Farm Week in Pictures is inching closer to harvest every week. Crops have entered the grain fill stages which means most of what happens from now on is no longer in our hands. We still have plenty of work to do around the farm from selling and hauling the last loads of the 2012 crop to thinking about still purchasing new equipment before the tax year ends. I’ll be travelling a bit before harvest begins. Mostly importantly I’ll be lending a hand at the 2013 AgChat Foundation Conference in order to help other farmers tell their stories.
Filling Out
Corn fields are working on filling out their ears after pollination. Most fields are in the milk or dough stage now. Those may sound like funny names for stages in the life cycle, but they make sense. Milk means the kernels are mostly full of milky fluid, and dough signifies the beginning of the buildup of starch in the kernels.
Soybeans are filling out pods with seed right along the maturing corn crop. This year two-thirds of our soybean crop is being grown for seed production. Next year these seeds will be growing a crop on some other farm.
Feeling Drained
21 rolls of drain tile arrived this week. You might recall we installed a bunch of new drainage in one of our wetter fields last fall. After harvest this fall we’ll be adding about 11 miles of tile to the same field. The system we started last year is doing a great job in a very wet 2013. Spots that would normally drown out in an average year have a crop in them this year.
A Case of Digestion
Some neighboring farmers are working together to build a manure digester. Waste brought to the facility from hog and cattle farms will be converted to fertilizer and biogas. The gas will then be converted to electricity.
Again?
We found another field damaged by armyworms. This corn field didn’t suffer as much damage as the field we had sprayed a few weeks ago so that’s good. When I scouted this damage I could not find one pest either dead or alive. After a few weeks of feeding the caterpillars go to the pupa stage. I hope this is the last we see of these pests!
New Toy!
Say hi to our new harvest toy! We’ve harvested corn with an 8 row head for a long time, but this year we are moving up to a 12 row head. Obviously 4 more rows cutting corn should be more efficient. This piece of equipment should cut the hours put on the combine and save us some fuel as well. Saving machine hours at harvest can pay at trade in time. The value of a combine can decrease $200/hr! If you don’t know how a corn head works I’ve made a simple video explanation to cover the basics.
Until harvest arrives we are now at a point where whatever happens to our crops from now until then is all up to nature now. A few nice soaking rains without much wind and definitely no hail will be just right. Stay tuned to see what happens!
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