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Three brothers and families Brothers Barry, Glenn and Dale Lowes, and their wives, Brenda, Shelley and Bonnie, manage and operate this 6,000-acre farm/ranch on the rolling, wide-open prairie along the western edge of Manitoba. On the farming side, they seed 1,200 acres of canola, wheat, barley and oats for grain and another 1,300 acres of corn, barley, rye and alfalfa for silage. The ranch includes roughly 500 cows plus yearlings and breeding heifers on 3,300 acres of pasture. In winter, the family operates a 3,500-head feedlot for backgrounding and some finish cattle. They also make hay on 400 acres. Barry estimates they produce about 1,000 round bales of hay for feed and 5,000 straw bales for bedding and cow feed. Silage production Barry says his parents, Bud and Evelyn Lowes, started farming in 1962 with "virtually nothing" and raised six children. Bud stayed active on the farm until his sudden death on April 1, 2003. Evelyn lives in town and still has an interest in the farm. "Dad was an organizer. We never did anything major here without talking to him," Barry recalls. Necessity was behind the family's first forage harvester purchase in 1980. That year, the seed sat in dry soil for four weeks before rain came. Barry says, "The crop looked like a map after that. We knew we couldn't combine it, so we bought this forage harvester and put a pile up. We've had seven or eight machines since then, and weíve made silage every year." Making silage became the ticket to expanding into ranching and the feedlot. It sustained the needs of a growing family, and in recent years, became Bud's way of keeping his sons and grandsons busy.
"So far, we've put about 400 hours on our FX38 and we've chopped about 42,000 tons with it. We did 5,500 acres of silage last year in about a 40-mile radius of home," Barry says. The silage work can keep up to seven men busy for a season that starts in mid-July and runs into the August-September grain harvest. The corn season usually starts around mid-September. "We usually start chopping around 8 in the morning and go until 10 at night," Barry says. "A lot of time, we keep three trucks, a chopper man, a packer man and a swather man busy. A fourth truck is available for longer hauls." Glenn and his nephew, David, are the chief FX38 operators. Others in the silage harvesting crew include Dale, Barry's sons Nevin and Justin, and a cousin, Charles. During the work season, the forage harvester must be ready for the job because a whole crew depends on its performance. They already had a good impression of New Holland performance and service, and weren't disappointed when they put the FX38 to work. "There's a good New Holland dealer network here," says Barry. "On the two occasions when we needed parts, the parts were available that day." The crew found it was doing a more efficient job with the FX38, he adds. The FX38 has a 12-foot wide pickup, a full three feet wider than they had on their previous machine. "It's also better for turning corners," he says. "You can pick up a wider swath and keep going on a corner." "We like the knives," Barry continues. "It has 12 knives, the full width of the throat. With these, if you pick up a small stone, it doesn't knock anything loose." On the other hand, if the machine starts to pick up a piece of metal, it stops dead. "The metal alert system on this machine is very good. It stopped her dead at six mph the other day. David got out and found a little piece of steel the size of a paper clip! That's amazing." |
