Our on-farm purge started about three years ago. It finished this week. We’re at least done for now.
We seem to only find the energy (and time) to work on this type of stuff for about two or three weeks a year. Other than starting or checking irrigation, it is pretty much the only thing I’ve done for the last couple of weeks. (I did slip away one day to go to a seed company field day.)
We’re not hitting a high for scrap value, but looking over the last five years, we’re probably in the upper third of the range. (2022 saw some pretty high values.) Regardless of value, it was time to get this stuff hauled off and have the farm cleaned up.
Concrete beats wood
The last time we did a major clean up, we put everything on wood pallets. Pallets were a great idea, reducing hands-on handling. However, we didn’t expect it to sit outside long enough for the pallets to rot out. This time many of those items have been sold or scrapped.
We moved some items to old cow barn that came with property we bought that adjoins one of our farms. The building isn’t tall enough to store much equipment, but the forklift fits inside and most of the barn has a concrete floor.
For now, stuff is just stacked along the walls in general groupings of like items. But we’ve used some of the scrap money to purchase pallet racking. Re-organization and final sorting will happen sometime during the colder months or an extended period of inclement weather.
Three more things to do
We aren’t not done, but we’re at a good place to hit ‘pause’.
- We do have a few pieces of obsolete equipment that we’re just not ready to tackle yet. They will require some disassembly.
- There is also the wrecked pivot from last summer that we pushed up along the woods and planted around this spring. We can’t access it, so that will be a winter project.
- We are also working to get some scrap concrete hauled out to be crushed.
But all in all, I think we’re looking 1,000% better!