After than long, wet April Farm Week in Pictures finally brings you planting shots! Monday through Thursday we planted corn. Of course Plant 13 keeps us pretty busy, but it came to a standstill right at 5pm on Thursday with a brief rain shower. Friday was a dreary day, so soil didn’t dry out. The sun appeared again on Saturday afternoon, but not long before sunset. Monday we’ll be at it hard again first thing in the morning. Let’s get to the action you’ve been waiting for!
Family Farming!
Spring and fall Daddy is in the cab so Mom and the little dude come to visit in the evening!
Refill!
Dad is putting talcum powder into the seed boxes. Talc helps seeds flow evenly through the seed meters and into the soil. Graphite is another form of dry lubricant that can be used for this purpose.
New Rig in the Neighborhood
I’d say I captured a great shot of our neighbors’ new setup considering this was taken over my shoulder without looking while I was driving. They’ve gone to a John Deere planter from a Kinze planter and have decided to switch over to 20″ corn rows. Standard corn rows are generally 30″ apart which is how we plant. 20″ rows allows for more plants per acre and should give each plant a little more room. I’m not yet convinced it pays to change equipment for 20″ rows, but every farm is different. I’m not ruling 20s out indefinitely!
Stop!
That’s far enough don’t you think? Close enough to get seed planted up to the edge of the field in this corner.
Suck It Up
Here an agronomist that works with our seed dealer and another employee are using a couple of shop vacs rigged up for easy clean out of seed from planters. Here we are in the process of planting a test plot of corn for them in the middle of one of our fields. They want to test some of their corn hybrids over varying soil types to help farmers in the future place the right hybrids on the right soils. The lines you see in the field are where the closing wheels on the planter have shut the seed trench after the seed was dropped.
Plot a Course
We weren’t the only people planting on our ground this week. Each year Weaver Popcorn runs a test plot on our ground. They have a brand new plot planter this year. They have hundreds of varieties in their plot. When I’m running along with our 24 row planter at 5.2mph I’m covering just over 37 acres an hour. These guys put in about a 12 hour day for 12.5 acres! Plotting is hard work that requires accuracy and consistency to gather good data.
I’m Impressed
This is the field behind my house. I saw one of our neighbors pulling out of here one day with his John Deere 2510H fertilizer applicator. We have been looking at getting an applicator of our own vs using whatever is available from the fertilizer retailer whenever we need one. Since we are doing more no-till I’ve been looking at moving away from a standard knife because knives do move a fair amount of soil. The 2510H is a low disturbance tool. This picture shows you can barely tell where the tool has been.
Results May Vary
This page of our monitor is showing a digital map of the field I’m planting. Each color corresponds to a different seeding rate. The planter will change rates automatically based on GPS coordinates. The blue areas show what has already been planted, and the highlighted white line indicates the track my tractor is following. Dad and I generate the rates, called prescriptions, on software on our laptop before planting begins. The program allows us to take multiple years of yield data from one field and combine them into a single map with an indexed yield that accounts for different crops. Based on this new map we create the management zones seen in the picture. At some point in the field I will manually change the rates for one full pass across the field. For example if the variable rate average seeding rate is 33,000 plants per acre I will make one full pass each at 30,000, 33,000, and 36,000 plants. Those three non-variable passes will help determine at harvest if the variable rate seeding paid off or not. VRT (variable rate technology) is one of the coolest precision ag tools. I can place seed more effectively and save corn seed in poor performing areas by cutting the population down. Soybeans are different because you want to actually increase the rate in low yield areas. Variable rate works for almost any input including fertilizer, pesticide application, and irrigation.
#AgNerd Skills
I made use of my Ram Mount X-Grip III to shoot some video this week. I’ve been asked several times how our 60′ wide planter gets around from one field to another. People know it folds up, but they want to see how. I’ve actually been trying to do this for over a year, but I didn’t have a tablet mount until last summer and two hands are needed to run the controls. But now we finally have video of how the planter goes from transport mode to planting mode!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FW8Km8HngKs
How was your week?
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Cool pictures! Too bad your video doesn’t work. Got planting last thursday which is late for us. Wr kike to be going by april 25th or so. Weird to only see rows every 30 inches when our air drill is on 10 inch spacing and we don’t row crop anything. Quit around midnight Saturday but back at it this morning. Currently just shy of 1000 acres in.
Brian – thanks for including the pic of our X-Grip III; glad it helped with your video. We invite you to post that on our website if you’d like. Regards, Jess Henderson