Shawn Feikema
speaker
152 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Oct 2024
last heard Oct 2024
Shawn Feikema’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Well, so my grandpa, my grandpa actually grew up in Hayward, Iowa. That's where he started where that's where he was born. So what is now considered Oak Grove state park in Iowa was their farm. Um, and it's right on the Sioux river there, I believe. And, uh, yeah, when he left the farm to go out on his own, then he moved to, uh, South Dakota actually by renter. That's where he met my grandma.
Um, and farm there for a little while, always just rented the farm. And then his first farm that he purchased was this one here. So he left those other two because he said, I don't want to live. I'm sick of living near a river. I am don't, I'm tired of flooding. So I'm moving away from a river. So that's what he did. Unfortunately, he found a lot of, you know, rock.
Yeah.
Yeah. Right. Well, I remember my, you know, my dad and my uncle talking about too, like every March, just because farmers back then were more, more likely to rent the entire farm place. Every March, you had new people in church with you. Every March, there was a parade of farm equipment moving from one place to another because they lost their rented farm here, so they had to find another one.
I agree. I can't hardly imagine what that would be like, but they do it all the time, I guess.
Yeah.
We don't struggle so much with your field stones. As much as we have solid ledge rock, we call it, it's solid granite. So, I mean, we have granite outcroppings that we literally will cover them up because you can't... The only way to get them out of the ground is to dynamite them out of the ground.
So you either just cover them up with dirt and farm over them so you don't have to go around them, or you dig out what you can, but most of the time you can't. So our ledge is basically from surface to... I don't know how deep it goes. We got a 400 and some foot well, and we never ran out of solid rock. Oh no. So it's solid rock underneath. It's great dirt on top. I mean, it's really great dirt.
It takes a lot of tile, but yeah, it's somewhere between, you know, zero and, 40 feet, you're going to hit solid granite rock.
No, no, no, no, no. I'm talking solid. Like we mine it here. We have two mines here that mine this granite out of. It's this red, that red quartzite type rock or whatever you want to call it. Yeah.
No, it's actually put in asphalt. And a lot of our roads now, they crush it. So they'll dynamite it and then crush it, run it through crushers. And they use it for roads. And a lot of it's going into concrete and asphalt now.
It makes awesome roads. The only downer is that the stuff is so jagged and sharp, it can be a little hard on tires. But we like it because it doesn't have no clay, so therefore when it rains, our roads are nice and hard, and I can still drive my pickup over it and not make it a muddy, sloppy mess versus regular clay gravel. Right.
It can be, depending where you're at. Because like I said, some places the rock is at the surface and you aren't tiling. It is what it is. But most of the ground has got a minimum of probably six feet of dirt over the top of it. And it might come up in places in your field, but you can still tile.
But yeah, I mean, we do our own tiling, and I've completely bent the back framing of a Crary tile plow mounted on my 9RX. I mean, you hit them, it does not move. That doesn't sound like a good day.
and uh really made a bad day yeah yep yep how long have you guys been doing your own tile 2008 so 15 years wow yeah i'm sure that has uh paid extreme dividends yep yep uh we always say we're paying you're gonna pay for tile whether you have it or not so that's how we look at it and uh Yeah, we're going to start a project. So a lot of times we'll try and tile behind our small grains.
So Monday is kind of our go time. We've got a quarter section we're going to try and put. I think it's scheduled to have like 117,000 feet of tile put in it. Wow.
Yep, that'll take us a couple days.
Yep. So our rotation, I mean, right now it's typically, I'd call it a corn soybean rotation that we're continuing to try and add more small grains to. So this year we had like 680 or 690 acres of different small grains, whether it was oats, triticale, hybrid rye, cereal rye. I think that covers it.
Yeah. Yep. So it's typically grown, from what I understand, we grow it on seed production. So I have some seed production contracts with Milbourne Seeds or Renovo out of Brookings. So that's what we grow it for. But I think the dairies are, they love that triticale because it elongates, don't quote me on this, but it elongates and makes for better feed quality, but still gets you the tonnage.
Whereas rye, when it elongates and gets its tonnage, it loses its feed quality. So a lot of dairies are putting it in, and then they'll chop it off in late May or something, and then they'll put their silage corn in. That's my understanding. A dairy guy would much better be able to just grow it for seed.
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