Too Many Break Downs While Chopping...

good afternoon everybody we are on day two of chopping barley we finished up two quarters already and we got about a hundred loads off but two quarters so really light stuff we're finally into the heavier stuff you can really see these swaths are a lot bigger there's a lot more volume here and this barley's actually looking really good you can see there's actually some fill in the kernels so this this silage should be a lot better than the first two quarters we did all that white stuff that's all barley grain and that's going to give us a lot more milk when the barley doesn't fully mature you're not going to fill those kernels out and there's going to be a lot less energy in your silage and that means you're going to have to subsidize the energy in the cows tmr or total mix ration with some other type of grain and that's really expensive especially when you can if you're lucky grow it in your silage and then you don't have to buy so much so it's a really cost-effective way to silence you know get as much energy in there as possible and try to buy the least amount of grain you can't always do that though it's dependent on the weather versatile is doing great for chopping we were having some issues this morning with the chopper it was having a bit of a vibration there still is we can't really pinpoint where it is because there's so many moving parts in this thing this chopper is maybe eight or nine years old already and i don't think we've replaced that at all so after that amount of time it's definitely getting a little bit loose and starting to vibrate a little bit [Music] got a quick break here the swather broke down we are actually in a bit of a p field here and that's just because our barley field kind of budded right up to this pea field we see it a little bit of barley in this field and just for convenience we had to cut a couple acres of peas so that's what we were doing and then the swather reel broke so they went back to the shop i don't know if another truck is going to show up and get the rest of this swath we got like 100 yards of swath but otherwise i'm kind of just stuck out here you get her going so typically we won't go too far ahead of the chopper with the swather but this year some parts are pretty dry some parts are pretty moist yet so we were getting a little bit far ahead but i've already chopped everything usually you don't want to go too far ahead though because otherwise the crop is going to dry out in between the swather and the chopper so you only ever go like two or three swaths ahead of the thing but you guys can see as soon as that swather breaks down that everything stands still whereas if you would have cut way far ahead you know like 10 or 15 20 swats ahead of the chopper you'd be able to go until that swather was fixed and it's be a lot more efficient but it's all about feed quality so we just backed up far enough from where she's gonna start cutting so she doesn't have to dodge me or anything i'll go check out the farm now we'll hitch a ride back with a trucker back to the farm [Applause] since we're not shopping might as well come out to the pit check it out it's looking really good this is just a little load so dima is sitting on the loader he's pushing up all the silage this year he did the same thing last year and it's more complicated than it actually looks just pushing it up onto a neat pile it's really important that you're constantly driving back and forth packing the silage as good as possible the idea behind that you're trying to push all the air out of all the silage and that's going to make it ferment a lot better and you're getting a lot better quality feed so even if there's not a ton of loads coming in you're constantly driving back and forth and back and forth packing it down and kind of squeezing all that air out and you want to pack every square into this pit so you got to be pretty concentrated and make sure you're doing a good job this case loader has a ton of torque so it pushes the silage up the pile really easily we don't need a big four-wheel drive tractor this thing's pretty good the new holland loader it's a lot more gutless doesn't have the torque that this thing does and it really struggles a lot more to push the salad up you can really feel the difference between the two loaders you guys might be wondering what happened to the back of this loader it's missing the hood unfortunately when we were doing the first cut of alfalfa silage uh it got backed into by it while the loader backed into a truck so pretty unfortunate we got it running again kind of pressed in some of the exhaust and some other stuff in that engine bait nothing that wasn't able to be fixed on time we'll go hop in there with dima it's a pretty nice pile man doing a good job so we got the duals on the case loader here we only ever put those on for pack and silage they give you more packing area so you're able to pack more of this pile at one pass and it also makes it a lot more stable so you're way less likely to tip over when you get close to an edge and that makes packing a lot safer as well so kind of two uses all right swath is going again brent fixed it up start following her right away all right well guys uh today was gonna be the big day we were gonna put up a hundred loads which we've done before and i was pushing this thing pretty hard this morning just trying to keep it fed go hard since we finally got a field that's heavy enough but um we just had a pretty big uh breakdown on the chopper something probably went through some metal this chopper unfortunately does not have a metal detector i really wish it did but that's one of the things this chopper at the time didn't come with we bought a new one it definitely would have that metal detector on it but unfortunately something just went through the knife flew out the whole machine the chopper it was vibrating like crazy it was just a really loud violent bang that just happened and uh we're gonna bring it back to the shop i texted mechanic brent he's probably gonna be at the shop ready he's driving her truck and we're gonna have to get this thing going as quickly as possible again luckily we're into some heavier stuff it's not as dry as the lighter stuff was so we're not really time crunched we just would like to keep going for a day and get it done every other day we have had a minor breakdown we've still been able to put up 60-ish loads per day a good day will be 100 loads and if you continue to have days that are slow it just drags the process of chopping so much longer and it's kind of too bad so it's supposed to be all knives like here bunch just are gone you can see in the spout here as well head up here so this is the load that i was chopping in when that big mistake happened so there's going to be a ton of knives a ton of chunks of metal in here and we don't want to put that in the silage because otherwise the cows are going to eat it so we're just going to back it into this tree line here and dump it so he's just kind of breaking a little bit make sure it stays in the tree row as good as he possibly can so we are going to have to come back here with a loader i guess but at least it's out of the way oh we're going to go now to where this actually happened in the field because we're missing some parts on the chopper they probably fell on the ground there we better go and pick those up because otherwise next year when we're chopping we're just going to chop those as well and have the same issue we want to make sure we leave the field clean well guys i am off to the city the chopper is pretty damaged and there's a cutter bar that's also damaged and that's basically a bar it's a flat bar and the knives shear right up close to it and the crop is in between there and that's what actually cuts it into a bunch of small pieces since this piece of metal or whatever went through the chopper took out a bunch of knives they probably slammed into that cutter bar banged it up really bad and it's not straight anymore so if we use that same cutter bar it's going to do a horrible job cutting so we need to go and get a new one and luckily we ordered one a couple days ago and it's in saskatoon it's waiting we get all the parts for this chopper out of alberta there's not a dealer for it in saskatchewan unfortunately that's one huge downfall for us right in this chop road here in saskatchewan parts can be a bit of an issue but luckily we ordered a couple days ago it's already in saskatoon so i'm on my way to go and pick it up right now all right we got a bunch of parts in the box of the truck for the chopper just ripping back to the farm right now there's a lot of construction on this highway gotta drive slow it's pretty tedious they are making the highway better so it's cool anyway catch you guys when we're back at the farm so we're going again chopper's doing a really good job it's eating up a ton of barley are pushing loads up pretty good elaine hasn't even had to stop yet once to let us catch up at all over the last two hours so it's really it's going smooth now just covering the silas pit right now they already did a whole bunch without me so i kind of showed up at the perfect time that's three days of silage you get a couple breakdowns slows things down quite a bit right on so i got the tires on the top i only tossed a couple but i stole dimas loader here and i'm gonna put some dirt on the edge of the plastic we always put tires on the top and then dirt around the edges where it's on the ground it's just a lot more secure than tires plus your throw them all by hand so that's pretty cool well that is the end for day three we finally got some plastic on the pile i'll catch you guys in the next one thanks for watching

Channel: SaskDutch Kid

Views: 83,423

Rating: 4.9774957 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: bBK5emO9VYQ

Length: 13min 48sec (828 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 25 2021