Office season

Harvest is over and now it is office and meeting season. I like to be inside on cold snowy days, but with the beautiful weather outside, I would like to be doing something more physical. I tend to procrastinate on keeping up with the paperwork involved in farming and the piles get quite deep on my desk. The goal is to get everything entered in the computer and filed. It never gets all done, but is a good goal.

Harvest was so-so this year. Soybean yields were good and prices were great. Corn was well below average, but prices again were great. We had hail and greensnap losses on all our fields. some were minor, others were horrible. It is not good when the soybeans yield as much as the corn.

Today I am finishing with the harvest records and getting the proper reports to the crop adjusters for the hail and greensnap losses we had this summer. Next is printing off yield maps and starting to analyze the good and bad from this summer. I also need to get our personal accounts caught up. I can keep the farming account straight since I use the computer for printing checks, but it is easy to put the bank statements aside for a rainy day. Now is the time, even though it is not raining.

Meeting season has already started with the Farm Bureau Policy Development meeting in Kearney a couple of weeks ago. Next is the Nebraska Farm Bureau state convention, again in Kearney. This are always fun seeing friends from all around the state. I have attended every NFBF convention since I was first elected to the Dawson County board in 1985.

Well enough time off, back to the piles of paperwork.

Harvest

So much for keeping up with this blog. Now we are into harvest. I totally skipped writing about irrigation this year. Will try to do better next year.

We are rained out of harvest now, so I will try to get started on this again. This last weekend we received 2.75-3.25 inches of rain. It is very muddy everywhere now. We hope to get started again Wednesday, but today is foggy and cool, not what we needed. We will be loading trucks on the road for the next week or so, this is lots of fun for both the harvest crews and anyone who is traveling the country roads.

We did start harvest on high moisture corn last Monday, 10/3/11. This was delivered to a cattle feedlot to be ground and packed into a bunker silo for storage. High moisture corn is a great feed for cattle in a feedlot and it allows harvest to start sooner. They want corn with a moisture content of 25-30%, much wetter than dry corn which is stored at 13-15% moisture. The wet corn is ground and packed tight to get as much air out as possible. The pile is covered with plastic and will ferment (like beer) and will keep for the next year.

We have one day of wet corn to go before we can start on soybeans. The soybeans were also ready last week, but wet corn has a higher priority. It is tough to time the wet corn harvest since in normal weather corn can dry out 1-2% of moisture a day. So corn that is 30% today will be 25% in 3 days normally. This year it went from 26% to 22% in one day.

Yields of our wet corn is about what was expected. No record yields this year. We had some hail damage early,  ranging from 5-15% loss, and some greensnap, ranging from 10-50% broken. Greensnap is a nasty loss. It happens when we get a very strong wind at exactly the wrong time. Corn can be very brittle just before the tassel comes out if it has been growing rapidly, which it did this year. Then we got 70-90 mph winds one night. Snap. One hybrid had greensnap of 50%, others were 10-15%. It really hurts the yields, and there is not much you can do. While some hybrids are tougher than others, all could greensnap if they get wind at the wrong day.

We are exited to get into the soybeans. We have been hearing yields that are way above record yields from our neighbors. I hope ours are there as well.

Let the sun shine.

Time Flies in the Summer!

Wow, a month has gone by and I finally got back to put up another post.

The corn is growing FAST now. The last half of June was, and always is, a very busy time period. During those two weeks we cultivated all the corn with our rolling cultivators, fertilized all the corn with liquid nitrogen using our coulter applicator, and ridged all the corn to prepare it for irrigation.

One step at a time. We use two 8-row cultivators that are adaptations of the Lilliston cultivator. they have curved spider wheels that run in the dirt, loosening the soil and throwing some soil onto the row, covering up small weeds next to the corn plants. They work best when you can travel about 6-7 mph. This is a picture of one of 16 gangs per cultivator.

The picture to the left is one of our ridgers. We run two like this and can convert one of the cultivators to ridging if needed. This year we needed it.

This is looking back while ridging with the adapted cultivator. The picture below is looking ahead over the hood. The corn has almost shaded the entire row now. It would have already shaded the row except we received some hail in June which slowed the corn down.

This is the corn today. As you can see the corn is growing rapidly. This is only one week after ridging. Now the corn is adding a leaf per day and 4-6 inches of height.

We normally would be irrigating like crazy by July 4, but we are much wetter than normal. The soil is fully saturated and we will wait for a week or two before starting to irrigate. The more we can keep the pumps turned off the lower the expenses will be.

Corn is growing!!

    I haven't kept writing as I wanted to. Just too tired or busy at night. This week the temperatures finally warmed up, all the way to 98! The corn is loving these temps and bright sunshine and is growing fast.

This picture was taken on May 23. The corn was planted on May 3 and in 20 days the corn was up and starting it's second leaf. This was ridge planted in corn stubble.

    This is a different field taken on June 7. This was ridge planted in soybean stubble on April 29. If you look close you can spot some old corn stalks from 2009 still on the surface. I was spraying this field with a tank mix of herbicides. On our corn I use a generic glyphosate herbicide and an atrazine based preemergent herbicide. I use the mix to avoid herbicide resistant weeds. I needed to spray the corn before it reached 11.5 inches and you can see that I was pushing it a little. Much of our corn grew 3-4 inches from Sunday to Wednesday.
    Next comes applying nitrogen fertilizer and spraying soybeans. We will also cultivate the corn next week after it's fertilized. Oh and we also cut our first cutting of alfalfa to bale next week too. Might be a bit busy.

Row Stalker

Finally getting around to posting pictures of our Row Stalker.  As you can see there are two disc per row that run against each other. They cut off the root ball from the previous year and throw it out of the way. This machine runs best at high speeds, 10-15 mph. Usually our teenage workers get to run this as they love the speed.

We finished planting soybeans May 17 followed by our four varieties ornamental popcorn and two varieties of broom corn. This is in addition to the three varieties of large Indian corn that were planted earlier.

I'll have another blog about this hobby gone bad later as they start to grow.

We did receive a light rain the evening of May 17 (0.65") and then a good soaking rain May 24-25 (3.25"). Now we need some sunshine.

Planting 2011

I finally started planting corn on Thursday, April 28. It took all afternoon to get the planter and tractor all hooked up and all the wires and hoses in the right places. One hang up was the tractor guidance system was not talking to the planter module. Technology is great when it works, a pain when it doesn't.

My Trimble guidance system is quite busy during planting. It steers the tractor, runs and controls a fertilizer injection pump, runs and controls the seed drive, turns row clutches on and off and logs everything on a data card. The seed population is adjusted automatically to match a prescription that I made. I plant more seeds per acre on the high yielding ground and fewer seeds on the lower yielding ground. Also some hybrids like high populations and some hybrids like lower populations.

The row clutches are new this year. They help cut seed costs and raise yields by not double planting on the ends or edges of fields. I plant one pass or two on the bottom of most fields first. When I plant the field, the guidance system knows when I cross into what was already planted and shuts the rows off. When all are off I can lift out of the ground and turn around. On square fields this is not a big deal. I could come pretty close by hand. The real benefit comes on the many odd shaped fields that I farm. Sometimes one side of the planter is off for several yards before the other side is done planting.

Planting into soybean stubble.

These are some of the pictures I've taken this year planting corn. The first two are ridge-planting into a field that was soybeans last year. These fields are very mellow and we plant directly on the ridge from last year with no other tillage. 

Planting into soybean stubble.

After Row Stalking, before planting.

Planting on the old corn ridge.

  The next two are ridge-planting into a field that was corn last year and will be again this year. I am on a corn-corn-soybean rotation on most of our fields. Before the planter we ran a machine called a Row Stalker. I can't find any photos in our files (I know they are there somewhere), but I will post them as soon as I can get some new shots. The Row Stalker has two discs that run against each other and they cut off the top 2 inches of the ridge left from last year. This cuts off the root balls from last year's corn. Those roots are very tough and I need to get them out of the way for this years corn crop. I then plant on the ridge.

Planting into alfalfa sod.

The picture on the right is no-till planting into an alfalfa field that has been sprayed with a herbicide to kill the alfalfa. We used to use several tillage passes to break up the field, which took a lot of diesel fuel and dried out the soil. This method works much better.

I should be half done planting corn by Monday evening. Most of our fields are now dry enough to plant, although we did find a few wet spots Saturday.

Planting!!

Finally started planting on April 28. Still too wet in some fields. This is ridge planted into soybean stubble without any other tillage.

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