Iowa Road Trips

 We went to Bloomfield a couple weeks ago for Joel's funeral.  Joel married one of my older cousins, and he is a brother to my uncle Russell, so he seemed more like an uncle than a cousin-in-law.  We used to spend a lot of time in Pulaski/Bloomfield in my younger days, so we enjoyed spending a lot of time with Joel, Shirley, and family.  I was always impressed by him as a young boy because he was the only person I knew that owned and operated a bulldozer!  I loved to watch him moving dirt around.  And he had the largest chicken house I ever saw (25,000 laying hens)!  It was good to be in Bloomfield again, it was a blessing to be at the funeral, and it was good to see so many of the Ernie Metzger family.

We drove halfway the night before, and stayed overnight in Burlington with Son#2 and D-I-L.  It was very brief, but we also got to see our two granddaughters.  Liezel was surprised to see Grandpa and Grandma at the breakfast table when she got up in the morning!

I finished sidedressing Nitrogen last week, and I thought I was finished with replanting corn.  A seed company gave me four bags of seed for a test plot that I had planted early.  I knew that the seed did not have the Bt or root-worm traits in it, but I thought it was Roundup tolerant.  My mistake!  A few days after it was sprayed, it became obvious that it was dying.  I hooked the little planter back up (the big one was already tucked in the corner of the shed) and did my last, late replanting. 

Last week on Wednesday, the World Pork Expo was again held in Des Moines.  It had been cancelled the last two years; 2019 because of African Swine fever and 2021 because of Covid.  It was four hours on the road out, five hours walking around the show, and then four hours on the road back.  A big day that started at 4:00 A.M.  The food was good, the show interesting, and we met friends and relatives from around the Midwest.  I have been going to trade shows for over forty years, and there are vendors and businessmen that I have met at shows that I only see once or twice a year.  Some I only know because of the shows, and yet we feel like old friends, partly because we have stuck it out in this business that long.

We had an online land auction this week of 135 acres of good quality land that lays two miles south of us.  It sold in 3 tracts, and I was interested in potentially purchasing some of it.  Unfortunately the talk and interest leading up to the auction clued me in that it would sell much higher than I could afford.  It set a new all time high price for true farm land in our area; $16,100 per acre!  It was purchased by an investor.

Nephew Troy borrowed the Massey Harris 44 for an antique tractor parade for the residents of Restmor.  He did a nice job cleaning and shining it up, so I thought I better take a picture of it before I got it all covered with feed dust again!

The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth.              Ecclesiastes 7:4