Farm Show!

Last weekend, Dan and I took Carl down to Louisville for his first ever farm show. It's been a tradition of mine and Dan's since 2010 to attend the National Farm Macherny Show, though last year we did not go since we had already planned a trip to Florida in March.

It seemed like as soon as I got pregnant, we calculated how old the baby would be by February and made definite plans to go. I'm glad Carl was old enough to be able to look around at the lights, spinning displays and every piece of farming equipment and it's related parts that you could imagine. Oh, and the people are fun to look at too!

This piece caught Dan's eye...a New Holland sprayer with 120 foot booms (the black part that spreads out on either side of the sprayer).

I felt like a tourist taking some of these pictures...

One booth we had to stop by and visit was Kinze. If you ever see Dan wearing his Kinze hat, it's because his corn planter is a Kinze, as well as the bean planter. The Shawhan boys love their Kinze planters.

This is pretty cool! A folding corn head! This is folded up and over the center piece, so that it will un-fold into a 30 foot (12 row) corn head. When the corn head is folded up, it's only about 15 feet wide, or no wider than the combine itself. If a farmer had this for his combine, he wouldn't have to detach the head and haul it down the road separately. Plus it would be more convenient to move from field to field if you had limited access to your fields. This picture was taken on Friday...on Saturday it was unfolded. Our regrets were that we weren't there to see it unfold.

Carl cruising through the show...

Passed out cruising the show...(my child will not keep his socks on!)

 

 

This monstrous machine is a Krone silage chopper. It dwarfed the chopper used by Dan and his family. This thing was like a combine, it was so big. I guess you would use it if you did custom silage chopping jobs or had a mega-dairy, since all the dairy cows I know eat silage.



Here's another view of it...

 

 

Last but not least, is the robot that milks the cow for you...though I would like to see the robot in action when it has to milk a cow that won't stand for the milker. The machine is relatively slower at putting the milkers on than a person is.

 

Note, they did not have a real cow to demonstrate on. I feel like this is an equivalent to the U-Scan aisles at Kroger's. I don't feel like it's right to replace a human's job with a robot. Plus this thing doesn't have eyes, and anyone with animals knows that it's important to observe them often for any signs of illness or problems.

Milkers attached to artificial teats...

Our weekend away went by way too quickly, but as always, we had a lot of fun. It's something I've always enjoyed going to, even though I walk by booth after booth of contraptions that I don't understand, but hey, that's what people watching is for!