Holy Smokes!!!!

Cody here folks, I need to check in and now that the dust has settled I can fill you in on last week. Last Wednesday I am happily running my potato transloading operation, actually wrapping it up to shift the responsibility to another manager. Things are crazy as usual and I had spent most of the day on the phone. Mid-afternoon I receive a phone call from one of my tractor operators. He had been working on knocking down our standing corn (9-10 ft tall) that the processors had rejected. Thinking he had finished a field I casually answer his call only to here a panic stricken young man in desperate need of help. All I hear is, "Cody, the tractor is on fire!"

My response is, "WHAT?!" I am almost four miles away, I look in the direction of the field, and yes I can see smoke starting to rise on the horizon. Talk about scaring the crap out of ya!!

At speeds I will not mention I began my drive to where this is occurring. Frantically I am calling my mechanic, the fire department, my supervisors and still fielding phone calls for the potato transloader operation. Multi-tasking merit badge, I have you now! During the course of my drive I get two more phone calls from my operator, the first requesting the fire department, check; the second requesting a disk to put out the brush fire that has now started, crap!

As I pull up to the shop, my crew along with some help is hooking the disk back up to another tractor. Seeing their troubles and what I considered slowness, I jumped in kick them out of the way, have it hooked up and am driving as fast as the tractor can go in less than a minute.

Arriving on the scene ten minutes later, I see a ball of smoke, that should be a tractor and a huge brush fire headed for the neighbor's feed lot and houses. Crap yet again!! On what is probably a 35-40 degree sloped hill, I drop the disk and hit the throttle charging up the hill. I caught the fire on our property, but now what, do I cross the fence to the neighbors? Yep, my manager jumps in the tractor as my mechanic and I cut the fence. I barely make it back into the tractor to make sure he is not alone.

We cut the flames off there only to find another fence. This time not so much time was wasted in carefully dismantling the fence, it is a 9530T tractor we are in, so don't worry about flat tires, plow the fence over with the tracks, right?! Well first let me get out of the way please boss man?!! To get to the point we were successful in stopping the flames, no help from the fire department, they would rather watch the tractor do the work. At the end of all of this we are left with a mess. Our T-tractors look like this on most occasions:

After being baked at a high enough temperature to melt all of the aluminum in the tractor into liquid (and run in a trail about 40 ft long down the hill) the tractor ends up looking like this:

Hey I did want to talk to the big guys from John Deere HQ, but not quite for this reason. Needless to say my operator is still feeling a bit in the dumps about this. Today a week later we got our replacement tractor, so that helped him feel a little better.

At any rate, you are only seeing pictures and that is all I had ever seen of crazy accidents too. Until now that is; now I can throw my hat into the barrel and say, "Been there, done that."

Oh and let me throw in too that Liz kept calling wondering if I was coming home with my computer for her mutual activities. Barely making it in time I received one of the biggest scowls I have yet received from her. I smiled, handed her the computer, told her my password and let her go to mutual. Upon her return and hearing/seeing why I pushed the time envelope the scowl disappeared pretty fast. :o)

AHH! The life of a farmer!