City boy here, what am I looking at?
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So there's an auger that goes up to the top of that hopper bin in the foreground and drops the milled grain in the bin. The actual mill is off to the left and out of the picture.
Left the mill running, got distracted, the bin filled up but there's no sensor to shut it off (yet) so it just kept pumping grain out and it all slid off the top of the bin and spilled on the ground. That was probably about 4 tons of oats on the ground.
There was a shovel party to clean it up.
Now my sides hurt from laughing so much at you.
The shear amount to shit your going to get for this one over the years. I would ask you "Is your mill running?" Everytime I saw you or called you for decades.
"Then you'd better catch it..."
Well, as far as mistakes go, this one was pretty minor, but I figured townies might find it funny. My expensive mistakes would be hard to capture in pictures, or they'd just make me cry.
Otherwise, we just aim for mistakes that don't kill us.
Damn, what a lovely way to spend a day. Even with a handful of fellow shovelers, that's 4 tons! That's a shit ton of tons!
It's oats so it's not that bad. It's a lot of volume for not much weight. Each shovel was pretty light and easy to move. Oats run around 32lbs/bushel. Oats are also pretty slick so it it doesn't take much force to push a shovel into them. This mess was more annoying than a serious issue.
It's not like wheat at 60lbs/bu. That same sized pile would be closer to 8 tons and take a while to pick up. Each shovel full would weigh more and then surface is rougher so it's harder to push a shovel into.
That's the standard weight for oats, but generally it actually runs 40 to 46 lbs/bu. The standard weight was built a long time ago before much of the modern seed varieties had been bred.
That said, you're right, it's still a lot lighter to shovel than something like wheat, and glorious compared to faba beans which is like shovelling gravel.
And you're right about the slickness, oats are almost a pleasure to shovel. But the dust is really irritating to the skin, at least to most people. It can be rough to deal with at harvest time.
Oh, most of it picked up with the loader bucket, but we did have to shovel out from too close to the bin to run the loader, and scrape around to get the rest without adding in gravel.
Trouble at mill.
Oh no, what kind of trouble?
I don't know! Mr Wentworth just told me to come in here and say that there was trouble at the mill, that's all - I didn't expect a kind of ...
Accidentally leaving an appliance running sure hits differently when you're a farmer
Deer's right now: free food!
Fun fact: the plural of "deer" is "deer"!
We have no shortage of deer. Mulies and whitetail paw (hoof?) holes in the grain bags all winter. I've driven by our bag yard and scared 80-100 deer out of there after dark.
The deer love grain farms.
Is it a write-off, or can you salvage a bunch?
We scooped most of it up with a couple of loaders and shovelled the rest, and put it back in the raw bin to take another trip around. Hopefully didn't take any gravel with it, that makes a hell of a noise when it goes through the mill and is sub-optimal.
I've heard some chicken farms will take grain mixed with rocks, chickens will pick right through the rocks.
Chickens actually need gravel and grit for their gizzards to grind up their food, so it's not an issue. It's not really and issue for cattle as well as they'll just pass it, it's more of a problem with the mill.
Fun facts, not really fun so much as disgusting and reckless, but they scrape the floor of those chicken concentration camps and scoop up all of the spilt feed and straw and chickenshit and they feed it To like cows and such, and that is to a large degree how bird flu got spread to the dairy cows.
Wouldn't the snow be a problem?
No, actually the moisture can help the milling process. The big guys have mills set up to add water as they mill to improve the consistency of the product.
Too much moisture and the grain will sprout and clump up in the bin, but snow isn't really much actual water.
Here are your messages, sir:
Please move your grain.
You have 10 minutes to move your grain.
Your grain has been milled into a heap.
You have 10 minutes to move your heap.
That poor insomniac dyslexic atheist that stayed up all night wondering if there was a dog


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