Here are Garry's photos from Friday. Maxim and the neighbor Serosia are doing business loading up people's manure piles on their yards, and spreading it on their garden. The fall garden plowing is starting to take place, so the manure will be plowed under and ready to nourish next year's garden. They are charging 70 grivna each per hour (Max has to get enough to cover fuel for the tractor) and were busy most of the day in the village.
Some manure piles have sat next to sheds in the village for years. Last year the guy with the white horse would move it to the field for people with his wagon but the manure was shoveled on and off! One guy told Garry it was much better than last year when he did it with his pitchfork! Garry said he watched a couple work all day to move their manure pile into small piles in their garden with a wheelbarrow, and they will still have to spend another day spreading it around on the garden.
Today Maxim packed up some leftover pizza to take with him; they were off to another village to spread manure. Garry checked the lug bolts on the tires this morning, since the spreader had new tires put on before we bought it last week. Sure enough they were loose, he said a couple nuts were close to falling off, it was a good thing they hadn't spread any more loads yesterday. It will be interesting to see how many customers they have next week, after word gets around, we have one of the few spreaders around here. We will need to spread our own piles on the fields.
Garry was ready for the combine to come since Friday morning, but he was still waiting by the time we had borsht for lunch, he had taken the photos of Maxim, and was waiting to watch the combine and go with the truck to the mill.
At 2 pm Maxim phoned Garry to say they had called him the combine was on its way. It was the same one that the big dairy farmer had used for his grain corn (he also owns the mill.) Garry says the combine was brand new, they told him it cost 180,000 dollars, or 1.4 million grivna. Garry said it was pretty nice and cheaper than one in North America. Garry was wondering if it would be difficult to find some one to combine our corn, but it seems that there are a few around to do corn this year, there is a lot more corn being grown in the area than two or three years ago.
Garry was hoping to get 30- 40 ton of grain corn, which will be enough, with the wheat we got earlier this year to feed the cows for the year. It seems we have almost 36, not bad considering the way the cornfield looked this spring. Garry is not sure how many hectares were combined to get that amount, they are charging him for 16.5 but he chopped about a third of the field in August for silage and the whole piece is supposed to be just over 18. The corn will be stored at the mill, until we need it ground to feed the cows. So we have plenty of corn silage this year, enough grain, but no hay, there will be brewers' grain to buy (plus some in the tubes for when we can't buy it), but the price is going up. The brewers' grain will take the place of the hay in the ration, since it is high in protein.
Victor called to say that the brewery phoned him to say the price is going up double for people that did not buy in the summer to 200 (grivna per ton), we will only have to pay 150. However, we will have to raise the price we charge to 3 grivna per bucket from 2. Garry says we have sold less since the price went from 1.5 to 2.
They told Garry they had to finish his field last night, the sun was setting but they were still at it, Maxim wanted to check out the combine, so Garry came back to the house while I made pizza around 7:20 and Max went with the last truck load to the mill (only two trucks full- it was a big truck.) It had been dark for a while when he got back around nine. The village herd have come home by 5:30 the last couple days.
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