Farm work shifted gears this week. Planting season wrapped up at 10:00 PM Tuesday night so we are moving on to the next phase of summer jobs and scouting our growing crop.
Mission Complete
Getting ready to shut down right after the last seeds of #Plant14 are in the ground.
Busy season traffic. Planters passing as I bring the planter home the next morning after finishing up the previous night.
And the entire record of what, where, and how much we planted over the whole farm fits in the palm of my hand in what used to be a USB drive that looked like a corn cob.
Frank Visits the Farm
Frank N. Foode, a genetically modified corn plant, stopped by on Monday with his buddy Karl from Biofortified. Frank was excited to get some seat time in the old Farmall M. I offered up two farm tours for Biofortified’s recent Kickstarter campaign to raise money for the creation of more plush Frank’s and other fun crops. Be sure to follow Frank on twitter!
Leave a Mark
We set survey flags out for all kinds of things from rocks too big or deep to get now, sinkholes, and other obstacles. This flag and several others are to mark planter passes where I’m doing a soybean population test. The flags will make these passes easy to find at harvest. We average about 145,000 soybean plants per acre. This plot of passes ranges from 200,000 to 100,000 in 25,000 increments. We’ll weigh the yield results with the seed costs after harvest.
Here is some of that precision, high-tech ag stuff that I like to post about. In a field where neither edge is very straight I wanted to make my first GPS guided pass on the second pass in from the fence row. Since this was no till I easily counted last year’s corn stalk rows over to where I wanted to start and marked a line with my boot heel that I could spot from the tractor cab. Sometimes low tech is the best tech.
Helping Soybeans
Sometimes when rains follow soybean planting and heat follows the rain topsoil will crust. Soybeans have pretty strong backs and can lift a lot of soil and debris, but sometimes the crust is just too much. We had this issue on about a third of our crop this year, and that’s why we’ve never sold or traded our old rotary hoe. The picture above shows a beans that has snapped his own stem trying to bust the crust, and another struggling to get cotyledons above the soil.
These days we just use the hoe occasionally to take care of this particular problem. Before Roundup Ready soybeans offered such great weed control we used to fuel up a tractor and run a hoe three times in the spring over soybean fields!
Take a look at this video of us running the hoe. I used my GoPro to get several angles and some slow motion action of the tines at work. They just break up the surface without tearing out many if any of the soybeans.
Clean Truck, Happy Truck
The truck got a pretty good washing over the weekend. You can’t tell in this picture, but it still needs a lot of work. It’s been through a harvest, a long, snowy winter, and a planting season since I bought it. Definitely time for a complete detail inside and out. I think I might actually do a complete write-up on the process. Detailing is a bit of a hobby of mine. Time to make this truck really shine!
See you next week, and be sure to drop a comment below!
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Brian,How relieved are you that 2014 planting is over?
If there is such a thing as a normal year, this was it. Everything got done in good time. A 1″ shower with the heat we’ve had the last week or so would be just perfect right now.