Merry Christmas!

Week ending December 18th...

Kevin Becker from Altorfer and Darin Younkers replacing the left side fuel tank on the CAT tractor

Emptying bins at the Martin Farm

More of the same since my last post. We have been hauling corn to the Illinois River terminals as well as ADM at Curran. Machinery is also still being cleaned up and put away. This past week Kevin Becker from Altorfer Equipment spent a few days at the farm working on the CAT tractor. The main job was replacing the left-side fuel tank. Due to a faulty fuel cap lid that did not let the fuel tank "vent", CAT had a re-call on the lid. Unfortunately, the faulty lid did it's damage before we made time for the two-day job to replace the fuel tank. Since the lid did not vent air to the tank, the fuel pump was pulling diesel out of the tank and eventually just caved in the sides of tank causing the tank to leak due to cracks. Luckily, our leak was not very severe and we could wait until after all the fall tillage work to get the tractor in the shop and perform the replacement. Thanks to Kevin Becker from Altorfer and Darin Younkers for their work on this project. We have our corn plans and hybrids finalized for the 2011 crop and are almost finished wrapping up our 2011 soybean variety selections. End of year book work and accounting are keeping us busy when the weather will not let us out to haul corn.

Week ending December 4th...

Dad wrapping up fall 2010 field operations; emptying the dry fertilizer cart

The Johnson Boys are ready for the Christmas Holiday

Making ginger bread houses with Owen; he lasted five minutes and NFL football won over his attention...

It is amazing to me how easy it is to create weekly posts when we are in the field, but when the field work is completed the task of keeping the blog up to date gets more challenging. Since my last post we have continued to clean up machinery and have started to haul corn to the terminals on the Illinois River at Beardstown. We have also been spending a considerable amount of time in the office working on 2011 crop plans, catching up on office work, and finalizing year end reports for landlords and accountants. Besides the peace of mind of having 100% of the fieldwork done, being able to be home more with our families is a wonderful blessing. Above are some of the pictures of our gingerbread project with Owen - he was interested for almost five minutes. We have also been working on wrapping on Christmas presents, but none of our previous pictures really displayed the fun of trying to wrap presents with an almost three-year old...