Time was, when you had a breakdown in the field, somebody made a parts run. Like the time when I was a teenager and Dad sent me to town for a part, and I wound up back at McLean Implement three times because I came home with the wrong thing. But I learned the difference between male and female couplers. And that you really can't just guess. This morning, my husband went out to spray. First decent day back in the field in weeks. He ran in at lunch and chased me away from the computer…

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We spent time over the weekend with some of my husband's great college friends and their families. No surprise, many of them are farmers and there was much conversation about farming, equipment, land and such. I was talking with one of the guys at the football game (hey, it was Illini football after all) and he was telling about the trouble he had getting his yield data in and out of his computer system. "Yeah, I came home from school and he had FOUR laptops sitting on the counter…

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I can hardly believe it's been three years since this night. It feels much more recent. Maybe it's because we are, yet again, in another crazy weather year on the farm. Or maybe because that night was scary enough to have engrained its traumatic self in my memory. Yikes. Either way, the good news is that monitoring the farm's grain dryer has gotten a lot easier. Somewhere after writing the post about my husband's grain monitoring incident, GSI contacted us about their WatchDog system. We…

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A few facts on the folks on Earth and what they've been up to lately: * World population hit 7 billion people in 2012. * United Nations estimates we will reach 9.3 billion by 2050. * Growth will occur not in our traditional allies but in rapidly developing nations like Pakistan, Brazil, India and Bangladesh. * By 2050, 30% of the population will be rural and 70% will be urban – some 6.4 billion people, which is roughly equal to the entire world population today. * Today there are…

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Remember my husband's little brush with farm un-safety? Well, after I wrote about it last year, the good folks at GSI contacted us and said they occasionally like to have farmers try out their products. They thought we might be, ahem, good candidates for one of their WatchDog dryer monitoring units. Essentially, the WatchDog lets you remotely monitor your dryer, via internet access or direct connect – from the house, smartphone, farm, wherever. Or in other words, you don't have to get…

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So last week, I wrote about my husband's fall from the dryer, which, incidentally, happened last fall (oops – a clarification). Almost immediately, we received the following email from our friend, Todd, who farms in the greater Effingham area.   John and Holly, I just read your blog about John's fall. Glad to hear you are ok. If you have a GSI dryer you should install the "WatchDog". It lets you monitor and adjust settings on the dryer from any computer connected to the internet…

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I took a tour of the nearly-constructed rail shuttle being built by Western Grain Marketing near Macomb this week, and as I listened to Terry Rouse and Gordy Miller describe the feet of rail (7,760), yards of concrete (10,000 and counting) and bushels of storage (4.6 million), I had a flashback to an elevator tour from my early career.   Eleven years ago, I peered inside the historic J.H. Hawes grain elevator in Atlanta. Built in 1903, the wooden structure was the height of technology in its…

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