Friday, August 16, 2013

357 Indiana State Fair and Sunflowers are for the birds.

I attended the Indiana State Fair twice this year.  Once with Susan and we had a good time looking it all over and visiting the north side of the fair mainly where the old farm equipment is located.  They have a group of farmers that work the fair every day for maybe two weeks running this old machinery...They do it so well and it take you back 70 years when they actually used this on the farms across America.  I got to see some of it happen when I was under 10 years of age.  I am glad I actually saw these farmers work together in a community team.  I will always remember the threashing machine being pulled by a steam engine coming down the road and pulling into our barn lot and setting up for the next days harvest of wheat.  The next day farmers converged on our farm from around our neighborhood.  I think about 12 farmers showed up with their horses and wagons to haul the wheat from the fields to the machine.  It ran all day seperating the wheat from the straw.  The straw blew out the pipe on the thresher and made a huge pile behind the barn...It was a marvelous time for me because I was too small to help, I just got to watch and I am so glad that I did.  The next day the machine moved to the next farmers farm and so on until all 12 farmers had completed harvest.  Some of the wives came and they had a huge meal at noon for the men that worked so hard in those days.  I went back to the fair a second day to watch my grand daughter show their
dairy goats last Sunday..It was fun and they did real
well with them.  But then after the show was over I again had to return to the north side of the fair to again watch the show and talk to some of the old farmers there. 

Next two pictures are my 2013 Sunflowers that I plant solely for bird food.  Quail mainly but most of it goes to  Golden Finches.  They arrive by the hundreds when they are ripe and in about two to three weeks they pretty much devour the sunflower seed.  I notice that the majority of the bees that are pollinating the sunflowers this year are bumble bees.  Not many honey bee's at all.  I worry about that that
maybe we have somehow killed most of them off with insecticide spray on our crops.  I hope not but I have that fear that it is happening.  I don't know how necessary they are for our crops maybe not at all the corn pollinates itself and the beans seem to get pollinated also maybe without the help of bees, I don't know for sure. It has been pretty much a prescription year for our crops this year.  A far cry from last years terrible drought that we had.  I think my soybean crop looks very good and expect a yield of maybe 50 bushels or more per acre.  Sorry I have not been a good blogger the last few weeks.  I have no excuse other than I guess I am starting to maybe enjoy semi retirement...That is the best I can come up with...