Yesterday was a seed day. That means, we got the first delivery of our seed corn and beans. (That's the stuff that gets planted...and then we pray will grow.)

The first thing that showed up yesterday was this tiny shipment from a man in a pickup truck.This is 50 pounds of sweet corn seed. They are pretty proud of this seed. It sells for almost $15 per pound. (You do the math!)

This is the (mostly) empty place in the shop where the seed will go. Ted will get it cleaned up a little more. A place needs to be spiffy before you fill it up again with stuff.

The semi truck arrived and Ted started to unload the bulk bags first. Normally, we get our seed in "pro boxes" (which you'll see in a minute), but the plant that had our seed had a fire this winter and 3000 pro boxes burned up. They didn't have enough to go around this year, so everyone is making due with less. (More on pro boxes in a minute.)

These bags weigh 2500 pounds a piece. Ted is pretty particular about how they get stacked for obvious reasons. The seed shifts a bit in transit and the bags aren't perfectly square.
He really doesn't want one to fall over.

Ted puts a layer of cardboard in-between the pallet and the bag to keep the bag from getting torn.

The bags are unloaded.

A fork lift is necessary equipment. Especially when you have to unload the truck yourself!
Ted starts to unload the pro-boxes.

This is what a pro box looks like. It, like the bags, holds 2500 pounds of seed. What is nice about pro boxes is that they are made to actually fit onto a cart with a conveyor that we take to the field. This eliminates manually carrying and unloading thousands of pounds of seed by hand. The boxes are also nice and square, making them easy to stack, and they get RECYCLED! (You can't recycle the bags.)

This is a little over half of the seed we will plant this year.
More than 25,000 pounds...and we're not done yet.

We also unload some seed for neighbors at our place. This particular neighbor can't get a semi into his place so they just bring the seed to our place, where Ted unloads it and then loads it onto the neighbor's truck. These are traditional paper bags of seed. These bags will get unloaded into his planter by hand. That's a lot of hard, back-breaking work...but easier than a few years ago. It used to be that a bag of seed weighed 60 pounds...why? Because that is a bushel. But, several years ago they changed it to 50 pound bags. No, I don't know why.

And, as always, our ever-present "watch dog" was in attendance. We call him the "watch dog" because Buddy can watch people work all day long...kind of like me. Hee hee!