I'm essential as well, essential to my wife, my dog, the cattle, her one nag and the 40 cats we have roaming around.
Went down the road to my buddy's seed operation and brought home 2 gravity wagons of corn I was gifted this year for next year. I can auger in 2 wagons full and that tops my grain tank off but there is more in supersacks so I'll bring them down and put them in the barn. Will be nice food for the mice and maybe they will leave my tractors alone. I have 3 cats that live in there but they aren't interested in the mice because my wife feeds them too much...oh well. Getting 14 tons total this time.
Home stuff is moderately boring but I'm working on farm equipment anyway. Getting ready for spring.
Interestingly, with the relaxed DOT regs (due to the virus), any hauler hauling foodstuffs is now exempt from the HOS rules, don't even have to log at all, just run, like the old days. Can run heavy too. weigh stations closed, just run the coops and hammer down.
The guy (farmer and very good friend of 30 years) I get the corn from has his own fleet of trucks and trailers and seed corn and soybeans are heavy. Normally, he loads 45,000 pounds in his trailers to be legal, now, he fills them up. Told me that if they don't look like they are going to break in 2, it's all good with him. seed corn and soybean seed is considered foodstuffs and is exempt under the relaxed regs.
I'll probably run hopper bottoms for him this fall if he's short on drivers. We always fill them up anyway, only going from the field (combine opr picker, seed corn has to be picked with a special and expensive machine) to the dryers on his property so weight is never an issue. You can get over 30 ton of corn in a 40 foot hopper (depending on RM) and 40 ton of beans. Nice thing about beans is you don't dry them. You take them off in the fall and they go directly in the grain tanks. From the tanks, they go to the sorting building where they are cleaned, sorted by size and bagged on an automated bagging line, dated and stacked on pallets or put in supersacks for shipment. Each supersack weighs 2.5 ton.
Seed corn is different. 90% of the time it comes off 'wet'. Wet is anything above 15%RM. It has to be dried down to 15 or less before you can tank it, or it will mold. Seed corn is taken down to 10--12%RM, sorted for size, cleaned and screened and some is innoculated and some isn't depending on end use. Then it is bagged and palletized or put in supersacks as well. I get the off grade stuff or the stuff that won't germinate. Corn in storage has to be 'germ' tested monthly. If it won't germinate above 95%, it's deemed unsaleable and it comes to me for my corn burner and his, he heats with corn like I do and there is always plenty to burn. The residual goes for animal feed.
Is there money in the seed business? I guess there is in as much as 1- 56 pound bag of hybrid GMO seed corn sells for around 300 bucks which sounds like a bunch but there is a lot of work and a lot of machinery expense involved. When you own 3 combines, 2 pickers, 2 de-tasslers, 10 tractors, numerous trailers and 3 road tractors, it all costs a lot of jack. He's not a millionaire by a long shot but he lives comfortably, but then, so do I.
I just run my hay every year and work for him on the side and call it good.
Way of life out here. We are removed from the urban sprawl and we like that. On a dirt road in the middle of nowhere (mud right now), 2 cars a day come by and I know who is in them.
The 'virus' out here isn't a big concern as we don't really have much contact with the outside world and all it's germs. We can pick and choose who we deal with and who we are friends with. best of all, out here, everything is on a handshake and a man's word is gospel. If it was like there everywhere, we'd be a lot better off. Sadly, it isn't, but it still is here.
Thought I'd give you a little insight as to what I (we) do out here. It's lots more complex but no point in getting into details except to say, when you buy your food at the grocery, the grocery fairy didn't make it appear. We did. Finally, all the hay I run every year goes to feed cattle, not just mine (I don't use but maybe 1/10th of what I make), the rest goes to one customer, a large feedlot operation that specializes in high quality steers for the food market. If you live out east and buy quality beef at your grocery store, there is a very good chance the beef you bought was fed on the hay I run. The operator that buys my hay sends his steers to slaughter in Philadelphia for East coast meat sales. We do our best to make sure you have quality, tender farm raised beef.