Reseeding Into The Dust...

good morning everybody welcome back to another video today it's supposed to get up to plus 32 degrees celsius out here i'll put the translation in fahrenheit on the screen and that's pretty hot especially for this early in the year those are mid-summer temperatures usually for out here plus 32 that's way too hot for me i don't enjoy it anymore but the cows don't enjoy it either and that's why we have a special type of ventilation in our barn called tunnel ventilation so the front of this barn is all open the panels they slide all the way down and then we have 10 big exhaust fans i believe they're six foot tall fans and they pull the air through the barn and you guys will notice there's only five out of the ten fans on and that's because this spring my dad decided you know what we're not going to turn all of them on because it's just not necessary when it's not even above 20 degrees celsius but today all of a sudden we're blasting right past 30 degrees and we're getting pretty hot so i'm going to turn the rest of these fans on they do suck a ton of electricity and you really see that in the power bill at the end of every month and that's why we didn't want to have them all on just wasting power so now that it's hot though we can definitely justify it and we're going to turn all 10 of them on they're literally just some switches right beside the fans here so that's kind of a master switch for this fan right here it's got a little miniature control box for each individual fan and then that relays back to the control box that regulates the ventilation for this entire barn and that's kind of how it works there you go you can see this one's already spooling up these tunnel ventilation fans they do only kick on in sections so as it starts to get warmer in the barn more of them will turn on [Music] [Music] just like that all 10 fans are spooling away but you know what's working good when you're standing all the way at the back of the barn and it still feels fresh and you can smell and breathe in fresh air 300 calories a little over 300 cows in this barn and they're gonna need a lot of draft today just because of that temperature but uh we're gonna go do some other stuff this morning all right guys next thing we're doing this morning is we're putting close-ups in the barn we do this every monday or tuesday but usually on monday if we're really on top of it we just took six cows out of the dry cow curls which are eight and nine we're gonna put them in the shoot system back there and then once we get them in the chute we're gonna walk through our bread heifer pen as well and we're just gonna be looking for heifers that are bagging up that look like they're gonna count within the next two to three weeks so let's get these up in the chute so these ladies they were just fed so you can see they're all eating at the feed bunk right now and i'm able to get a really good look at their udders here now and see if there's anyone that's begging up well i walk through the two uh heifer pens here and nobody's really banging up at all so that's good um that means we just have these six cows we're gonna go put them in the barn so we're just giving the cows their vaccines right now and right away we also trim the cows tails with this cordless trimmer that we have here me and my dad we were always wondering like why the battery was dying so quickly on this cordless trimmer and it never really worked good we could trim like five tails and the battery would die and it would just crap out on us until we figured out i always used to go to 4h when i was a kid and we learned you can grease underneath on the blades here on the trimmer and put some lubricant in there and it goes a lot easier my dad did that we realized we should be doing that and it almost went a gear higher so it's working a lot better now [Music] now we're gonna take corel one out and we're gonna just take the biggest calves out of this corel the biggest 20 and move them up to the next uh age group hey come on hey this afternoon i am going to be planting some alfalfa seed in the ground we're going to do a bit of seeding here i'm gonna be using the versatile genesis back here 2210 and we're gonna hook it up to our old melro press drill just a smaller 20 foot drill pretty old it's probably around 40 50 years old used it last summer a little bit it's gonna use it again now and uh we're gonna put some alfalfa seed in the ground with that thing we did finish up seeding with the big drill the big boy about two weeks ago now or something maybe not quite maybe 10 days something like that and all the seed did go down relatively in the moisture a little bit of canola looks like it's dry so we are going to need some rain and there is not a lot of rain in the forecast and the alfalfa sea that i'm going to be putting in the ground today is definitely not going to be going in the moisture either so why are you going to be planting it then youn well we're kind of crossing our fingers and betting that we're going to get rain although it's not certain we might not get any rain at all it is pretty dry out there but the idea with putting this seed in the ground is we're just gonna put it there it's gonna sit dormant until it does get some moisture and then it's gonna start to germinate and the alfalfa will start to grow and that's our idea so uh you can see now our versatile genesis is still hooked up to the bunny manure spreader and the reason why we're going to be using this tractor is just because it's got the gps auto steer so you really appreciate the gps auto steer when you're seating with something like the melro press drill and uh makes your life a lot easier so we're gonna just leave the manure spreader right here where it is get this unhooked i think it's gonna take me about 90 seconds to unhook this wagon a minute 12 that's not bad at all and we're gonna go ahead and turn the air conditioning all the way up so this is our gps auto steer monitor here i'm just going to turn it on right now because it does take like 20 25 minutes to get connected to a bunch of satellites and before it's gonna actually do the automatic steering for us i'm gonna start off by putting some fuel in this tractor because we've got about a quarter tank and that old drill is not the most portable thing you can't really drive that fast with it so better start off by filling this girl up i always put the fuel gap on the steps now because i've lost the fuel cap by putting it there forgetting to put it on this way you're either going to step on it or you're going to see it and put it on so i'm going to get this cedar hooked up but there's no jack on the hitch so plus is going to lift it up here for me so all right so we got two bags in each box so a total of four in the cedar and then we also got four more bags on top and i'm just doing that not putting it all in at once we're gonna empty the four bags out into the field that should give me about almost 20 acres probably maybe 17 acres and then i can double check okay we're empty at about 16 or 17 acres and then i know i'm putting down the right amount of seed instead of if i just put it all in and then i was 10 acres short at the end that would be pretty bad so that's why we didn't put it all in at once it definitely fits but uh just to kind of double check and play it safe so last fall we seeded this field with alfalfa the exact same drill as well and we were hoping that the snow that melted this spring would get the seed to germinate because we put the seed in the ground so late last fall but it looks like it probably came up out of the ground and then froze and died off or maybe it just died because there was no moisture for a little bit there this spring but it didn't work out so now i'm doing the exact same thing and we're putting about 13 pounds of seed down to the ground per acre and hopefully you know it's gonna sit dry now there's no way this stuff is going in any kind of moisture right now but hopefully if we get a rain because the seat is going to be so shallow it's it's so it's not going deep at all a little bit of rain will get the stuff germinated up out of the ground so hopefully there is rain in the forecast right now not a lot but fingers crossed [Music] [Music] just hopping out here these bags are slipping back a bit don't want to lose them they're not cheap there's some right there there was a little bit of um inoculated seed left in the drill and that's why that one's a bit green and i'm actually able to see it there's another kind of tan seed right in front of my finger there it's pretty much the same color as the dirt but that's going probably a quarter inch to half an inch deep so super shallow and it's absolutely bone dry it's like look at the dust it's unreal it's like you're at the beach it's just pure sandbox sand i guess we should also check in the boxes here make sure that seat is feeding out of every run the way you can tell seed is running out of every single run you can see the little dimples there and every run on this box is good sweet everything's looking good so the way this old cedar works you got two discs and they kind of open up a bit of a run in the soil here and then it's dropping seed down in between those two discs into the ground and then your pack wheels at the back and they're packing it down okay so i've seen it about 10 acres so far you guys can see we're still super close to that tree line so a couple passes probably like five up and downs there but i gotta pull over and check and make sure that the seed is still feeding out of the boxes evenly because this is a different type of drill than that big fancy borgo where it all hoppers down nicely into an auger and you never really have to move the seat around the box but this drill it's a lot different the meters are all separate and there's a bunch of them across the entire box so if there's a lot of seed on this side and there's none on this side it's only going to go down there and it's not going to move so you just got to manually move it over and that's why we got this end of a broom so we can do that so yeah you can see there's quite a bit less seed on that end run so we're just gonna have to kick a bunch over and right away while we're out here we're just going to double check and make sure that there's seed going down in each run so from the back of the drill here we can see into the discs and we can see if there's seed in there or not so it's pretty easy from the back of the drill here so i'm just going to walk along check down every single run and make sure there's seed coming out make sure that all of our uh hoses are still lined up with the discs over the last couple of years we've really struggled to get some good strong alfalfa established out in the fields uh usually it's pretty good out here but over the last few years we've had some pretty brutal winters specifically not getting a lot of snow coverage on the field and then getting some really cold weather snow is a really good insulator but the last couple of winters out here in saskatchewan we've had less snow and then really incredibly cold winters and that freezes the alfalfa and kills it so we've had two or three gnarly winter kills in alfalfa and we only get two cuts to start with so it's been pretty tough out here over the last couple of years for us anyway to get some good alfalfa we love feeding it to the milk cows and it's always a huge asset to our farm to have some good alfalfa silage on the yard that we're feeding to our cows that's why we like it so much it's a lot better and a lot easier to cut and chop and put in the silage pile than pee silages so that's why that's why we're so keen on getting some good alfalfa established out here [Music] so we finished up the field that i wanted to get seeded today here and i was definitely less acres than we thought we were thinking about 35 acres but it turns out 24 acres because we weren't seeding the entire field more or less just half of the field so we kind of uh we're a little bit off there but um doesn't matter we still got the four bags on top of the drill and the drill is definitely putting it down lighter than we thought we were trying or we were thinking about putting it down at uh 12 to 13 pounds it looks like it was closer to eight pounds but um that's not going to be too big of an issue we're reseeding this obviously you want to do a good job but it's it's going to be fine we're going to need rain if we get the rain we'll have a nice alfalfa field here anyway 13 pounds with alfalfa seed it's on the more aggressive side i guess so um yeah we're gonna go and park this in the shed i don't know i think i'll clean the seed that's out in the drill yet uh probably tomorrow or the day after with a vacuum cleaner put it back into a bag clean it up nicely and put this thing away for storage because i don't think we're going to be using this thing again but uh yeah that is going to be it for today's video guys if you enjoyed be sure to hit those like and subscribe buttons down below check out the instagram at sasquatch kid you can grab yourself a t-shirt or one of these hats at uh farmfocus.com it'll be linked in the description down below for you guys to check out if you want and as always i hope to see you guys in the next video thanks for watching

Channel: SaskDutch Kid

Views: 65,525

Rating: 4.984087 out of 5

Keywords: dairy farming, dairy cattle, farming in canada, canadian dairy farm, dairy, farm, farming, farm vlog, farm vlog channel, farming selfie, holstein, holstein cow, holstein farm, cow farm, farming milk cows, tractor, seeder, combine, crop farmer, land farmer

Id: lzSJbyTS3GY

Length: 15min 41sec (941 seconds)

Published: Tue May 18 2021