June 28

View of the day-Post rock fence line with a wild Sunflower.

These post rocks make up a lot of the fence lines in this area of the state. A lot of them are made into signs in front of farms and houses, with the occupants names or sports allegiances carved into them. Millions of years ago, the central US was a sea bed and after everything dried up there were layers of sea life compressed in the earth. When the area was settled, there weren't enough trees around to make fence posts, so they excavated the layers of post rock, using clever method of drilling holes, then splitting of the posts. They are usually 8 or so inches square and 6-8 feet tall, the ones in the picture stick out of the ground about 4 feet, so they are very solid. There is a Post Rock Museum in LaCrosse, which is 10 miles from where we are cutting and we had checked it out about 15 years ago, if it had been wet again to day we would have revisited. There is also a barb wire museum there, it is unbelievable the different kinds of barb wire that would require a museum, but they have hundreds on display.

The day started out cloudy, as usual, but we could see blue sky in the west so there was hope. After Al had his Pizza Hut buffet fix, we headed out to the field to survey the repairs, wash the windows and do a test. We got rolling at the crack of 3pm and, wonder of wonders, there were no stops...well maybe one when the knife broke at the joint, but we're old hands at repairing that kind of thing, so we only lost 15 minutes.

Marilyn had company riding with her for a while, Maitland, 7yrs and Maddy 6yrs, two of Kevin and Mandy's (our farmers) children made a few rounds, then Mandy and Macy, 2yrs swapped out for their turn. Finally we are back to great harvesting conditions...sun, wind and warm temps. Al claims the temps were more like Canada, running in the high 70's, and when Marilyn got out of the combine at 10:30pm the temp was only 63 degrees...it felt like home in September. An 80 acre day even with the late start, the field is running around 44 bushels and the test weight is 59lbs, so that is uplifting.

A final shot of the terraces in the field. It is hard to explain them if you haven't seen them, but sometimes they're a treat to combine, especially if there is water laying in them....