BF Avery Collectors

May, 2009

Greetings from North Alabama, I hope this finds you all happy and in good health going into the spring.

For those of you who missed the Spring Show/Meeting, I hate to tell you this, but it was warm and nice in Florida. We sure thought about all you folks up north that couldn’t make it. Nothing like sitting out under a shade tree in 70 degree weather in February.

The Florida show was a great success and I for one enjoyed myself immensely. The Quality Inn where I stayed was a nice motel at a great price. It wasn’t the Hilton by any means but the room was very large, the beds comfortable and had a microwave/refrigerator in it. All in all, for $45.00 per night it was a bargain.

I took several pictures and also videotaped the meeting. I’ll be putting them on the website in the near future. And, speaking of the website, I have finally upgraded the site software to the latest version. It took me about 3 weeks to get it to the point where it is today. I still need to dedicate some more hours to tweaking it out. Unfortunately, during the upgrade there were some items that I just couldn’t get to convert to the new software because I also had to upgrade the database engine on the server. I never could get the old forum messages to come across after several hours of work and long conversation with tech support at our host company. Additionally, while the pictures posted in the galleries are still in the database, I can’t find a way to reconstruct the user albums while allowing ownership to reside with the album owners. So, if you’ve posted pictures to the photo gallery, then you will need to repost them. Hopefully, this will be the last time this will occur.

In other news, we seemed to have come out of our drought here in north Alabama. Now farmers are wishing for about two weeks of dry weather so they can get their corn in. The window for planting corn is closing fast and more rain forecasted for April.

Experts predict that only about 60% of the 150,000 acres expected to be planted in Alabama north of Birmingham this year is in the ground. All of the farmers are under the gun to get it planted within the window for the best chance of making a decent crop in this area.

So far the corn planting season is the only one affected by the spring rains according to Eric Schavey, a regional agent for the Alabama Cooperative Extension Service. The cotton planting season starts around May 1^st and then is followed by the soybean planting season.

Cotton planting is expected to be below previous years due to predicted low prices and little chance of turning a profit. Soybeans are expected to be the “money” crop this year, according to Mr. Schavey.

With soybeans able to be planted as late as June 15^th and still produce a good crop, predictions that the overall acreage planted will be up about 40,000 acres in Alabama this year. Mr. Schavey said soybeans are less expensive to grow than cotton or corn, making them a lucrative crop in the current tough economy.

January, 2009

Greetings and Happy Holidays from North Alabama, I hope this finds you all happy and in good health going into the New Year.

From the looks of things around here it’s going to be a long cold winter. With electrical and natural gas prices at an all time high everyone is cutting back on their energy usage. We’ve knocked our thermostat back to 66 degrees and use space heaters in the bathrooms when needed. Maybe we’ll be able to make it through the winter without breaking what’s left of the bank.

The Avery website is doing great and we’re getting lots of visitors. At the time I’m writing this, we have had 225,339 visitors since creation of the site and have 214 registered website members. The website still ranks as number one for goggle searches on keywords such as BF Avery, Avery Tractors and Avery Collectors. Our availability time has been really good with only a couple of days of downtime due to software or database glitches.