Bees!

     The Bees have arrived.

     Look at those happy guys. The man on the right is the Author's father. His name is John and he is in a lot of the pictures on this site. (Look for the hat.) The man on the left is Barry Wolf and he's a bit like Santa Claus. He comes from way up north and delivers gifts. Oh, and he's quite jolly too. Unlike Santa Clause, though, he's from Saskatchewan and it's not so much gifts that he delivers as cargo. He's still very jolly, though. Also, instead of a sleigh he uses a great big truck driven by a nice guy named Brendan.

     This monstrous truck is full of bees. Probably not the kind of bee you're envisioning right now, though. These are Leafcutter Bees and they come in board form. That white building behind the truck is where the boards are going to be moved to.

     This is the inside of the white building. It's actually the refrigerated box from a truck trailer. Inside you can see many bee-boards. We call them bee-boards because they used to be wooden boards. We still use many wooden boards, but these are made of polystyrene. They're about four feet long, one foot wide, and three inches thick. They are also full of holes.

     The holes are about three-sixteenths of an inch in diameter, or roughly leafcutter bee-sized. Not surprisingly, a leafcutter bee cuts leaves. They cut out little circles and use them to make little capsules or cells in any hole they find that is small enough. They'll even check your ears for vacancy, though I've never heard of them moving in. Most of the cells will have eggs laid in them but a few will be filled with what is called bee-bread. Bee-bread is a mix of honey and pollen (and some other ingredients, I'm sure) that will be food for the young bees after they mature.
     The boards are put into a refrigerated trailer so that the bees stay asleep. (They're not really asleep, but for the purposes of this post "asleep" will do.) The important thing is, so long as they think it's still winter, they'll stay put.
     Leafcutter bees are very important for the pollination of alfalfa, but all that's a long ways off (at least for them.) So for now, they sleep and dream of bright days and green leaves. (At least I hope they do.)

The Disc

      This is a Disc.

     Some people might insist on calling them a disc harrow or a disc plow, but around here it's just a disc. When you use the disc you are discing and once you do it the field is disced. The "C" is always said with a "K" sound and never with an "S" sound. It is towed behind a tractor.
     You can see most of the tow bar in the above picture. You can also see the hydraulic systems that raise and lower the wheels. The wheels are for transport. When you're using the disc they stay up so that the individual disc blades can do their work.



     Here they are up close. What a disc does is break up and mix the top layer of the soil. It also cuts up any weeds or leftover crop matter. The blades are a concave shape and are angled so that the sharp side cuts strait but then the curve of the disc pushes the soil to the side. As the disc turns it takes this sideways motion and turns it into a rolling motion. The front bank of discs rolls the soil one way and the rear bank rolls it the other. This makes sure that the dirt is chopped and mixed into a usable texture. You might have noticed that the banks are angled in opposite directions. This is so that the individual disks aren't in each other's way and also so the dirt is placed back where it came from. A loose crumbly soil breathes better which is good for it, and is much easier to plant in. It's also easier to run other, less burly implements through later on.

     A disk is often used in conjunction with a wheel roller. Few implements are more strait-foreword than the wheel roller. It rolls. What this does is reduce the surface area of the soil by squashing it down a bit, while not squashing it so much that it can't breathe.

     If you zoom in on the above and below pictures you can kind of see the dirt being tossed by the discs. Notice how the unworked ground shows the dry surface on top while the worked ground is mixed so the moisture shows. The particularly astute reader might notice that losing moisture is a bad thing out here in the dryness of Owyhee County. The roller minimizes this through reducing the surface area and therefore it's exposure to the wind and sun.

     The days are fast approaching when the rest of the crops will be planted. The appearance of the disc in the fields is the first step towards the planting of most crops. The Disc lays down the groundwork (so to speak) of many things to come.

In Action

     Today's post is more of a test than anything. Describing what a farmer (or anyone else) does in a tractor is easier if I show you first, so that's what I'm going to do here.

     Warning! Turn your volume down! It was a very windy day.

     This farmer is corrugating a pasture. The bar on the back of the tractor is mounted with three shovel points. (Actually its mounted with others too, but they've been raised up so they don't do anything.) They are whats doing the corrugating. A shovel point scoops the dirt and then lifts and tosses it out to the side.
     As he reaches the end he throttles down and pulls the hydraulic lever to lift the corrugater bar out of the ground. He then turns, counts to make sure he gets the gap* correct, lowers the bar in the same manner and throttles back up. He does it all in seconds.
     He makes it look easy, but it's not. Having driven this tractor for a goodly few years he knows where the levers are without looking. Most of the turns the farmer made weren't so smooth because the pasture is so small, but in an open field every turn costs you time. Time is generally something a farmer doesn't have to waste, because nature waits for no man. So every turn counts. Plus, after a few hours you get tired of being on a tractor and don't want to spend anymore time on it than necessary.
     When a person drives a tractor, they must pay close attention to the tractor itself and whatever implement is attached to it for the sake of the safety of the driver, the machines, and the crops. All kinds of things can go wrong, so a driver must remain vigilant. That's why he sits a bit sideways as he's coming out of the turn. He can watch where he's going and also watch his corrugater bar.



* The correct gap is three rows. He left three rows on his left because he had more room at the other end to turn left than he did to turn right.

Technical Difficulties.

     I'm afraid that today's regularly scheduled post has suffered some technical difficulties. In it's place please enjoy these Owyhee County images. Remember: You can click images within posts to see a larger version.

Thinning The Alfalfa

     These are some nice, neat, green rows. Maybe too neat. This is alfalfa. It has a tendency to grow very close together. This is not a good thing as the extra competition will limit growth. So they must be thinned.

     Farmers use many different methods to do this. Here, various points have been put along a bar to remove some of the competition. We'll talk more about them later, but for now, all you need to know is what they do.

     Half of the blades were wide cutting blades like you see on the left. They cut the roots of the path in front of them. The narrow point you see on the right either breaks the crown (the part on the alfalfa plant where the roots and stems meet) or pops it out of the ground. They alternated down the length of the bar. What you end up with is this.



     On the left is the untouched alfalfa, on the right is the thinned alfalfa. Many of the plants are removed, leaving more space for the ones that remain. In the end, having fewer alfalfa plants that are larger produces more seeds.

Winter Wheat Update

     Since I talked all about the Spring Wheat yesterday, I figured that an update on the Winter Wheat couldn't hurt. Nothing smells more pure and clean than a young, healthy, growing plant. In my opinion, wheat smells best.

     As you can see, it's doing well. In this field the wheat has grown to between 5 and 8 inches tall. These little grass plants are industrious little factories. In the leaves is where photosynthesis happens. Photosynthesis is a process where the plant makes the sugars it lives off of. Leaves are wide and flat to maximize exposure to the sun, which is what powers the photosynthesis. The sugars are carried in the sap through the veins. The lines you see in the leaf below are the veins of the wheat plant's leaf. In this leaf, as with all grasses, the veins are parallel.

     For those of you who are interested (and even if you're not) there are two kinds of vein in a plant. Xylem bring water and minerals up from the roots. Phloem move the sap and the sugar it carries.
     The leaves are also where the plant "breathes." They don't breathe quite like we do, but what you need to know is that the plant will take in some of what it needs from the air. In the process it takes in carbon dioxide and releases oxygen.
     While the leaves do their work up top the roots are working just as hard absorbing water and minerals from the soil. As there are plenty of water and minerals, it's a race to see which plant can grow the fastest.

     In short, the Winter Wheat is doing what it does best: Growing. The entire purpose of explaining it all is to hopefully illustrate the magnitude of what is happening. These plants which you may not have seen as being any different from your yard are actually taking elements that we cannot directly use (sunlight, carbon dioxide, etc.) and turning them into a usable (vital, in fact) energy source. I hope that every once and a while  when you're eating you think of the amazing plants (and people) that make it all possible.

Wheat Sprouts

     Aren't seeds great? Well I think so. The spring wheat has finally emerged, giving me the chance to do this post.

     They're pretty small now. Dwarfed by even the smallest clod. Each of these is an individual wheat  plant. a few of them can boast to be an inch tall, but only a few. Believe it or not, their origins are even more humble.

     These are wheat kernels or grains or seeds. Whatever you call them, this is where wheat comes from. They're also what gets made into all kinds of food. When placed in the ground by the Grain Drill (remember the drill?) they can start to react instantly. With the right amount of sun on, and water in the soil they grow quite fast.

     Ten days (more or less) after planting is when the first root emerged in this field. You can see it just emerging in the picture above. When it's first starting out the proto-plant will feed off of the starch contained in the wheat kernel. It has just enough to grow it's first roots and leaves. At first one root will head strait down and little hairlike roots pop out of it and start sucking up water. At roughly the same time the first stem will emerge and head strait up looking for it's first sunlight.

     Twenty days in (thereabouts) this specific little kernel is doing well. With three larger roots covered with the little hair-like roots (what the dirt is sticking to) it pulls water up into the plant. The stem on this plant had just reached the surface and will soon turn green. None of the little wheat plants that I saw had leaves yet, but it won't be long. Once they grow the plant will be up and running, which is good because the starch is about spent. They're well on their way, and in not too long their seeds will end up in all kinds of products which you might eat or they might get tossed back into the ground to make yet another crop.

Hay.

     This is a haystack.

     Inside it is a significant amount of alfalfa hay. Hay is any sort of plant that has been put into a mode that is useful for storage. This hay has been run through a piece of equipment called a baler. The baler compresses regular alfalfa into flat partitions. They can then be peeled off to be fed at a later time. This is an important industry here in Owyhee County because there are many stock animals that must be fed during the long winter months. There are also a number of dairy cows that my not have pastures at all that need hay all year long.

     It's good feed, and unlike their wild cousins, a stock animal can continue to gain weight over the winter when eating good hay. As hay is so common and important out here, there will be more posts on it at a later date.



     (The author is still sick. Hopefully we'll be back full sized posts soon.)

Breakfast.

     Many folks out in Owyhee County raise our own beef cattle. But what do they eat? They always eat hay but that's just filler. For the best beef you need to feed them something extra special.

     Corn and Peas; This is what I feed to four cows every morning. So, like many of you, they have cereal for breakfast. But in this state it's somewhat crunchy. So these seeds get processed through this.

     It's a mill or grinder. Viewed slightly from above you can see that the peas and corn go in the top and comes out the front. (Under the bag on the bottom left.) Inside is the grinding mechanism that turns our seeds into this.

     All mashed up and crushed it looks like something you'd find in the organic aisle of your local supermarket. And it more or less is, but to a cow, it's Candy!

     They eat about four and half gallons of it in less than ten minutes every morning and evening. In between feeding times they'll pick morosely at the hay and dream of the next time they'll get their corn and peas.

Owyhee Aviary

     (The author is ill today, so please be forgiving if this post is a bit off task.)

     Agriculture is not far removed from nature. It's all over out here, in fact. I've always been a bit partial to birds, myself.

     Yesterday I mentioned that we've been host to Snow Geese passing through. They're on their way to their feeding and nesting grounds in the tundras of Canada. Not every Harvesting gets all of the seeds and the geese are more than happy to pick up any corn kernels that were left behind. Many hunters would like to eat these plump birds, but in this field there is no hunting allowed. They came by the hundreds, if not thousands.

     A great many birds stay all winter. Our most native and most common fowl down in the lowlands is the California Quail.

     This photo was taken about a month ago when coveying up for protection and warmth was first on the quail's minds. But now the little males are more interested in the little females and are much more busy trying to find out who is toughest.

     This little fellow would love to eat one of the quail, but he's much to small to catch one. This is an American Kestrel. He's a minuscule falcon who can often be seen hovering over the fields waiting for a sign of movement from a grasshopper or small rodent. And speaking of rodent lovers...

     This is a Burrowing Owl. It's got a home in an old fox den in a drain ditch near here. It loves eating the many voles that live in the hayfield next to it's home, which might have a mate and nest in it.

     Of course there are many kinds of perching birds that stay all winter such as sparrows and finches, which thrive off of the grains and insects that farming invariably attract. The migrants (killdeer, blackbirds, robins) have already started to return. Getting to see them all is one of the many benefits of living the agricultural life out here in Owyhee County.

Rainy Day.

     It was a rainy day yesterday here in Owyhee County. Despite all the technology and hard work, it all comes to naught without the rain (and snow). I mentioned this yesterday, but it bears repeating. Owyhee County is a dry place. While much of the water that will fill our reservoirs comes from melting snow; we collect as much of the rain as we can whenever we can. This doesn't mean that the stock has to like it.

     While they may look like they're having a hard time, they are not. It's just difficult to look majestic when your mane is stuck to your neck with rainwater. This is very likely the very first rain that these youngsters have ever seen. Their mothers were far more interested in the hay that had recently been tossed out for them. Soon they will move out to their grazing range in the hills where small reservoirs will be a major source of water for them.

     These travellers weren't even phased by the weather. In fact, I think they probably preferred it. These Snow Geese (top) are just passing through. The Mallards might stay in the local waterways. For now they both are picking at whatever they can glean from the harvested corn fields.
     The agricultural community, for the most part, did their best to stay indoors. A few were out feeding and the ditch company was hard at work. But for the most part I'm sure they were in their shops fixing whatever needed fixed. And I'm sure, if only subliminally, they were all thankful for the rain. Maybe even more so for when it stopped.

     (Winter wheat loves rain.)

Laying Pipe.

     A farm has a lot of infrastructure. A good deal of this infrastructure concerns the moving of water. Here in Owyhee County the water is primarily pumped out of the Snake River, with secondary sources coming from various creeks and reservoirs such as the Owyhee Reservoir on the Owyhee River. (Which is across the border in Oregon.) The water flows through the canals spreading water to ditches and eventually to what would otherwise be much dryer land. At that point it becomes the responsibility of the farmer to get it to every usable corner of his or her farm. And when ditches aren't right for the job for any reason. The farmer will lay pipe.

     This is a trench with a man who would appear to be the best shoveller in the world. But he's got a bit of help.

     This farmer is very talented with the backhoe and he dug this entire trench with it. The farmer with a shovel is helping to level a spot. It's hard work, but I don't think he'll let it get him down.

     He's about 5'10" for those of you wanting a bit of scale.
     This purpose of this trench is to lay a pipe in. This pipe will replace a dirt ditch and make a bit more surface room as well as a bit less maintenance.

     These are sections of pipe. Once the farmers are satisfied that their trench has the right amount of "fall" (that it tips at the right angle causing the water to move at the desired rate) they will roll or lower the pipe sections into the trench. They'll then put a gasket in between the two sections and push them together.
Eventually it makes this.

     Many pipe sections come together to make one long pipe. This pipe will give a bit more room on the surface as well as get the water where it's needed far more efficiently than the ditch ever could.