Tuesday, March 4, 2014

When I arrived at the office this morning, there was no internet service.  Boy, does that cramp your style!  It’s amazing how dependent we have become.  It is now considered a basic utility at this farm.  I was not able to check on the John Deere payments that were made online last week.  I was not able to sign into our QuickBooks online service.  Twitter and WordPress were inaccessible.   So, a  quick call was made to Towerbridge Technologies in Vincennes, our wireless internet provider.  Soon, I received a call back from owner Tim Trotter.  He walked me through some router information on the phone, but eventually discovered he would have to make a call here to the office.  He arrived soon after, and began to diagnose the problem.  He rebooted the ‘radio’ (I think that’s our wireless connection).  Then he did an analysis on the office router.  He says it has some ‘funky’ unusual set-up because of our grain dryer being connected through it.  But he worked his magic, and got the whole system up and running again.  Thanks, Tim.

Tim Trotter works his ‘magic’ on the internet service this morning.

It is pretty certain that the snow has stopped the progress at the Burke farm, where Shepard Construction is clearing 11.5 acres of woods.  They will need some dry days in order to get back to work.

John and Brandon are waiting for the replacement parts for the JD 2510H applicator.  They were able to remove the worn parts yesterday afternoon.  Maybe later today or tomorrow those ‘scrapers’ will arrive and they can start putting the machine back together.  When using this machine in the field, these scrapers run alongside the big 22.5″ diameter opener blade, making the opposite side of the trench or “furrow“.  The NH3 is delivered to the bottom of the trench through a special tube inside the scraper.   The NH3 is immediately sealed into the soil by closing and press wheels.

Here is one of the scrapers that is being replaced. This thing runs alongside the big furrow-opener disk, making the opposite side of the trench or “furrow”. The green arrow shows the direction of travel when this machine is operating in the field. The red arrow shows where ammonia (coming from the metering system down a long hose to the product tube) enters the top of the scraper. The yellow arrow shows the wear point at the bottom of the scraper, and where the tube inside delivers the NH3 to the bottom of the furrow.

We have been working with Jason Lueken of Wright-Stemle to get our JD S680 and the 9360R tractor connected to JD Link.  That service will allow us to remotely monitor and send information to those machines.  It will automatically transfer the harvest and other field data directly to the office computer here.  We are just beginning to learn about this kind of system, and if we discover it has real value, we will add this to the new machines as we replace the current ones.  Jason is still working to get us fully connected with JD Link, but I am confident that he will soon have us fully up-to-speed.

All these things get us one step closer to planting time…