Ever since I watched the movie “The Straight Story” for a class in college, I’ve had a desire to do aerial photography and videography of events on the farm. I’ve recently purchased the DJI Phantom 3 Advanced drone, which has been one of the most amazing pieces of technology I’ve used in a long time. It has more than met my expectations for what I have purchased it for.
Enjoy. 
I took the opportunity to have some seat time with the Model A and Number 5 mower. There was some tall grass that needed to be cut down as to not be a fire danger once it dries up. The grass was really tall, but the mower and tractor did a good job. Most of the issues were with the operator, as I’m used to using more modern equipment to cut hay with…
The Number 5 Mower was fun to use though, as it used to be my grandfathers mower, on my moms side. My grandpa used to spend a lot of time with it, so my restoring it and using it has a sentimental value to it as well.
Wow, it’s been a while since I’ve updated the blog last. Basically, as far as farming goes, my spring/summer can be summarized as the following.
The first project was the restoration of the 1957 John Deere 420 Utility. I went to Utah and picked up another 420 parts tractor. I was pretty fortunate to stumble across one online for a good price, so I jumped at the opportunity to take it. I brought it home, and used it to fix my current 420 utility. They were both the same year, too, so it worked pretty well.
After that, the crank of my 1959 John Deere 630 was finally fixed. I brought it home too, but then had the 420 project come up, so I spent time getting that done instead. Once I was finished with the 420, I spent some time working on the 630 and was able to get it working as well. The 630 project was completed after spring planting and alfalfa cultivating, which cut into the projects time, but was a priority.
Afterwords, it rained. It rained and it rained. The good thing was, we never had to use the sprinklers for first crop. It did stop raining, and instantly went to very hot/dry temperatures, so I was able to cut the alfalfa with the John Deere 4230 and 945 MoCo (mower conditioner, aka swather). We then waited about 3/4th of a week, then raked the hay. I used the newly restored 420 Utility for most of the raking–and it worked great! It was fun spending some seat time on a machine that I spent so much time with the restoration process.
After the raking came the baling. With all the rain we had, there was a very good high yield of bales. The yield was much higher than last year. I used the JD 4640 and Hesston 4790 3×4 big baler for the baling.
Anyway, that about sums it up. I’ll post some videos here and in future posts. Enjoy.
This weekend we will be moving the beef cattle to the dry farm in preparation for calving season. The dry farm has shelter (trees) and the hill, which is good for keeping dry once the snow starts to melt. If you’ve seen a flat field with cattle on it in the spring time, it can get pretty messy. Anyway, I took the G over to where they will be to help keep the road open, where we aren’t using it daily (yet). It’s always fun to have an excuse to get out on the two-cylinders, and the G does quite well with the 3-point mounted blade.
Feeding in the Fog with the John Deere 3020 and custom-made bale feeder. Here I am feeding 3x4x8 feet large square bales. Hereford and Angus beef cattle on an early January evening, 2015. Taken from a GoPro that was strapped to the top of my head.
Where we’ve received a lot of snow the past few days, I used it as an excuse to get some seat time on the G by making a little road though the field to feed the cattle with. I think it did a pretty good job–even if it did snow a lot the following night… Guess I’ll have to do it again. 
If you get bored, there’s GoPro footage at the end. There’s no sound because the sound wasn’t worth including.
As with the previous post, we also thought it’d be fun to get the tractor out and go on the dry farm and take some photos. I took the John Deere Model A to the top of the alfalfa hill behind my grandparents, where we were able to get some pretty good photos.
A few weeks ago, my sister and I went out to do some photography for one of her photo assignments. She’s currently attending BYU-Idaho, and has a minor in photography. It was fun getting out taking some nice sunrise photos.
Last night I took the John Deere Model A out for a few photos. There was a bright moon, so I thought it would be neat to see how the exposure would turn out. I think there was a little too much light though as there weren’t many stars in the photo. However, it was pretty cloudy so I don’t know if it would have mattered much anyway.
To create the shots, I had the camera on a tripod and and did a 30 second exposure with my 5D Mark II. On the one on the left I also hit it with five seconds of light off of the LED flashlight from my iPhone. I think the results turned out pretty well.
The John Deere Models B, A, and G were three machines tractors in the series of consecutive models in the letter series. The B was the smallest, followed by the A, then the mighty G, which was the largest of the row crops. To make this a complete series of row crop lettered series tractors, I would simply be missing the Model M, which would be the smallest of the group of row-crop models. There was also the models D and R, which were “standards”, and not row-crop.