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this is going to be the beginning of
seating for 2021
right now we're just going to calibrate
the drills
it is super cold today or at least i
think so it was actually quite cold
yesterday we've been having some
unpredictable weather in montana
a couple of days ago it would snow kind
of like that wet
snow and then it'd melt off and then
it's snow again
and it's been doing that for a couple of
days and just today it was
hailing and then now it's soft hailing
it's just
really really weird weather in montana
and
if you've ever heard the saying weather
can change in a second in montana it
definitely can and that's so true
so this is my uncle chris and he knows a
lot about
the calibration of the drill so he's
going to be
explaining it and teaching you a little
bit about that in today's video
you go up in the cabin and instruct a
computer how many pounds you want to put
an acre and then you come down here
and set a bag underneath it it turns
that wheel
so many revolutions and then you weigh
it and then it calculates that
per weight and you set it in the
computer and it sort of sets the acreage
itself i always do it twice on
thing and then i once i get going in the
field i'll do it again just to
see if it gets more accurate that's
great thank you here with darcy what is
the part you're doing right now
well we're going to calibrate this to
see if the machine sets automatically
once we find the weights of the bags
but we've got to run a sample into the
bag but to start with we're going to
have to make sure the rollers are all
see that's inoculant oh really it had
little bugs
so the roots take nitrogen out of the
air and put
little nodules in the ground oh awesome
inoculants that's what that it has
little
microbes that attach to the roots and
grow on the roots
and they'll take nitrogen out of the air
and put it on the roof so what will end
up going in this bag
yeah see this way i don't know how much
we put in computer decides how many
times it wants it to turn
so we'll hold this button up and that
roller will go
until it stops and when it stops then we
weigh the bag and it goes up there and
it tells how many times it turned and
then
you punch the weight in and it'll give
you the magic number of what you want to
do
awesome these are lentils but as my
uncle chris said there has is seed treat
on them and that's what makes them red
they're normally green either green
lentils yes very delicious in soup
how many pounds you want seeded in the
drill now you said take calibration and
then you push this button
and it turns that i think enough
revolutions for a half a bushel
i mean half a half an acre i believe
but it's a certain amount of time and
what we do then we weigh it
and we go back and tell the computer and
the tractor how much
went out and how many revolutions and
then it and then it sets itself sort of
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i usually do this twice in this here
while we're stopped and then
once we get going and everything settles
down and bounced
i'll stop and we'll do it one more time
especially on stuff like this because it
only goes on it
two pounds on a whole acre oh really
yeah
it's less than a you know stack of flour
five pounds you know
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it said it went 50 revolution it turned
50 times and and put out 18.15
stuff and then i go is that exactly how
you want it to be
well i don't know that it sort of does
that see then i take this number 18.15
except i go one more and it gives me a
calibration number
oh that's awesome so now i'm going to
write that down we're gonna do it again
to see how close we come
how did you used to do this in the olden
days
we used to put a bag underneath it and
go so far
and then weigh the bag that is cool
so this must make it a lot easier
yeah it's easier but i'm not i'm never
quite sure if it's
accurate accurate well it should be more
accurate than whatever i'm doing
so they say to do about three of them
then average
it is what they say to do that's a good
idea
do you do this process one time before
seeding begins
every every time we change crops
or change varieties of seed we do it
because every
variety or thing that would have a
different weight oh yeah every crop and
every variety of the crop okay
oh wow you even use different types of
rollers per crop and what is this field
going to be
this is going to be lentils lentils
green lentils did you do lentils last
year
i did lead to last year for the first
time ever
i had beginners luck i had a pretty good
yield
i don't know if that's true or not well
that's really good then and would
lentils be considered a pulse crop
it is a pulse crop and that's why it it
fixes nitrogen
and that's what helps fix the nitrogen
is what we have in that bag that
inoculant and then when you go back to
wheat you should have a better crop on a
better crop
and because you have a rotation you have
less
weed problems and less disease problems
because
that's really good so it's very
technical well not
not really but a little bit
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[Applause]
the other one was 0.647 and this one's
0.4828
so my uncle chris went back to the cap
to set it to do a third one to make sure
there we have the most accurate setting
my uncle chris has done a lot of
different experiments with different
crops what was one of your favorites
you've done
i like indian rice grass because it's
really pretty it has a big
grows up and has a really pretty bloom
it wasn't the success of the crop but it
was sure pretty
and i've done flax that's really pretty
because it blooms and it has a
flax blue that's awesome and i've got
canola
and it i like it i like the crops that
bloom
well that's the best part yeah canola
and i've done corn
for just for fun which isn't common in
montana but we did a little bit of dry
land corn
and it's because we don't get as much
moisture yeah we don't get as much
moisture in our growing season it's
pretty
pretty short well that's awesome how was
the lentil soup from the lentils last
year
delicious of course well that's amazing
that's the best part
that's awesome that's awesome right that
doesn't always do that
4828 to give us the same number even the
computer's right
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i have to run a little bit on the ground
first so i
so that so the rollers are full rollers
aren't full yet so i have to run it a
little bit
lentils weigh 60 pounds of bushel and
we're shooting for about 65 pounds an
acre
for seeding
lentils take different harvesting
equipment right like flux headers
yeah they these lentils only grow about
four or five inches tall
so you have to be able to get right on
the ground to get them
they have headers that float on the
ground and actually sort of bend in the
middle a little bit sort of
with the contour with the ground but
they're amazing things to watch
so yes they cut lower than your
your lawn mower cuts really yeah oh my
gosh
well then that's pretty low so setting
the drills would be one of the most
important parts
for preparing for seating absolutely
yeah getting the application
right seating's really important because
you
you don't have a crop if you don't put
it in the ground correctly absolutely
and it's all really expensive to do too
so
there's not a lot of room for air i
think this costs
well over a hundred dollars an acre to
see there's a lot of overhead in farming
you take the roller on the field after
you seed it because it's lentils yeah
because you have to use the flex header
and the header has to be
right on the ground all the time take
that roller and you roll the ropes in
the ground so they don't
so they don't interfere with the
compound which is not something you do
with weave
knocked or
as you can see it's folded up three
times so when we are
about to see it we'll all fold down the
sky looks really cool today
because lentils are a pulse crop you use
very little nitrogen
fertilizer you just put a little bit of
fertilizer through just
to give it a little bit of boost at
first but normally you don't
put hardly any fertilizer on lentils or
pulse crops in general so
that's very interesting i didn't know
that i'm putting about 20 pounds of
starter fertilizer on
oh my gosh that is so cool camera so
when you're going down the road you can
see it's somewhere behind you
that is really good if you can't see
behind the
implement no and that must be very
helpful
yeah it is really helpful you can get
off the roads for people when they're
behind you
and also you see sort of what the job
you're doing behind you sometimes
because that part blocks a big part of
the
grill and we call this a drill not a
planter or a cedar
we do here i don't know what to do and
we call
what we're doing seeding rather than
planting which is
more common in the midwest yes
when you're you plant corn and soybeans
they use different equipment although
they do use air drills for
for air planters kits the reason we
don't grow a lot of those other trucks
we don't it takes a different type of
encryption a lot of it
so you know we don't have uh equipped to
go forward with it
when i grew for it my neighbors did all
the planting and cleaning and harvesting
so
it wasn't very problematic
set it in there one time instead of
bracketing it down and we were just
going to go
turn it around the other direction or
something oh no it fell off
mash from the tire bouncing on the
ground
that is not good at all
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this is the containers from the top or
the tanks
and the views are great mountains are
over there
now these are called the wings right
here and they fold down
and then those pointy things go into the
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ground
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here my dad's come with the sprayer
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now they're checking to see if the boots
are
clear and just basically inspecting the
machine
to make sure everything will go well
so you're basically doing an inspection
of the drill
yeah to see if all the boots are clear
sometimes they get clogged up
and you don't notice until you
we have to wait until the prayers
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so
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so these are what the lentils look like
yeah this is
before we treated it very cool
that's awesome what different varieties
of lentils are there
oh there's a whole bunch there's
different colors there's
green lentils red lentils yellow letters
black lentils
how do you choose well i don't know that
some people choose but some some grow
better some other places
these are easier to grow i think they're
a little bit bigger so some smaller
these are green richly lentils there's
layered lentils and there's a whole
bunch of varieties but i'm not
real familiar with them because i
haven't raised them very long
are you starting to see more lentils in
this area yeah quite
quite a few the price of wheat is down
so people are trying to find
other commodities and locations that
that will
you know pick up the pace so this is
malt barley
that's a that's a deer feeder
here my grandpa came in the field hello
to the video camera
thank you
yeah that's kind of chilly out there
yes it is very cold what was seating
like in the olden days compared to now
well we didn't have no cap
we have smaller drills we have foul
24 feet 24 feet
24 feet drill wow
12 foot drills that's a lot smaller than
they are today
60 feet wow i got it too lazy today
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do
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do
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huh
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two
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we couldn't start seeding today because
there's a couple problems with the drill
and because it's a friday nothing's open
on the weekend so we'll have to wait
till monday
but thank you so much for watching okay
bye
bye there all the antelope are
we always have antelope around here
you