Market Farming

[Kakerby <kakerby AT aol.com>]

Good morning all.  I wanted to share some pretty exciting news with everyone.  After years of hemming and hawing, debating and then shopping and pushing pencils, we've finally said yes to a major new acquisition for the farm - we're buying an Allis Chalmers AllCrop 60 combine. 

We decided earlier in the year that the time had come.  Test plantings of grains on our rental land had been spectacularly successful, while attempts to harvest same manually, were a dismal failure.  Enough interest from our customer base, those ever-rising feed prices, and a certain possibly paranoid fear that "all the good ones" were getting away from us, added up to provide more and more motivation.  We started shopping in earnest about three months ago, and had several rounds of negotiations with several sellers, none of which came together.  We were negotiating with one seller only a few hours away, which seemed a stone's throw compared to some of the other candidates we had previously considered.  But that seller was being something of a pain.  In the midst of that set of negotiations, we learned of one forlorn AC60 which was dying a slow death of neglect out in the weeds, only a few miles away.  We went to see that one a week ago, and the seller was very easy-going and pleasant to work with.  That machine was definitely the worse for wear after all those years of neglect, but the price was right and the distance was right.  So this past weekend, we told him we'd take it.

Now to fish the creature out of the weeds, get it home, get going with the considerable restoration work, and see if we can get her field-ready for harvest season next year.  And this fall, I'll finally have a reason to go do some new plantings.  We'll start small at first, as we learn the ropes for how this grain stuff is really going to go.  But we're pretty excited.  Richard Stewart, I believe you've either got an AC60 or have at least worked with them.  I might want to bounce some ideas off you over the passage of time.  Anyone else on the list who has worked with AC's, I'd love to hear from you.  This will be the most complicated implement we'll likely ever use, so we anticipate something of a steep learning curve.  But we're on our way.

Kathryn Kerby, and AllCrop #169663

frogchorusfarm.com

Snohomish, WA