If I had a dime...

If I had a dime for every time someone told me that I have more time in the winter...

Winter is a much busier time here than anyone could ever imagine. As the seasons go by we have grown as a farm and as a business. Heidi and I spend an unbelievable amount of time working on the business of farming during the winter months. We go over safety policy and procedures, review employee performance and job descriptions, attend conferences, plan the planting schedule, order seeds, look at sales figures, advertise, spruce up our brochure and web site... In the shop we are also busy fixing everything we broke last year and breaking everything else. Not really. We spend a lot of time servicing and upgrading equipment and getting new equipment adjusted and ready for the coming season.

Aaron Wilson has been my right hand man since early spring of 2011. He has been a real asset; even tempered and excellent with machinery. I simply must capture him on camera, but recently he has been able to avoid getting his picture taken.

For the past week he has been working on replacing the clutches in our John Deere 3020. Our shop is small and splitting a tractor this size in there has been pretty challenging. We had a very difficult time getting it to go back together but after a few failed attempts and some careful reflection on the technical drawings we finally mated the two halves and rolled it out of the shop late yesterday afternoon.

We had not even turned the John Deere off before we rolled one of our Farmall Super As in to remove the cylinder head and get it ready for re-machining. Among other chores we hope to have the Super A buttoned up by the end of next week.