combined some oats

My day job has been too demanding to keep up with doing sweet corn during the summer so this spring I decided to plant oats. I already had an Allis All Crop combine so I had a way to harvest them and could use some oats to grind into hog feed or calf creep feed plus it would save me from buying straw.

Broadcast 3 bags of oats on about an acre on April 8. Early on I thought I should spray but never did. Oats came up nice and headed out beautifully and out-competed the weeds for the most part. Yesterday (July 15) they were dry and had rain in the forecast for today and I have to be out of town this week and the high humidity wasn't going to help dry them further.

Got the All Crop hooked to the Oliver 88 and went to work. Oats made 80-90 bpa. Baled 35 bales of real nice straw. Was kind of nice to take another step in making my little hobby farm more self-sufficient.

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try pictures again

Nice looking oats. There are not many oats around here anymore for grain. The few that are raised are usually windrowed and then combines with a pickup head. This year the oats have been blown down with the storms we have had this last week or so.

Good looking rig.Did you plant anything with the oats for hay later? We used to plant Red Clover.

For not being sprayed, that looks like a nice crop and it did shade out the weeds long enough to get the grain and straw without being contaminated.

(quoted from post at 10:26:10 07/16/17) Nice looking oats. There are not many oats around here anymore for grain. The few that are raised are usually windrowed and then combines with a pickup head. This year the oats have been blown down with the storms we have had this last week or so.

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Mine got blown down in spots last weekend during a quick storm. Was able to get most of them picked up.

I do have a reel pick-up for this combine if things get real weedy.

(quoted from post at 10:27:40 07/16/17) Good looking rig.Did you plant anything with the oats for hay later? We used to plant Red Clover.

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Nothing with them. I planned on discing today and planting some buckwheat and crimson clover as green manure and to help my bees out for the fall. 1.7" of rain early this morning put the kibosh on those plans. Will have to wait until Thursday.

I'm going to try some black beans in a small portion of this. I want to try growing dry edible beans and combine with the All Crop.

Quit it! You're making me itch! LOL You have a good looking rig there. The old combines in the right hands can do just as good of a job of threshing and cleaning as the new ones.

I cut my oats for feed about 3 weeks ago. With the recent rains I have a chance of getting an alfalfa crop this fall. Thats a pretty nice looking
old all crop. Do you have the sieve for clover seed for your machine?

(quoted from post at 14:25:52 07/16/17) I cut my oats for feed about 3 weeks ago. With the recent rains I have a chance of getting an alfalfa crop this fall. Thats a pretty nice looking
old all crop. Do you have the sieve for clover seed for your machine?

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I do have the clover sieve. I'd be interested in trying some clover or alfalfa sometime.

Good looking crop, and I love the AC All-Crops. My BIL bought one at a consignment sale some years back- got it for $125, I think. The seller came over and said he wished it had brought more, but he had promised himself that he would help the buyer get it set up right. He told BIL to call him when he was ready to combine, and he would come over. He was good at his word- came over and showed all the adjustments, then had BIL go a ways to see how it was working, and make any additional adjustments. It did a real nice job.

Wow that is a 72 auger feed with a pick up reel. You have the best of all the All Crops ever built. Great Grandfather had a 66 that they bought new. They did lots of clover seed and would wear out a set of rasp bars every year. Nice to see good older combines still being used. For a soil builder crop get a few pounds of tillage radish seeds and add to your mix. We are going to plant 50 acres after we combine rye next week. Tom

Tom, do you have a market for your rye? Here in MI, there isn't any of the elevators that will give you a price for rye, they don't want it. We used to grow it 15-20 years ago, but our only market was a few guys that wanted rye seed for cover. When they got older and gave up farming, we gave up growing rye. Too bad, it really grows around here, we'd have rye 6 or 6 1/2 feet tall with a seed head on it 5 inches long. It didn't take many acres to get way more than we needed.

Ross

Did you disc the seed in, or just spread it
on top and leave it? I'd like to try some
oats sometime, and some black beans next
year. This year's experimental crop is
sunflowers and sorghum. I'm gonna harvest
the sunflowers, we're just using the
sorghum to hopefully keep the deer out of
the corn. Dad used to grow oats a long time
ago, he said they did the best here when
you "mudded them in" in late March or early
April. Don't know about that, but that's
what he said. Good to see another fellow
Oliver user as well.

Ross

Ross- down here in the SW corner of MI, we use a lot of rye for cover and between vegetable rows- tomatoes, pickles, etc. Those guys all seem to have blow sand for fields.

We always used to grow oats as well, and had an overhead bin in the old "granary" to store oats in- Grandpa put two sacks full in with a pickup load of ear corn for the mill to grind into cattle feed, and we spread oat seed in the grapes after working in the manure in the Spring. Now I use rye in the grapes, easier to get than field run oats- I think the last rye I bought in one of those bulk bags was 30 bushels for $16/bu.

Last year a buddy was hired to farm some land by the local Native tribe, they want to get it certified organic to raise food and feed for organic animals to serve to people at the restaurants inside the casinos. He got field run rye and broadcast it/disked it in, had about 50 bushels left over and gave it to me. I hope to get some more from him when the crop is ready, soon. He'll have a couple more crops of rye as the fields transition to organic, but we are not sure how clean the seed may be.

I bought a mower designed to pick up leaves on a golf course or estate- been mowing the rye between the grape rows and feeding it to the cows as green chop, makes neat little round bales that they really go after!

We clean and market it to the dairy farmers for cover crop as well as many chop it for silage. We get $10 per bu for it after cleaning. Local coop's are about $12-15. Tom

(quoted from post at 20:10:13 07/16/17) Did you disc the seed in, or just spread it
on top and leave it?

Ross

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I broadcast with the fertilizer spreader behind garden tractor and then use a spike tooth drag harrow to incorporate. Birds got a bunch but still made a nice stand.

In my younger days(1940's) oats were a common crop raised for feed and as a cover crop for alfalfa-brome or red clover-timothy hay seedlings here in Southern Michigan.. Everybody on our threshing route would have oats as well as wheat and sometimes some rye or barley to thresh...hauled to the thresher from the shocks in the fields. I saw a lot of oats cut after they headed out but still green and baled up for hay in California.

Dad would grow oats in western Montana and he'd cut it green for hay just after the heads filled . Made real nice bales and the horse people around there bought it all up each year. Dad passed away early this year but maybe if all my stars line up, I'll be out there to keep the farm going as he did. We will see.