69GMC-Alaska

You're the Alaska guy?Please post some pics of your AK farms and countryside.Thank you.Steve

Burning fields, everything we are working had been fallow for 20 years.

More burning

Out the end of our driveway, all the treelines in these pics are going away this winter.

The front yard

These next couple are a hay farm 40 miles south of us we bought some equipment off of this summer, and I am talking with the guy about buying it when he quits farming in a couple years, 320 acres with 50 cleared.



Bringing the new toys home.

Playing with the new baler.
Now for some scenery. Matanuska Glacier in autumn
On the way to Valdez to go fishing.

Salmon, anyone?

A visitor, we get lots of `em.

More visitors, out the front window, the fence is to keep the moose out of the garden

Mt. McKinley from the Parks Highway

A picture of our place from a hot air ballon

We also take hay off our runway.
My airplane is in a little rougher shape than my dads....

Riding my snowmachine outside of Palmer


More riding, in Hatchers Pass

A friend and I having fun. My sled is stuck in the foreground, from getting up to where he got stuck in the background to help him get out.

Nice pics guys !! Thanks for sharing .

Thanks!!beautiful country.Hard to imagine raising hay up there.Like your'new' baler.I bought one(CIH 8530) too this summer-love it!

I love this website! All the photos, no matter where you go there is some beautiful country! Thanks for the photos. I admire anyone who can live in a climate such as that. It's a little too cool for me though.

I love showing the place off, I really do love this state. As far as being too cool, I`ve heard people say that Fairbanks, where we live, has the widest temperature range of anywhere in the world. Don`t know if it is true or not, but I have seen -65F for two weeks, and in the summer 105F.

As far as raising hay up here, it is the best cash crop I know of up here. We were on the low end of the price range this year at $400/ton or $10/bale out of the barn, and that is normal prices for up here, not drought gouging or anything like that. Land is spendy up here though, as is fuel. Corn does not do well up here, and wheat is just starting to get experimented with, barley and oats are the main grain crops, and the market is flooded with barley because of a failed state ag project in Delta Junction in the `80s that cleared thousands of acres and bought equipment for private farms with the goal of shipping barley internationally, never happened.
We are also a good example of global warming (not really complaining) by the fact that when my dad grew up on the dairy Timothy would not grow up here, only native fescues or brome, same with wheat, now our soil temperatures have warmed up enough for timothy to thrive, and now the university experimental farm has had success with growing wheat.

I can ramble on forever about farming up here, the more I learn about farming down south, the more I enjoy doing it up here, because it is like we are several generations behind agriculture in the lower 48. There is so litte ground cleared up here, 2/3 of the hay sold up here is trucked in from Canada and the states, younger farmers like me are still buying raw ground and logging it off and opening it up and building up a farm from scratch, not moving onto a place that has been farmed for 3 or 4 generations. Not for everyone,but I sure am enjoying myself.

Josh

Josh,

Thanks so much I used to live in North Pole I love to see pictures from up north.

Still kicking myself in the butt for ever leaving.

Snow on the ground yet?

(quoted from post at 09:41:53 11/02/11) Josh,

Thanks so much I used to live in North Pole I love to see pictures from up north.

Still kicking myself in the butt for ever leaving.

Snow on the ground yet?

Click to expand...

We got about 5 inches on the ground, -5 this morning.

I used to live a few miles outside of Tok,... still have a cousin that lives in North Pole.

I sure miss the moose hunting since retiring and moving to "the lower-48."