it's not beeping anymore the whole time in here is just beeping and uh yeah so we're going to fill the Grand C and then be done for the night all none of the wagons have tarps on them and they're saying pretty good chance of rain like midnight tonight otherwise we'd fill those tarp them and then take them in in the morning after the rain and you can't combine yet that was my original plan combine until dark here we're just going to fill the cart cuz it's got a tarp we got 210 of rain and two10 of rain is just perfect to make everything greasy [Applause] a so we're stuck here we go let's see what he does okay Spence is going to need speed and momentum on second thought we probably should have pulled this full wagon up that cck you guys better thank me I think it was worth it military truck usually always climbs out of there she got a little stuck but uh she's just a little slimy the Cornet is a little clapped out right now we got stock rolls on the third row that aren't grabbing correctly so it doesn't help when we're in any type of wet moisture stock it just plugs like crazy and then we got some weird sounds coming from the left side which we looked at it's vague and that's how we're going to keep it until we finish those last 14 acres we're not stopping because we got like 3 or 4 days worth of rain coming and it's going to get very greasy and muddy if we don't finish so we're going to try and get finished here today all right grant thinks he figured out what row is going bad he thinks it's the far left one which isn't the one that's been plugging banging noise you're going to hear we think it's the left one we're going to try and test each row [Music] it's 1:00 now it's a perfect fall day it's going to get all the way up to 75° we're doing anywhere 320 to 200 load yield we just reset is 225 totally happy with the yields and better than I could have kind of thought with the cor head acting up so much and it plug in so often I have to keep the head speed up and then we're actually going pretty pretty slow so going probably 1.6 1.7 mph please don't plug please don't plug please don't plug there we go we're done course we're officially done with the Third Acres right now field average is 210 belel things are going actually pretty good besides that guy over there pretty cool stuff going and seeing all that I was always curious what it was going to yield it's honestly fairly like consistent and anything that is dark green is 230 or better we got to cross the creek all right we are starting 10 acres left it is 2:15 we should uh should be able to get this just fine here the tallest corn right here this is going to be very interesting I'm going to jump in here this corn is 11 1/2 ft tall so a little bit of we did a lot but that's the worst spot by far yeah this stuff is yielding awesome uh besides one plug it's not awesome but that's uh that's okay there it did 225 on N rows Point rows I think this is going to yield better but it is kind of a weird shape so you end up with a lot of Point rows that deduct your yield it's where you're pretty much double planting and then all the plants some of them then kind of fall over because they have to compete with each other CU there's twice as many in one uh one spot so I've just been hauling for Spencer all day but we got this guy TI of the farm guy he stopped me at the co-op and his dad's in front of us what's your dream job to farm to farm okay what's the new mobile game that's going to come out America farming yes nice all right we're going to make some adjustments real quick to the combine seems like a bit too much is coming out the back we got low fuel so we're going to top it off Grant picked up a hitchhiker at the co-op what's up nothing picking up all the ears that I I I miss when I come combine yeah if you find any ears toss it in the header it's pretty slow going with the head CU that happens we're on the last five acres we're not going to stop now we're going to hammer down nice and slow we have 2 hours till the co-op closes if we can't get the last load in that's totally fine I'll just come back tomorrow drive it in and been fun it's just that one row it' be nice to have fixed it before coming here but we didn't know was this this big of an issue and I think uh I think the good stock health of the Corn kind of amplifies the problem a little update it's uh we brought in the last load of corn but we're still combining so we technically won't finish till tomorrow cuz we'll bring in one more wagon load but it is uh it's heing pretty good over here and the field average is coming up to 211 which is cool to see and then we are uh still plugging away at 1 and a half mph and we could run out of fuel I I am out of fuel in my transfer tank in the pickup truck don't do do oh no baby don't do it sometimes you got to sing to her right all the way down shut her down start her up and gra back down we were going 1 and 1/2 mph and it plugged up on us and I should have went a bit slower into that probably that one was my fault that one was my fault the last corn stocks for 2023 with a cornet that's about to explode and she made it how was Harvest what do you think your first harvest if you said in the springtime that the farm was going to yield this field was going to yield 2115 i' would be super happy and stuff but then obviously you sit in the combine with grants 80 acres that did 270 it's like oh dang uh that's doing really good and stuff and when we come out here over the summer and coming up to the fall looking at ear size and all that you're like oh wow this could do you know 250 so but there's so many uh tree Edge effects and stuff like that through the field consistently probably 235 240 I'll have to uh double check that yeah super happy I literally can't complain it would be nice if the combine was running good maybe we left some yield there cuz we run the heads speed really fast some cobs were jumping out maybe the combine isn't fully running up to its you know having the combine totally full so I don't know maybe a little too much out the back too it was just kind of not everything was perfect which it's not going to be the first year is kind of what I'm what I'm thinking so stuff to do probably better next year [Music] Grant decided to take the combine to the dealer for Service and Storage over the winter months and it's really helpful because we don't have a close place to store it just yet and while leaving he almost ran over a nice buck he said it jumped out of the ditch randomly and of course he wasn't looking for deer in a combine but it was pretty cool to see it run across the field like that and I had half a wagon load to bring in in yet and in the end we brought in 9,010 bushels of corn on 42.5 Acres which brings our total to 212 bels to the acre for our average now the really cool part the iPad that you saw in the combine it was registering all this data so we can come back sit on the computer and look at what spots are yielding good bad and trying and figure out why so when looking at this pay attention to the scale cuz I can really easily make everything look like it's all green and yielding really good anything in the darkest shade of green is 280 plus and then the bottom end of Green is 2 225 so anything that is yellow is 225 and below and so this is pretty cool to see you can really start to see areas that yeld good possibly wet spots and then right here on the side is tree damage tree damage and animal damage too deer damage too looking on the south part I know for certain this is a wet spot right here and then here it sits wet as well and in right there too that was literally a pwn this spring what's kind of cool to see not really but all these little red dots are me picking up that head so and then you can start to see spots where I had the whiffles seed we planted whiffles and Pioneer and the whiffles uh we had some planter issues so you can start to see that pop up for example right here I know for certain this sits wet cuz this spring I couldn't plant part of it and I think it's just the broken tile so we'll get that fixed stuff like that we will fix up and then this right here is totally my fault planner issue I double planted here screwed up big time and like little things like that point rows and bad planting does uh does kind of mess up the yield too and one of the best things has got to be you can literally make a rectangle on this map and see what this section yielded so those S Acres it gets into a wet spot to 236 and then the competition we're running you have whiffles and Pioneer it looks like whiffles barely beat it out in this section just by what is that 5 acres and a super nice thing is you can see side by side the hybrids what what they did for yield and it looks like whiffles Beat It Out by small margin just five bushels let's make a quick new rectangle because we had the whiff have a planner issue and just some of the seeds didn't go down in the ground this spring so this should be a bit more accurate this is a new square that I highlighted whiffles did 236 here pioneered to 217 which is just under a 20 Bushell yield difference in this part of the field in the end my thoughts are we did leave some yield out there with having the combine head not running smoothly I saw some cobs kind of flying out and it did seem like there was a lot of loss on the ground from the header but it's kind of one of those things you just make it the best you possibly can and keep chugging along cuz we were we're not going to take apart that head right there in the field I don't have a lot of tools on me and then we'd probably make it [Music] [Music] worse the most asked question on my past videos specifically when we were doing some farming stuff was how much I'm going to make this first year and the reason I'm making this video is just to help somebody out whether you're curious whether you want to know how much you can make off a few Acres farming or how much you can make off a YouTube channel that's why I'm making this video it's just to help the 10 people out that might take this information and do something with it the number we're going to come to is cash flow we're going to leave out some expenses that are to improve the land and look solely at the year-over-year cost of owning the land and then the yearly cost of uh the crop inputs and to start you have the option between renting land or buying it I ended up going with the buying route at a public auction I kind of believe in owning real estate too just as a long-term store value a good place to put money now this spring at an auction I purchased 50 acres of farmland and that came to this first year 42.5 of actual tillable ground that we planted and harvested the purchase price was $396,000 that comes to $9,300 per tillable acre and then it's $7,700 per acre around the whole entire border so like The Creeks ditches stuff that I'm not actually farming trees stuff like that I financed 90% of that and it came to a 4% interest rate and then the other 10% the $39,000 was a down payment and with that our land cost came to $225,500 or $600 per table acre now keep in mind I have property taxes in there as well and then 9600 of that 25,000 is actually money going towards the principal or gaining me Equity now to get some context of those numbers we're going to use the land survey that was done for Iowa Farmland in 2022 and that came out to an average of 11,400 per tillable acre of farmland and what's pretty interesting to see that's an increase from the previous year of 17% now in my region of the world you can see land prices go from $20,000 an acre plus and probably nothing less nothing that's purely Farmland will go less than 10,000 there'll be a lot of people commenting in this video talking about how much Farmland is in their area and for more context in 2023 the Iowa cash rent survey came in around $300 for cash rent in my area now that can probably go all the way down to 150 and all the way up to I don't know 400 but for my Lane cost it's 600 and now we're going to look at our input costs starting off with tillage we had to do some field work this spring some of the ground was really rough there were big holes it hadn't been farmed in many decades so I ended up running a disc across that and we're going to use isu's 2023 custom farm rates these are public numbers that you can find online and the cost of running a disc is $17.55 per acre which is about $745 that I paid the disc didn't do the best job so we came in for one pass of a fuel cultivator right before we planted and that came to the same price $17 per acre or $745 now right away in the spring we came out did some soil sampling that's pretty important to see like where fertility is at in the field we spent 5,100 bucks on in hydras and then 6,300 on dry fertilizer keep in mind that's application as well that comes out to $1,500 for fertilizer and that's including the custom cost of somebody doing it I wasn't out there with my equipment doing it and now it was time to get the seed in the ground so I borrowed my brother's tractor and planter a lot of you guys gave me a lot of heck for driving it 100 miles up to my place and so we're going to include $250 of diesel on you know that round trip and then $250 for wear and tear on the tires and the tractor stuff like that in order to grow corn you need some corn seed that came out to $5,000 or $118 per acre now to be completely transparent I was super fortunate to use my brother's tractor and planner I didn't write him a check when I used it now I paid for diesel I was the one in the tractor doing the work stuff like that now we do share a lot of equipment and a lot of things I do for him with no expectation of a reward or he bars piece of equipment from me that I own um kind of similar situation but we're still going to include that into our cash flow statement so we're going to use the custom rate again that comes to $24 an acre or $1,050 total now we also have to pay for crop insurance that came to $1,200 or $28 per acre next we have to add the cost of spraying this was custom done I didn't do any of the work myself that came out to $4,900 or $116 per acre in July when the corn was just about tasseling we had a drone come out they put down funger side and a product called source that came out to $2,300 or $56 per acre now fast forward to fall time it's October the Corn's all grown it's mature it's starting to dry down and now we need to harvest it so once again I'm borrowing my brother's equipment for this he has a John Deere 9560 SDS combine it has a six row corn head on it instead of driving it 100 miles I ended up having a trucker Hallet that came to $650 for the oneway trip the cost of custom combining is $1,750 or $41 per acre next we had the Hall of the Corn in we Ed the military dump truck for that gravity wagons and that comes to 13 cents per bushel that we bring in or haul and it was about a f mile oneway trip so it was about $1,200 to harvest all the bushel I did and then bring them in so those were all of our expenses we had our land cost then we had our crop input cost and now we're going to look at how much did we bring in how much would we make off the Harvest we went in we sold our corn now we yielded 9600 bushels of wet corn we averaged about 18% on moisture sure that we were bringing out of the field and drying down the corn isn't free at the point of sale it cost me about 5 cents per bushel per point to dry it down now I pre-sold 2,000 bushels of corn back in June there was a bit of a drought scare we didn't have a big rain up until then during the growing season and for fall delivery prices went up to $554 now in hindsight I should have sold a lot more than I did just those 2,000 you know I should have sold the 9,000 that we sold in a perfect world but prices never went up after that and they all went down from there now in case this video gets lots of views I want to take a second here and tell you guys about American farming my brother Grant you've seen in past videos he started a software company called Squad building about three years ago now Grant and the team at Squad built just released their first product American farming it's a mobile farming game it's kind of based on the Midwest region it kind of has that feel of the map there's like a downtown and everything a main street and it's like the true American farming operation in a video game there's livestock such as you can have a pig farm cattle farm you can even have a dairy operation so it's pretty cool there's lots to do in the game now the game isn't free it is a onetime purchase it's a it's a mobile video game so you can find it on the app store or Google Play now this isn't a paid promotion at all I just wanted to give a shout out to Grant and the team I've seen them work super hard on this over you know a few years here now and just wanted to shout it out and let people know if they're interested now back to how much we made in the end we made $4,400 and that comes out to $4.50 per bushel that we ended up selling at now that's after all the drying costs like I said earlier 5 cents per bushel per point of dry down cost so as you can tell our Revenue did not meet our expenses and on paper we lost money in our cash flow statement it came out to about $16,800 or just under $400 per acre of loss now keep in mind some of the things I did myself like running the disc fuel cultivator and planting uh IU custom rate kind of factors in what labor would cost I'm not sure what they use but on that $166,000 loss some of that money would be what I would pay myself to sit in the tractor and do the field work now personally I'm going to look at it like this year I lost $166,000 and you can click off this video and say how dumb I am for losing that much and tell everybody I lost a bunch of money farming but I'm going to throw a bit of speculation in and maybe some people would use what I'm going to say to kind of justify these land prices and justify you know purchasing land like I did now first thing to lower that number I didn't pay Grant to use the tractor the planner or the combine so those savings would have came out to $200 per acre if I didn't include that into my expenses and like I said I didn't write him a check for that super fortunate that I didn't have to and there's a bunch there's a bunch of times I've worked for Grant in many years past without any pay stuff like that or lent him a piece of my equipment my truck whatever it is and knock it any pay that we're kind of a team like that and we work together and earlier I mentioned there's $9,600 of that land cost that's actually paying down principal so I like to kind of look at it as a force savings account and really that's $9,600 of equity I'm putting into the land and at some point it's not liquid at all I'm not saying it is but at some point I should be able to get that money back unless land price is totally collaps and I can't sell it for anything so minusing off those two the 16,000 kind of goes down pretty quick and things are looking a bit better now something that's peer speculation is land price appreciation so earlier I said from 2021 what the Iowa land survey went up 177% just for fun let's take my purchase price of $396,000 add 177% increase let's act like it did it again this year and that would turn out to $460,000 or $67,000 increase year-over-year from Land price appreciation and that's not liquid that's uh that's all on paper but what I want to find out is like what kind of year-over-year number we can use that's sure it's all speculation but it's fairly conservative over the past 50 years since 1973 Iowa land prices have went up 6% year-over-year and that 6% is an average so you know 21 to 22 that was 17% and maybe back in the 80s it went down 10% one year 8% one year so on average past 50 years it's went up 6% and let's cut that into a third so I'm going to use 2% for this so let's conservatively say my land went up 2% this year that would be $7,900 increase which is starting to bring that $116,000 loss down even lower and let's just say we use 6% well that's $223,000 a year again I'm not using that but I mean that's what it's done the past 50 years which is kind of interesting just to think about and again it's all eLiquid it's all on paper I could Cash out refinance or I could sell it but uh you know maybe for the next three years land goes down 5% year over year and uh I'm in a crunch I need to sell land oh I lost 15% but when you kind of factor that in you can kind of start to justify you know buying land and maybe that's why land prices are so high just uh people get used to number going up and people keep buying low interest rates I don't know I'm just uh just saying so now after the savings from borrowing my brother's tractor and combine then let's factor in the principal payment and then also the 2% land appreciation now it looks like on paper we actually made some money you could say this year we made $3,400 I'm not going to I'm just saying maybe some people do people look at numbers in all different ways that's kind of one thing I've discovered when you open up an Excel spreadsheet track all your stuff it's probably uh it's really good to do it but don't base your decision fully off that now realistically money out of my pocket was really closer to $144,000 because again I didn't pay my brother for for borrowing his equipment but I like to be more conservative and we'll stick with this the negative 16,000 now one thing I haven't talked about is if I ever got a like a operating loan some Farmers you know it's a lot of money for example that fertilizer the spray all that stuff you're paying for the seed like I already bought seed for next year and so some Farmers borrow money to then pay all their expenses for that year and I didn't do that but you could also add that into the expenses um that some Farmers might have but one thing too to hit on is like the fun enjoyment I got from this year all the learning we did and stuff like that there's no way to factor that in on paper and if you guys want to watch a better video that goes like more in depth Co the cornstar I'll link his video below he spends a lot of time going in much more detail on all this stuff now I want to throw another wrench into this situation and look at how much this YouTube channel made this year it's specifically Al like let's combine that with the revenue off the corn and then how much this YouTube channel made off specifically farming videos on this land and the whole reason I made this YouTube channel wasn't actually to make any money it was kind of for the fun of it document some stuff look back on and I actually didn't put any ads on my videos at first I calculated a while back I I missed out on like ,000 to $2,000 now there's a bunch of ways to make money off YouTube but we're going to specifically keep it really simple and just look at AdSense how much I'm making off per video Google AdSense now the highest view video was 760,000 views and that made 2600 bucks and that comes out to $353 per 1,000 views so that's how much revenue I got per 1,000 views or RPM for short and a video that got 660,000 views made $3,600 or $5.50 per 1,000 views and where not all YouTube videos make the same amount of money also you have different YouTube channels so like a channel that's about video games and a channel that's solely about like real estate finances the real estate and finance channel is going to make quite a bit more per 1,000 views but once you find out how much something makes per 1,000 views then you just take that number and times it by however many views it has and the total amount of money I made from YouTube videos this year specifically about farming came out to $7,800 now you could take that number minus it off our 16,000 and say we only lost around $88,000 this year or if we add that YouTube money plus our principal payment plus the savings we got from using grants equipment and then the land appreciation it on paper we could say that we made $111,000 this year but all that's just speculation like the appreciation stuff like that I'm not going to look at it that way I'm just saying you could and the total amount of money this channel made this year comes to about $144,000 that's pretty crazy to see that we made that much money off this channel so so far super appreciate all the people that watch watch the videos that wasn't my goal at the beginning of this year and nowhere did I uh did I factor that into my projections for this year I actually like I said I missed out on I think I think around $2,000 because I didn't have ads on my videos so that kind of gives you an idea once you look at how many views are on some of these videos how much you could make uh if you were to start your own YouTube channel I always kind of tell friends and family there's there's a million ways to make money online it's it's a good opportunity it's it's it's honestly a really good side hustle for somebody that's looking to um maybe you have a 9 to-5 and you know you have a couple hours late at night that you're looking to do something to uh to start something YouTube isn't there's a million different ways YouTube's just one way but maybe you're really passionate about one certain Niche or topic anyway I just wanted to share those numbers and maybe you guys think those aren't worth worth the time I put into the videos they actually take quite a bit of time to edit them and stuff but maybe you guys think holy cow $14,000 off making these stupid YouTube videos that's awesome I should start it so anyway just thought I'd be transparent with those numbers and and yeah comment below let me know if you have any thoughts or different ways of looking at things or things I should do different for next year so thanks for watching appreciate it

Channel: Spencer Hilbert

Views: 5,581,725

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Id: VjpQ4D8wDpA

Length: 120min 17sec (7217 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 16 2023