Combining oats....

Here is part one of the post about combining oats. I dont know how many posts it will take me to get through the process, but I hope you are all willing to at least come along for the ride! I am going to start at the begining, since thats the normal place to begin.... the begining.... I think all the chocolate I am not having is affecting my brain....

Here is a picture of one of our oats fields, its next to one of our hay fields and corn fields....


I am not real good, I stink in fact, with this camera.... I want to be able to zoom into some of these pictures so that I can show you the detail of it, but its not working for me. I guess I better read the manual huh - yup I better...
This is a picture of oats that are ready to be harvested. They are a golden color and are 'headed out' - which means the oats have formed and are hanging off of the stalk. I think this is a beautiful color, but I am partial because it remeinds me of butter, I have a thing for butter.

This is a picture of the combine that we use to harvest the oats. Its OLD by todays standards, its from the 50's. But it works great for the oats and my father in law is the one who drives it. He just turned 74 on Tuesday and he works as hard as he did at 40. Notice how dirty his cloths are? That is from 1 DAY working in the oats field. They are SO dirty to work with because they are dusty like nothing else. I am going to get a picture of the 'cleanings' as I call them. That will show you how much dirt and dust there is in this process.


This is a picture of the cab, where you operate this hunk of tin. It has lots of foot pedals because you have to be able to move 'reel', 'sickle', and the feeding auger all at the same time, plus stop and go. I get a headache thinking about all that goes into driveing this thing. If you look close at this picture you can see a plastic gunny sack haning to the right of the door. That is where the cleanings come out - I will get a picture of that I promise.


This is the same picture as before, but I want to show you what the 'reel' is. The 'head' of the combine consists of the reel, sickle, feeding auger... are you taking notes? There will be a quiz later... *snort snort* sorry, just kidding.


The reel pushs the oat stalks up against the sickle. This is the sickle:

The sickle has TONS of little teeth and moves left to right cutting the oat stalks and then the feeding auger grabs them and takes them into the the screens that seperate the stalk from the seed. I could not get pictures of the screens because the gaurds were shut because the machine was running. I will see if I can get pictures of that a bit later. This is a picture of the feeding auger:


After it goes into the feeding auger, through the seperateing screens the oats and straw come out in seperate places. The oats goes into the 'hopper' on top of the combine. This is a picture of that:

Who's bored yet? Anyone, I can stop here if ya want me to??
Anyone, anyone, Bueller, Bueller??
This is the unloading auger, it takes the combined oats and unloads them into the gravity box.



These are pictures of the gravity box.



Lispy is clothing challenged. Its a challenge to keep clothing on him - he is proud of his body and wants everyone to know it. So unlike Big Son...
This is the back of the combine - this is where the straw comes out and is lain back on the field in a row.


This is the straw - we bale this for bedding for the cattle...


Well, thats it for the first post. I hope I have not bored you all to death with this. Please ask me questions so I can explain details that I might overlook. I would love to explain things to you all.

My favorite part of oats is rolling in the loose straw.... need I say more.. probably not!