Oats!

[BA Deere]

I see cash oats is $4.50, you can get rid of straw bales on Craigs List for $5.  I haven`t raised oats for grain in years and never sold any, always fed it.  It`s tough raising the 38lb oats in Iowa, one guy has a trick of mixing barley with it, some run it through a grain vac to increase the weight.  With high inputs, maybe a small field of oats could help with the cashflow.  Sell a pickup load of straw weekly at the salebarn for grocery money   🙂

I went through St Charles on highway 14 today and the Amish had these oat shocks.   I remember oldtimers talking about shocking oats, it was something of pride if you shocks didn`t get tipped over in the wind.  I can still hear one old gy saying he told his hiredman "Them bottons ain`t made of glass, slam `em down!".    Then in later years they bragged about pitching bundles into a threshing machine at a thresher`s bee.

[bruce MN]

FWIW one person here who pitched bundles into a threshing machine. 

We shocked and threshed until the late 50s. The old proverbial neighborhood machine. We could have gotten out sooner but my Dad was a terminally good guy and a good number of the other cooperators were getting well along in years, and he kept and maintained the machine and they weren’t going to update their mechanization. 

I don’t farm a square inch, but still in my blood.  Have been watching markets and am wondering why with the wheat prices posted for ‘23 new crop that I’m not hearing about people selling and putting wheat on some corn acres. It seems to go along with what you are saying about oats.  What am I missing?

[RJG640v8]

 as we speak, HRWW, yield is good plus a bunch of straw. 

[roarintiger1]

And here I thought when I opened this thread that I would finally get the answer to what is it exactly that oats "knows".

[BA Deere]

Bruce, I don`t know much about wheat, Dad thought is was too wet and too humid for good quality in our area.  See with oats, we always had to windrow it, or it would go down and lodge terribly.   I would think, if we got our common 2 week rainy spells that wheat would sprout in the windrow.  That`s one thing I would never contract is wheat or oats because it`d be a flip of a coin whether your yield would be 150 bpa or roll it up for hay. 

But the neighborhood threshing ring, Dad got in at the tailend of that and they started in Britt where it was all working fool Germans, if there was plenty beer they just treshed until it was done, if one guy had a few extra acres or one man short, they didn`t keep track, they just worked their German butts off.   Then the family moved to Garner and they were still Germans, but they were getting more picky.  Then they moved to Ventura and too many Norwegians!  They are just too tight and maybe a little lazy.  So, the family hired combining done and later got a International model 80 pull type.   

But, I don`t know if it was so much the nationalities that  made the threshing rings more difficult or if it was just the natural evolution of farming?  😀   Around Garner they joke, we chased the Norwegians in the sloughs around Ventura and Meservey but they fooled us and tiled it out and had good land,  🙂

One story I recall, the farmers quit for the day and the stream engine was shut down for the night but still warm.  During the night a thief fired it up and they drove it across fields and it was way out in South DeKody before they tracked it down.  

RJ, everything looks good in Wisconsin, you guys are living right.  🙂

[k-289]

Hansen Mueller  outfit  up  in   S. Soo City  advertizing  ,  wanting  domestic  oats  only , radio  spot ===

[Whitesand_Farms]

Morning BA, we grow a lot of oats in our area of Western Canada. What works for us for a good crop of heavy oats is seeding it first before wheat and putting plenty of N down in the spring. The oats fields are almost black they are so lush green and will be heading out soon. We seem to be 2-4 weeks behind here we were so late seeding this spring. Some guys spray that growth inhibitor down to prevent lodging and now with equipment coming a long way it’s easy to pick up lodged crop with the swather(windrower) or straight cut headers. It is a little cooler and wetter in our area which helps too.