Flat Aggie visits Miller Farms!

We hosted a visitor at our farm this past weekend...Flat Aggie! She's on a really long school field trip from the Midwest! I'll hush and let her give her report!

Hi! I'm Flat Aggie! You can call me Flat. Or Aggie. Or Flat Aggie. I'm on vacation in North Central Alabama at Miller Farms! As you can see, I'm standing in a chicken house with a lot of chickens! This farm raises broiler chickens for meat. There are four chicken houses on this farm. Each house is 43 'x 510' and holds around 33,000 chickens a piece. That's a lot of chickens!



I was lucky enough to visit the day they got day old baby chickens! The feed, water, ventilation, and heat in the chicken houses are all automated. These chickens will stay for 35 days and will be 4 lbs. when they leave.

Can you tell what I'm standing on? It's peanuts! The Millers also have 200 acres of peanuts.

Peanuts grow under the ground. They are planted in April/May and are harvested in October. When the peanuts are ready to be picked, a machine called an inverter (in my picture above) plows the peanuts out of the ground and flips them over where the peanuts are now on top and the vines are on the bottom.

On the left, you can see non inverted peanut vines. On the right, they have been  inverted.



After the peanuts dry for a few days, they are ready to combine! A tractor pulls a peanut combine over the inverted peanuts. The peanuts are blown into the basket on top of the combine and the trash and vines are blown out the back.

Look, it snowed! No, I'm just kidding. I'm in a cotton field! Cotton is King on Miller Farms. They have 760 acres of it!



It's also harvest season for cotton! I'm standing on a cotton picker. Can you see me? These things are huge!



I even got to help the farmer drive! I should really keep my eyes on the rows though. The cotton picker grabs the cotton as it runs over the stalks. The cotton is then blown into the basket. From the basket, the cotton goes into the baler where it is rolled into a giant round bale of cotton and wrapped with plastic.

I look teeny tiny compared to these bales of cotton! One of these weigh 5,000 lbs. and has 4 bales of cotton in it. It is loaded onto a truck and taken to a cotton gin, where the seeds and trash are separated from the cotton.

I had a great time here in Alabama, and I learned some awesome facts before I left...

• The average American eats 85 lbs. of chicken in one year.
• The United States is the world's largest producer of poultry meat.
• There are enough peanuts in one acre to make 30,000 peanut butter sandwiches!
• It takes about 540 peanuts to make a 12 oz jar of peanut butter.
• The average American eats over 6 lbs. of peanuts/peanut butter products in a year.
• One bale of cotton, which weighs 480 lbs., can produce 215 pairs of jeans, 690 bath towels, 3,085 diapers, or even 313,600  $100 bills.
• The seeds from the cotton plant can be used as animal feed, and the oil from the seeds can be used for cooking.

Mid Harvest Update!

We're plugging right along with harvest here at Miller Farms! We've got 260 acres of cotton left, I'm guessing about half way through with soybeans, and there's no end in site for peanuts, lol.

Here's some of my favorite pictures of each crop this harvest season...

Peanut harvest has been ridiculously dusty because of the dry weather, but they have great yields! That's one reason its taking so long to pick them.

The cotton crop is also turning out really good! That's where I'm spending most of my time lately.

And then there's soybeans. We're so busy in the peanut and cotton field, we have to hire a guy to drive the combine on the weekends!

If you would like to learn more about any of these crops or what is happening in the photos, please click the "Farming 101" link at the top of my page!

Scenes from Harvest 2013

Since this year's harvest is winding down...I finally have time to post some pictures!

 

 We finished our corn harvest in September.

 

We started peanut harvest not long afterwards in October.

We started later than usual, which was close to our frost date (October 15th), so we decided to go ahead and invert (dig the peanuts up and flip them over) all the peanuts before we picked any.  

When the peanuts have had time to dry after being inverted, the frost doesn't hurt them, and they run through the combine just fine.

 We finished combining peanuts on October 24th.

 The same day we started picking cotton.

This was the cotton in our backyard.  

 I love taking pictures of this barn in our cotton. This year, I took it with an awesome setting on my phone, "dirty window." We have had a lot of folks come to take pictures in our cotton this year because it was so pretty. This barn is a popular spot.

Here, you can see the module truck starting to pick up some of our cotton modules in one of our fields. The module truck carries the modules to the cotton gin. We found out today that one of our modules was too big to fit on the truck. I just want to point out that it was not me that built it. "Ahem, Lance, cough cough".

 This was an odd sight in one of our fields. Lance parked his combine (which harvests grain) in our cotton field. We currently have around 150 acres of cotton left to harvest!

We are also harvesting soybeans.

When we have enough help in the cotton field, Lance sneaks off to the soybean field to pick a while.

It's a very slow go, but we're getting there!

 We were also videoed and interviewed for the "Outstanding Young Farm Family" contest we are currently competing in.

To read more about that, click here.

 

That's it for now! If you have any questions about what's happening in any of these pictures, check out my "Farming 101" page!



When will the peanuts be ready??

Around this time of year, this is one of the most popular questions we are asked on the farm. I'm in no way encouraging you to go dig up your nearest peanut field to see if they're ready or not, but I am going to show you how we know when they are ready to be inverted!

If you think it's about time for your peanuts to be ready, you want to check a small section instead of just going at it wide open in case they're not.



First, you need to pull up about a three foot section of peanuts.



Then, you pull the peanuts off the vine.



After the peanuts are pulled off, you take a knife and do a hull scrape. This involves scraping the outer hull of the peanuts to see the color.





The peanuts are then separated into piles by color.



The peanuts with yellow hulls are within a week of being ready, but will still go to market.



The peanuts with dark hulls are mature.

The peanuts with white hulls are immature and usually get blown out the back of the combine.

When you get your piles made, if the mature/almost mature piles are the biggest, then the peanuts are ready to be inverted and harvested!

Peanut Harvest 2012!

 Today was the last day of peanut harvest! Yay! Here's some pictures from our time in the field!

(inverting peanuts) 

We had 160 acres of peanuts altogether.



 (inverting peanuts)

Half of our acres were Spanish (the red-skinned peanuts) and the other half were Runners (normal peanuts).



 And of course, Reed had to ride!

 (combining)

We averaged over 4,000 lbs of peanuts per acre, which is pretty good.

Combining peanuts is a very dusty job!

If you would like to learn more about harvesting peanuts, click here. Here are some peanut harvest videos too!

 

FYI: When full, one of these trailers holds enough peanuts to make 324,000 peanut butter sandwiches!

 

 We normally fill up three a day! That's a lotta pb sammiches!

And the last picture of peanut harvest this year...Thanks to Hurricane Sandy, it made for one windy day!