I recently attended BlogHer in New York City. Yep, me. A male farm blogger. I have been looking for ways to achieve the common AGvocate goal of reaching beyond the choir of our agricultural peers. Going to a blogging conference with emphasis on the “Her” portion was certainly a way for me to reach out. Not that […]
The Bad 2015 is a tough weather year. Excessive rain is currently taking a fairly big toll on our crops. Corn especially. The last two years were very kind to us and brought big harvests. This year has been wet. Really wet. During planting I don’t think we worked the fields more than three straight […]
One ear of corn. It doesn’t seem like it holds much value. But even though I’m a corn farmer growing around 850 acres of corn, there is a lot of worth in one ear of corn. Let’s do some math. We plant on average 32,000 seeds per acre taking the whole farm in account. 32,000 […]
We just installed a barn quilt on the barn at our farm. My sister describes the history of the quilt as follows. “In the early1900s, my maternal great-great-grandmother Inez Newton made a quilt using her own variation on the Whig Rose Pattern. Around that same time, a barn was being erected on the ground that […]
Our 2015 planting season began on April 24. It ended on May 23. The season seemed longer than one month because I don’t believe we ever got a full week of planting in due to rains and waiting on particular fields to dry out. Some people think grain farmers like us work hard for just […]
The first day of planting is an exciting time. It means winter has finally (aka hopefully) given way to spring on the farm. Lots of planning and preparation goes into being ready for the first day. In the past I’ve written about how we know when it is time to start planting. Not every year […]