{"id":58,"date":"2013-05-27T02:18:53","date_gmt":"2013-05-27T02:18:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shaworchards.com\/blog\/?p=58"},"modified":"2013-05-27T02:18:53","modified_gmt":"2013-05-27T02:18:53","slug":"so-what-does-a-farmer-do-all-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shaworchards.com\/blog\/?p=58","title":{"rendered":"So what does a farmer do all day?"},"content":{"rendered":"

When I was telling my friends back at Hershey that I was going to go run an orchard, I could tell most of them really had no idea what that involved.\u00a0 Some of them would make references to “going to pick apples”, and pretty much everybody understood that it was hard work, and a few correctly surmised that I wasn’t doing it for the money.\u00a0 But I’m pretty sure nobody knows what an apple grower does all day.\u00a0 And that was the genesis of this blog.<\/p>\n

Most of my weekly posts so far highlight something important that is going on in the orchard.\u00a0 This one will give you a better understanding of where I spend my time.<\/p>\n

The quick answer is simply this: fixing stuff that breaks.\u00a0 I hate it, but it’s true.\u00a0 It takes an incredible amount of equipment to run this place, and we can’t afford to replace it, so we spend a lot of time fixing things.\u00a0 And we develop an impressive array of skills to manage this.\u00a0 Here’s a listing of things my Dad and\/or I (mostly Dad) have fixed in the last two or three weeks:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Irrigation system “1”:\u00a0 Found that mice had completely destroyed the control panel by gnawing through the wires.\u00a0 I was able to apply a little knowledge from engineering school and identify the low voltage wire that triggered the main pump relay, and long story short, I hot-wired the system so that our berries could get water.\u00a0 At which point we found two different major pipe breaks below ground that required excavation, and then some plumbing skills with PVC.\u00a0 Still pending is the electronics work to get the wires spliced back together and repair the solenoid valves.<\/li>\n
  2. Irrigation system “2”:\u00a0 A crack in a pipe was causing a leak.\u00a0 More plumbing.<\/li>\n
  3. Sprayer fill station:\u00a0 The suction line cracked and needed to be rebuilt.\u00a0 More plumbing.<\/li>\n
  4. The internet in the office kept failing: This is more complicated than it would appear because I’ve had to build a wireless bridge using high power antennas to get the signal where it needs to go.\u00a0 I think the problem has been fixed by a new firmware on the router.<\/li>\n
  5. Cold storage main blower:\u00a0 Turned out to be a seized bearing that thankfully started working again with some powerful lubricant and a few prayers.\u00a0 But since the system is nearly 90 years old (not kidding) I’m still worried about the long term stability.\u00a0 Next week, we’ll start working on the backup system that seems to have a faulty compressor.<\/li>\n
  6. Forklift 1:\u00a0 Sticky contact terminal causing it not to move.\u00a0 Fixed with a little TLC.<\/li>\n
  7. Forklift 2:\u00a0 Bad idle setting caused it to stall, and it needed brake fluid.<\/li>\n
  8. Bulldozer:\u00a0 (You really don’t want problems with a bulldozer.)\u00a0 Bad starter turned out to be pretty easy to fix but still took hours to take off and reassemble.\u00a0 Fixed.<\/li>\n
  9. I’m pretty sure there was a flat tire or two.\u00a0 There’s always a flat somewhere.<\/li>\n
  10. Sprayer 1:\u00a0 Major surgery to the agitator shaft.\u00a0 Fixed.<\/li>\n
  11. Sprayer 2:\u00a0 Broken timing belt.\u00a0 Fixed.<\/li>\n
  12. Mower 1:\u00a0 Pulled out of the mud.\u00a0 Hammered out a shield that had been deflected into the blade.\u00a0 Replaced drive guard and fixed PTO shaft.<\/li>\n
  13. Mower 2:\u00a0 Bled the fuel system after someone ran it out of diesel.\u00a0 (Note: do NOT let a diesel run out of fuel.)<\/li>\n
  14. Weed sprayer 1:\u00a0 Repair to broken fitting involved fun with fiberglass and resin.<\/li>\n
  15. ….\u00a0 by now, if you are still reading, you’ve got the picture.\u00a0 Fact is, I could go on.\u00a0 There are actually more things we had to fix.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    I’ve asked myself what we could do to minimize the time we need to put into this kind of thing.\u00a0 I think the causes are pretty simple: 1) stuff is generally old; but really the bigger contributor is 2) it takes an incredible array of complex machines to make an orchard work, and they get a lot of use.\u00a0 When you have so many old things working all the time, there are going to be problems.<\/p>\n

    So for now, we keep trying to fix the problems and find enough time to actually grow food.\u00a0 On the bright side, we are scheduled to open our market and start picking strawberries.<\/p>\n

    It will be nice to actually see some fruits of our labor.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    When I was telling my friends back at Hershey that I was going to go run an orchard, I could tell most of them really had no idea what that involved.\u00a0 Some of them would make references to “going to pick apples”, and pretty much everybody understood that it was hard work, and a few […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-58","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaworchards.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaworchards.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaworchards.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaworchards.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaworchards.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=58"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaworchards.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":59,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaworchards.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58\/revisions\/59"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaworchards.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=58"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaworchards.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=58"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaworchards.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=58"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}