We have not filled the silo since the early 80s when my dad was lifting a cow with a block and tackle. The cow was down with milk fever. The old block and tackle broke and cow collapsed on my dad, his knee shattered. That convinced him it was time to retire. I helped him sell the herd the next week. The silo was almost full and the silage was left to settle and dry out for the next twenty years.
Usually, the first step in filling silo is to to hoist the blower pipe that conducts the silage from the blower at the bottom of the outside of the silo to the top of the silo. The heavy eight inch pipe was hoisted to the top of the silo with a cable attached to the pipe and run through a pulley at the top of the silo. The cable was pulled by a tractor on the ground. This was a tense job that could turn into a disaster at any moment. At our place, with its uniquely designed concrete silo, my dad always took the most dangerous job: he would climb to the top of the silo, crawl on his hands and knees on a shaky two by ten plank from the silo ladder to the opposite point on the other side of the silo where the blower pipe would enter. That plank and his sense of balance was the only thing between him and a forty foot drop to the bottom of the empty silo.
When the other farmers who dad filled silo with were all dead or retired, dad no longer had to take the shared pipe down each year, and so it stayed right there, until yesterday.
That pipe had been nagging at me. It was chained to the silo roof sill, but never secured at the bottom and it has been blowing back and forth in the wind more and more the last few years. The plank dad used has been up in the top of the silo, exposed to the weather and insects. It can not be trusted to cross the chasm like dad used to.
My wife and I moved in with dad to take care of him and the farm for his last few years. It has been four years since he died and we took over. We have curious, lively, and fearless seven year old twin grandsons who are around the place all the time. I fret about what might happen if the blower pipe let loose and fell when they happened to venture to the base of the silo.
Yesterday, I decided to do something about the pipe. I had open heart surgery last fall and I am in no condition to climb up to the top of the silo, attach a cable and pulley and lower the pipe the proper way. The roof of the silo is already in bad shape from age and weather, so I decided a little more damage would be a small price for the peace of mind I would gain from having that old pipe on the ground. So I decided to attach a cable to the pipe and pull it down with my tractor.
It took two pulls and met with only moderate success. The first pull separated the pipe at the expansion joint. The second pull got the rest of the pipe but it separated at the connection to the distributor hood, leaving the distributor hood, the part that directed the silage blown upward by the blower back down into the silo, danging from the sill and hooked over the side of the silo.
Not ideal, but much better. Most of the weight has been removed from the chain suspending the pipe from the sill and the hood is firmly hooked over the side of the silo so even if the chain and sill were to let go, the hood would still be held up.
An improvement, although I must continue to scheme about getting the last bit down.