2020 California, USA Rice Harvest! | Tractor Video

Alright. Let's work. It's the 2020 crop year. My name is Matthew Sligar. That's right. We're out in California planting rice by air. Welcome to the rice fields. Ride with me from planting to harvest. California rice my friends. You're watching Rice Farming TV. Yes, the 2020 California rice harvest has begun. I've been cutting for a couple of days actually already. And for those of you of my regular audience who have emailed me, Facebooked me, Instagram, here on YouTube, wrote a comment wondering where I've been. I know. I haven't been producing many Rice Farming TV videos lately because I've been busy. This rice plant is a month old. Aerial shots really crane my neck. This is the John Deere 9660 CTS. This of course is parked right next to our corn crop out here. The actual corn is behind the combine. If you look down here, we got this like hairy section. This is the hair, hair of the corn. So in this area, I found four. I left one down in the water, but here they are. They're all the same size and they've been causing a little bit of foilier damage out here in the rice fields. I thought I was going to get to drive it in. You want to say something? Like a punchline type thing? Like he paid for it? He paid for it, you brat. He pays for it, you brat. Thank you. Thank you. Busy. Many reasons why which I'll get into shortly. One big reason why which I'll touch on right now, because I'm super excited to share with you, that I published a children's book. It's called Daddy's Got Dirt, A California Rice Story. Vroom, vroom, vroom, the harvester roars. Climb on in. Daddy yells from the door. That's exactly what we're doing today. Vroom, vroom, vroom, the harvester roars. Climb on in. Daddy yells from the door. Anyway, this is on Amazon. I'll leave the link down in the description, or it's available on my website. I'll leave the link in the description. If you buy it from Amazon, you get free shipping. If you buy it from me, I can sign it for you. But I've been talking for far too long. We need to start being productive. So let's engage the machine. Here's the separator. You heard that. Okay, here's the header. That's a moving now. We are now going to throttle up. moving right along, I can explain to you, well, how the rice crop went this year. After planting, where I left off, it was a smooth growing season. Didn't get too hot, but we did get our heat units. The rice did grow up at a perfect height. As you can see outside, the rice is all standing. All of our fields have been standing or are still standing. So that's good. We don't have to cut lazy rice. You can remember back to the 2017 rice harvest where we had heat waves through California, 107 degree Fahrenheit weather for weeks that just elongated the rice and it fell over. That hasn't been the case this growing season. This rice has been a wonder to cut. Just super easy when it's standing. We don't have to reach down with the reel to pick up the rice in order for the combine to cut it and separate the grain from straw. So that's the good news. Super smooth growing season. I do have a couple of backlogged videos that I will share with you here in the near future that I filmed and edited back during the growing season, but I took a break. As again, my regular audience knows, I was missing in action for a couple of months. A couple of reasons why. We had a new baby. We had a new baby. We have a new baby. We still have the new baby. The new baby's name is Stella. She's doing great. She's already eight months old. Another reason why I took a break from videos over the summer, aside from having a new baby, we purchased a new house. So that has been super exciting. Wow. That's what I've been doing. Focus on raising the crop, raising children, being a homeowner and working on a new creative project. Daddy's Got Dirt, a California rice story. And I suppose I should also mention that I am driving the Claas Lexion 750, our newer combine. 585 is not running right now because we're actually not sure if this field is ripe enough. So we're just going to take a couple of passes, cut a load of rice, send it into the dryer, see what the moisture reader says. Hi mom, I'm unloading some rice. Chuck is an excellent operator. He was with us during the spring doing tillage work, disking, land planing, and helping us get the crop in. So it's good having a returning crew from planting to come help us with harvest because they know the fields, they know the work ethic, they know the strategy, and we know them. So it really helps. Green tank is getting a little empty and Chuck out there is getting a little full. Disengaging, tucking back in my unloading auger, and Chuck is going to take off and deliver that freshly harvested rice to the trailers, the sets of doubles, and of course being hauled by our semi trucks. Bye Chuck, good job. See all this dust that's coming off the crop? That's, well, not just dust, but it's a lot of ash that has come and floated down from the wildfires that we've been suffering through here in California. And even if you look outside, I mean, normally that sky would be blue, but it's gray from smoke and it's been like that for weeks. Pops called, he ran in a sample to the dryer to see the moisture of this rice here to see basically if it was ripe enough. Unfortunately it's not, so we're going to have to stop cutting. We've run into unripe rice, and this is so typical because we have such efficient machines, such high horsepower, that we can cut faster in the fall than we can plant in the spring. So we've caught up to ourselves. We'll give this field a couple of days to ripen up, to mature. Try to get over to the road here. So cutting right up against the road there, as you can see, kind of precarious to have your header right up against the road, so I'm extra cautious over there. Otherwise I'm just gonna do this strip ahead of us so we have a parking spot again so we can fuel up against the road. Here's Pops. Standby. Yeah Matthew, how much you got in your bin? Uh, probably about halfway full. I would stop. Okay, all right, bye. Oh, oh, hey, come on Ricky, show us, show us. That's right, that's right folks. The new SBM, Sutter Buttes Manufacturing Ag Truck. Self-propelled grain cart. Now remember last winter when I toured through the Sutter Buttes Manufacturing Warehouse and Manufacturing Plant? You should check that video out because we saw how these things are essentially made. Anyway, Rick's driving it. We got a new one. Thanks Nevada. Great machine. Okay, completely unloaded. I am backing up into that parking spot that I cut against the road and Rick is going to deliver that last bit of green rice to the trailers. Bye Rick. Lowering the header. That's how we check the hydraulic oil. The header has to be all the way down. And that's it for me today. That's it for this video. I think we got caught up. We got more harvesting ahead of us. I'm gonna get back in on the video production. So if you enjoyed, let me know. And I'll be answering comments as well. Check out down in the description again. Daddy's Got Dirt, Amazon link, website link. You can get it either place. If you want me to sign it, get it through the website. Take care everybody. Have a great rest of your 2020. It's been an awesome year, hasn't it?