March 27, 2013

Today, John has the old orange 10-wheeler in the shop, getting it ready for spring work.
This is the truck we use to deliver soybean seed to the air drill.

John is servicing this old 1978 International 10-wheeler truck. He is preparing it for the spring/summer work of delivering soybean seed to the air drill. This old truck has acumulated 31,611 miles! Over the years, as we moved away from 10-wheelers to semi trucks, this one has been relegated to seed duty. But it’s in great shape for its age.

Our Monsanto seed dealer, neighboring farmer Jeff Jackson, keeps most of our soybean seed in his warehouse. We send our orange 10-wheeler to his place (about 3 miles away) to be filled. It will hold about 550 bushels of seed. We then can take the truck to any field to re-charge the seed tanks on the air drill. The old truck has a hoist under the bed that tilts the box up… thereby unloading the bean seed into a special rubber-belted conveyor on the JD 1910 air cart that carries the seed up into the tanks. The air cart’s conveyor is very gentle on the fragile seed, much more so than an auger. If you want to see this loading process in action, go to our farm’s Channel on YouTube called “Casifarm”. There, click on ‘browse videos’, and down towards the bottom of the page, you can choose an older video from May 31, 2011.   It’s called, “Loading the soybean planter”, and it runs 1:15.

Filling the air drill

Here’s what it looks like from the upper platform on the air cart.

You can see the soybean seed tumbling down into the seed tank

I’m looking forward to scenes like this… hoping the conditions will permit this to happen soon in April! By the way, the snow is gone today….