August 10

View of the day-Al gets lined up to hook up the straight cut header to start in on the barley.

Lightning flashes and low rumbles of thunder woke us around 5:30am, but it was moving NE, so we felt reasonably safe and were able to go back to sleep. It never did hit here in Tuttle, but they certainly got hammered bad to the north and east of us.

The combine was still parked in the farmers yard, and the pass to get to the field was through part of a corral which was a bit too soft to haul the header through. The pickup sunk down a fair bit when we went through the corral and pasture to check out the path and do a sample.

We got our "Simple Sampler" out to do a test of the barley. This little box lets you cut stalks of grain by hand and with a rotating cylinder to thresh the grain out of the heads and a fan to blow the chaff away, you get a sample to take to the elevator for moisture testing. It tested 14.3% moisture (13.5 is dry for barley), so we decided to move the combine out on a different road and come in the back way to the field and then just kill a little time having lunch at the camper while it dried down.

While we were having lunch, Tom and Suzanne came by the camper bearing gifts of dessert...Kuchen made at the local grocery store. It was mighty fine. We went back out to the field to give it another try, Tom rode with Al as he made the first few passes to get a sample. They took it into the elevator and this time the moisture was down to 13.8% so the farmer said to go ahead and cut a load. Tom took several "action" photos and rode with Marilyn for a few rounds, then they headed back to Fargo.

The weather was quite spectacular today, as we listened to the Harvey radio station as they described the golf ball size hail and heavy rain and wind that just pummeled them for quite a while. There were also tornado warnings out, with several funnel clouds spotted in rural areas south of I94. We were able to watch the massive clouds forming from a safe distance to the west, north and south. We were very fortunate that they all missed us, but there is another band of nasty weather predicted for tonight before the front finally moves out of the area.

Al had to drive about 6 miles to the bins where he is unloading and the auger is a slower one so he wasn't able to make it back to the field before Marilyn had a hopper full and was waiting. Once he returned to the field, we made one more load and called it a day, since the moisture was getting high. The barley was yielding around 30 bu/ac.

We finally got our phone hooked up at the camper, so there was no need for the "internet road trip".

Sometimes dial-up isn't so bad...