Monday, October 31, 2016
Sunday, October 30, 2016
Saturday, October 29, 2016
Gravity Wagon
There is a reason
few of us are farmers.
The Brent 1082
gravity wagon holds one thousand bushels of shelled corn. It has a
20” diameter auger to unload, and will unload about 500 bushels of
corn per minute. A single load of shell corn weighs 56,000 pounds, or
28 tons, at 15% moisture.
While these grain
wagons are useful for farmers who have large, powerful tractors to
run them, but they are expensive. The Brent 1082 wagon pictured here
sells for about $42,000. It will take more than 82 acres of corn
producing the national average of 171 bushel per acre to earn enough
to pay for this wagon. That is more than 14 full loads of corn which
today sells for $3.01 per bushel. In Dec. 1947 corn sold of $2.47 per
bushel, only 18 percent less than today. Of course this does not
count the cost of the tractor to power the wagon, or the combine to
harvest corn. It also does not account for the price of seed corn,
chemicals, fertilizer, or diesel fuel to run the tractor and combine on many passes over the
field. It also does not account for the mortgage cost of the land
where the corn is grown. Given the uncertainty of weather, a crop is
not assured at all, but the costs are all a certainty plus the going interest rate to finance all these costs. Fortunately for our few remaining farmers this looks like a good crop year.
