A bit of a slow start early this farm week due to wet soils, but by Wednesday we were back to planting again.  Take a look!

 Family Farming

Great shot my wife got of our son and me after he spent a whole afternoon (until 9pm) planting popcorn with me. Planting that popcorn!

Seed Swap!

This was taken as we got ready spread out two more bags of popcorn seed across the planter to finish of the last field of popcorn.  After this it was on to soybeans. Back at the shop we stripped the seed hoppers off the planter and cleaned all the popcorn out of the the planter.  As we empty the hoppers we set them on the ground upside down.  The popcorn metering plates are pulled and swapped out for soybean plates.  Then everything was mounted back on the planter.  John Deere’s new planter coming out in 2015 is designed so seed plates can be changed without removing these boxes.  That design will save us a lot of time because since we raise popcorn, waxy corn, and soybeans for seed production we have to go through this teardown process a few times each year to ensure we plant a pure stand of crop. Soybeans ready to plant! And while those soybeans are just being planted these were the last of the 2013 crop being taken to market.

Planting on the Wabash

Cruising along the Wabash River! This ought to put an idea in your head of how deep the water must have been during the winter thaw/ice jam on the river.  That’s a fairly big log wedged between some trees about five feet off the ground.  Luckily this doesn’t tend to happen often during the growing season. An issue developed in the river bottom where half the planter rows would randomly shut off, and I’d get a warning about checking the hydraulic drives.  The tractor did need about 4 gallons of fluid, but that didn’t solve the problem.  Seems to be something internal in the tractor.  Since then I’ve just been running with the drives plugged in where the row markers would normally go.  With GPS autosteer I don’t use the markers very much if at all in most fields.

Make Your Mark

I do use the markers occasionally though.  I laid the marker out while I made my first pass in the new field we bought.  I didn’t follow the marker exactly here, but rather connected the dots between the two far ends to make A and B points with the autosteer so I would have straight rows from here on out.  If you look close you can see tractors have hood ornaments for a reason.  They line up with your marker track!

Clean Sweep

Another tweak I made while in the river bottom.  This was not a no-till field, but the residue from last year’s popcorn crop was pretty heavy in several spots probably due do the flooding moving things around.  I ended up lowering the trash wheels in front of the row units just a little bit to help sweep the residue out of the way.  On my first few passes down here I was finding a seed here and there on top of the soil where there was heavy residue cover.  Working the ground again with tillage might have been over doing it a bit, so we went this route.

And finally.  Things got extreme this week during popcorn planting.  If you considering driving 5.2mph an extreme sport.

EXTREME FARM! #gopro #Instagram pic.twitter.com/3nBkctYKhv

— Brian Scott (@thefarmerslife) May 1, 2014