A few weeks ago my Dad and I finished up our first season as strip tillers and are happy with the results of year. While there were plenty of challenges, we feel that our change has not hurt the operation's productivity a bit. Our yields were very good considering the lack of rainfall as our corn was only a few bushels less than our average last year with our soybeans actually being slightly better than last season. Good soil with good organic matter paid big time this year. Anything that was lighter in texture really took it in the shorts. Not a big surprise in a drought.
So what did we learn in our first year as strippers?
1. We can grow corn on corn utilizing strip till as well as conventional tillage. In fact our side by side comparison test that I blogged about earlier this season had nearly a 27 bu/A advantage to the strip till. I don't think we will see this type of difference year in year out but the moisture conservation along with the banded nutrients had to be of benefit this year in the drought. We will have nearly 75% of our corn acres in strip tilled corn on corn next year.
2. I won't give up on a soybean crop ever again. In the middle of July I was thinking my soybeans wouldn't make 30 bu/A but a few lucky rains in August and the application of fungicide and a miticide proved to make quite a difference. I thought that my fungicide application was pretty iffy this year when I made it but our untreated test strip was nearly 7 bu/A less in a side by side comparison. A lot of folks pulled the plug on those applications this year but it was obvious that the "plant health" effects had some merit in the abscence of disease pressure.
3. Conventional corn was our best corn and convetional corn was our worst corn. Our 3 Smartstax traited hybrids were middle of the road. My observation is that I don't think it makes much difference what trait technologies you plant...if you manage them properly yield parody is fairly easy to acheive. That being said we are being defensive with the amount of rootworm beetles that were laying eggs in fields this late summer and plan to plant a mainly Smartstax hybrids next spring.
4. We have to manage our stalks different. The past 2 seasons we have cut our stalks with a chopper and have run into problems with plugging the strip till bar on a few fields by putting so much fluff on the ground. The common denominator this year appeared to be having problems on fields where we plowed last fall. The ground was so loose yet this fall that my leading coulter seemed to push in certain soil types. We need to get our cornhead to process more of the residue yet leave as much stalk as possible standing. We'll be looking at knife rolls or other trash reduction kits over the winter. My goal is getting the system to a place where combine and strip without an stalk processing operation in between.
5. You have to have patience and dedication to do this. When you are trying to do your primary tillage, dry fertilizer application and seed bed preparation in one pass guided by satelittes that need to put you at sub inch placement in the field, there are lots of variables that have to work in harmony for things to go well. One piece of the puzzle falls out and you can have a lot of frustration. There were several days when I was battling several of the pieces and it is not a fun thing to do while you watch your neighbor go back and forth with autosteer engaged reading a book at 6.5 mph pulling a ripper without stopping. At the end of the fall though it's fairly satsifying to know that my tillage is complete, my dry fertilizer is applied where my roots will be and I am ready to plant into a great seed bed with no zones of compaction across the entire field.
I'm hopeful as winter sets in I'll have more time to post on other reflections from the year or things I'm thinking about trying to improve upon for next year. Thanks for reading!
Saturday, November 24, 2012
Friday, October 5, 2012
Strip Intercropping Results Are IN!!!
I've done a really bad job keeping this blog current over the last 2 months but we haven't had a rainy day to catch up and allow me to post anything. There's a lot to talk about as it's been a really interesting and surprising harvest with some of the things we've evaluated this year. I'll start off with some observations about my strip intercrop yield results which was really interesting and a lot of fun to do this year.
I had one row #2 on my planter that wasn't dropping enough seed in both the conventional block and strip intercrop so in both cases I had a light population in that row. Although it's not scientific, I went ahead and grandfathered in the ear counts from the opposite side of the planter on row #5 to offset this equipment variable problem when making my yield estimates for both treatments. I estimated yield by ear weight by weighing each individual ear in each row and recording that weight. There was little variance in the ear weights of the conventional planting block but it was really interesting in the strip intercrop block as the middle four rows all had ear weights of 7.6-8 oz where as the outside row on the east side of the strip had an average ear weight of 8.76 oz while the outside row on the west side of the strip had an average ear weight of only 7.2 oz. This confirmed what I witnessed visually that the outside west row's ears looked smaller throughout the last half of the season most likely from the increase in temperature and winds being higher with the full exposure to the afternoon sun. Here is the breakdown of each row's yield estimate in the intercrop strip along with final ear counts/a.
West row 1 - 277 bu/a 45k ears
Row 2 - 246 bu/a 37 k ears
Row 3 207 bu/a 32 k ears
Row 4 227 bu/a 37k ears
Row 5 246 bu/a 37 ears
East row 6 - 360/bu/a 48k ears
Overall Intercrop Average for 17.5 ft of row 6 rows wide = 261 bu/A estimate
I weighed the regular block as well but there wasn't enough variance to see anything really interesting so here's what the yield estimate was from that.
Overall Regular Planting Average for 17.5 ft of row 6 rows wide = 199 bu/A estimate
Keep in mind that both treatments were corn on corn that was strip tilled last fall and freshened this spring.
So now it was pretty apparent by the estimates that we had a difference on apples to apples soils that we'd see a difference between he 2 systems. Time to combine and see the real story.
We combined the beans off the headlands on a Sunday afternoon and could tell right away that the yields of the beans were significantly less than what we'd been combining in our normal bean fields. The biggest difference that I could guess why was the fact that we hadn't sprayed them with fungicide and insecticide as we had our big fields. I could see quite a bit of spider mite damage late in the season in both the corn and the soybeans so I'm guessing that was part of the reason. Our fungicide check on one of our big fields was 6-7 bu/A better than the untreated as well so our bean yields on this field were not likely representative as to what they were if we were managing them normally. I didn't have a wagon to put the beans from the end rows available as I was in a hurry trying to beat the sun going down so I used the next best thing in the yard...my Dad's old Gleaner M2. My Dad won't get rid of it as he says "you never know when we're going to need that thing." I guess he was right.
Once the beans on the ends were off, I started combining the corn in the normal block of 36 rows that I planted. I weighed each 6 row pass across the field and took the average weight of the middle 4 passes to eliminate the advantage that the outside passes would have with the increased light on the edges. The average yield of the conventional block was 196 bu/A...not too far off from the estimate.
I had 3, 6 row strips of intercrop corn under the high management system that were on the same soils and that I felt were relative to the same conditions that the conventional planted block had. I harvested those 3 strips weighing each pass and then averaging them and which resulted in a avg yield of 249 bu/A.
Here's some video of harvesting one of the 6 row intercrop strips.
I was worried that my test of intercrop strips vs conventional solid block planting would be skewed all year as the conventional block was on flat black ground and about 1/2 of my intercrop strips were on a lighter Clarion soil type that under moisture stress would have a disadvantage from not being apples to apples. Beggers can't be choosers as I didn't have a lot of say in where I put this plot....pretty much had to beg my Dad to let me do it in the first place. Because of this, I wanted to go out and do some pre-harvest yield estimates on the intercrop corn strips that were closest to normal solid planting block and on the same soil type. To do this I went out and hand harvested 17.5 ft of ears 6 rows wide in the intercrop and then harvested the same from the conventional block. What was amazing like some of the pictures earlier in the year showed was how the outside rows even at 45-50k plants/A still had torpedo ears on nearly every plant despite the drought stress we were under. I laid out the harvested ears on a trailer so that you could see what 17.5 ft of ears looked like in the both the intercrop and conventional settings.
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| Grain Cart |
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| Strip Intercrop 17.5 ft of row 6 rows wide |
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| Conventional Planting Block 17.5 ft of row 6 rows wide |
West row 1 - 277 bu/a 45k ears
Row 2 - 246 bu/a 37 k ears
Row 3 207 bu/a 32 k ears
Row 4 227 bu/a 37k ears
Row 5 246 bu/a 37 ears
East row 6 - 360/bu/a 48k ears
Overall Intercrop Average for 17.5 ft of row 6 rows wide = 261 bu/A estimate
I weighed the regular block as well but there wasn't enough variance to see anything really interesting so here's what the yield estimate was from that.
Overall Regular Planting Average for 17.5 ft of row 6 rows wide = 199 bu/A estimate
Keep in mind that both treatments were corn on corn that was strip tilled last fall and freshened this spring.
So now it was pretty apparent by the estimates that we had a difference on apples to apples soils that we'd see a difference between he 2 systems. Time to combine and see the real story.
We combined the beans off the headlands on a Sunday afternoon and could tell right away that the yields of the beans were significantly less than what we'd been combining in our normal bean fields. The biggest difference that I could guess why was the fact that we hadn't sprayed them with fungicide and insecticide as we had our big fields. I could see quite a bit of spider mite damage late in the season in both the corn and the soybeans so I'm guessing that was part of the reason. Our fungicide check on one of our big fields was 6-7 bu/A better than the untreated as well so our bean yields on this field were not likely representative as to what they were if we were managing them normally. I didn't have a wagon to put the beans from the end rows available as I was in a hurry trying to beat the sun going down so I used the next best thing in the yard...my Dad's old Gleaner M2. My Dad won't get rid of it as he says "you never know when we're going to need that thing." I guess he was right.
Once the beans on the ends were off, I started combining the corn in the normal block of 36 rows that I planted. I weighed each 6 row pass across the field and took the average weight of the middle 4 passes to eliminate the advantage that the outside passes would have with the increased light on the edges. The average yield of the conventional block was 196 bu/A...not too far off from the estimate.
I had 3, 6 row strips of intercrop corn under the high management system that were on the same soils and that I felt were relative to the same conditions that the conventional planted block had. I harvested those 3 strips weighing each pass and then averaging them and which resulted in a avg yield of 249 bu/A.
Here's some video of harvesting one of the 6 row intercrop strips.
So our early estimates weighing ears turned out to be pretty close to the final actual numbers. It makes sense that they're a little less as the sampling didn't take into account the spider mite damage on the south edge of both treatments. It was nice to see though the same relative differences held true. So we realized a 53 bu/A advantage to our new practice in this system. The question remains would this be economic when you do the math comparing growing continuous corn vs having 50/50 corn soybeans with intercropping as well as taking into consideration that the soybeans will likely do less than normal yields? My answer this year is that I don't know just yet. While raising potential corn revenues by $375/A with $7/bu corn sounds great, you have to factor in the extra cost in inputs between seed and fertilizer which I've estimated at nearly $100/A along with decreased revenue likely on the soybeans of potentially $100/A compared to what normal yields would be. Add to this that continuous corn, if yields were decent this year, was likely $100-200/A more profitable than soybeans.
So in the end, I have more questions than answers. I do want to do this again on more acres in a bigger field setting and figure out a way to be able to spray and manage the soybeans like we do the rest of our acres to give them the best shot possible for yielding well. I also want to plant the soybeans the same time I plant the corn to get as much plant growth going before they get shaded out by the corn on the outside rows. It's quite obvious that we can grow more corn this way but it has to make economic sense across the board if we're going to adopt on a widespread basis. I'm really glad I took the time and went through all the hassle to do this though...it really opened my eyes to what can be possible if you farm outside the box. Thanks to those who helped me in my efforts including Sheldon Stevermer of Easton, MN and Bob Recker of Ceder Valley Consulting.
More blogs to come quicker in the future I promise!!!
Sunday, September 9, 2012
Spring Tillage Lines Still Visible in the Fall
All year I've been noticing how many corn and soybean fields even in a dry spring that you could see both wheel tracks and either field cultivator shovel tracks or ripper tracks from the fall before at an angle across the rows early in the season and well into summer. There is a soybean field that I've watched this on all season long that I just got back from going out to make some observations between the tillage lines vs area in-between. Here's a shot from about a month ago where you can see the differences in height with the straight lines from the auto steer tillage pass working from the camera vantage point towards the grove across the section.
Here's a shot where you can see the tillage lines tonight with the beans turning colors. The tillage lines are the greener beans that aren't as mature.
When I walked out to look at these specific spots and differences it didn't take long to see that the differences in the beans were significant beyond color variance. The beans in the tillage line were shorter and greener and had far fewer pods on them in comparison to the soybeans in between. Those plants were taller, more mature and had much better pod counts on them. I took a sampling of plants from the field and took them back up to my place to take some pictures and do some pod counts. Here's what they looked like.
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| Untracked on the left, beans growing in tillage track on the right |
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| Strip tilled beans on left - Untracked plants on right |
I did pod counts on the 3 samples that I had gathered and found on average the green soybeans grown in the tillage track had on average 10.8 pods, the soybeans that were in between the tillage lines had 18.8 pods/plant and the strip tilled beans across the road had 28.4 pods/plant. Granted it's a pretty small sample size and not quite scientific but still pretty interesting as it was a pretty representative of what you saw standing in the field.
So what does this all mean? If this translates in yield across a 160 acre 1/4 section assuming that you have these tillage lines every 30" and that they encompass an 8" width for effecting plant growth, you have 60% of yield potential on 47 acres of that 160 acre farm. Assuming that the untracked beans average 40 bu/A on 113 A and the others yield 24 bu/A on 47 acres. 16 less bu/A on 47 A = about 800 bushels X $17/bu = $13,600 loss on the farm. This is making a lot of assumptions but if the actual loss is even 1/2 of this, it's still significant.
So what caused this variation? My best guess is where that the last row of shovels on the field cultivator created a dried out zone that was not leveled out completely by the drag. This more shallow, dry, compacted zone creating a delay in emergence and prohibited root proliferation which led to these plants being further behind than those plants that grew in between. My assumption is that there is enough mixing action on the shovels throwing dirt in the rows ahead of the back row that the seed bed is more consistent in between the last row of shovels. Earlier in the season I thought it could possibly be the old ripper shanks from last fall went where the roots had an easier time of going down and were bigger plants because of it. However when I saw tonight the plants growing in the lines were smaller and less productive that lessened the chances of that theory holding water.
The thing that gets me is how common you can find this in corn and soybean fields across the country side if you look and what the potential loss is from this is makes a guy think. What it reinforces with me is that creating a zone free of compaction and planting seed into it without smearing or driving something across that zone has value. And in a dry year like this one, I'm hopeful that the moisture savings in not tilling our soil will pay dividends.
We will start harvesting corn likely this week as our 98 day corn will likely be 18% or lower by the middle of the week. All of our corn is standing well and the stalk and shank strength is surprisingly good. Dad and I spent this weekend getting ready by setting up augers, going through the corn head, combine and hooking up the strip till rig. I'm excited to dive in to the crop and see what things are going to yield.
So far the harvesting that has happened in our area has had corn yield ranges of 140-200 bu/A which is great considering how dry we were. Dad said he'd be thrilled if we average 150 bu/A on corn...he's always the pessimist...I think we'll be closer to 170 bu/A if I had to guess today. The only fields that really worry me is our corn on corn plowing where moisture was short. Soybeans I'm going to guess we'll average upper 40's to low 50's bu/A. We'll know how accurate I am in about 10 days as we should be well into harvest by then. Safe harvesting to all!!!
Tuesday, August 14, 2012
Watching the Fill
Sorry for the lack of posts over the last month.
I've slowly gotten back to re-engaging in the farm over the last week doing a fair amount of walking of soybeans and corn. We finally have caught some rains over the past 10 days. Albeit light and a little late, the rain will help fill the soybean pods and hopefully add to the test weight of the corn. We applied fungicide and insecticide to the soybeans back around the 20th of July not because we had lots of disease or bugs but to try to remove any additional stress on the beans as the tried to flower and set pods in the unrelenting heat. At the time, the early bean pod counts were looking pretty poor but they have seemed to find away to put some more on as temps have cooled and we've gotten a little bit of rain to keep them going. I would guess that our soybean potential assuming we catch a few more rains will be around 40-45 bu/A.
I went out to check out the ear size in my corn on corn strip till vs plowing tonight and didn't see a lot in differences so far. The picture below was just one check as I could find really nice ears and crappy ears on both sides of the line. The combine will have to be the judge on this one. The one thing that was apparent is anywhere where I had trash that wasn't cleared from the strip with the planter, ear size was definitely impacted. Earlier in the season, you could not tell much of a difference but it was quite clear that moving the trash off the strip needs to take a higher priority for us if we're going to do much with corn on corn in 2013.
I took my daughter Avery up to our strip intercrop plot on Sunday and we had some fun teaching her about doing ear counts, spider mites, light interception and how to walk through corn and soybeans without tripping when your only 7. She's a lot of fun to take to the field as she asks lots of great questions and takes an interest in what I'm doing. The intercrop plot looks pretty good in places. On the good soils where we don't have any spider mites we did some yield checks on the outside rows that came out as high as around 330 bu/A of corn with 48,000 harvestable ears/A. It seemed like the east outside row of the 6 row strip had bigger counts than the west outside row in most of the strips which I'm assuming is because of the increased temperature stress those plants had being exposed to full sun during the heat of the afternoons. We have a few pockets of spider mites in a few of the strips that will likely drag yields down somewhat as well. The regular planted check block of corn next to the strips looks to be very good as well so it will be interesting to see how things shake out when we compare things in hopefully about 5-6 weeks. The soybeans strips in between the corn have come on better than I thought that they would've as well. I couldn't find much for bugs in them or disease to this point. They are rib high on me and podded fairly well.
I've been pretty disconnected from the farm over the past couple of weeks as I lost one of my very good friends and neighbor, John Larson, to a tragic crop dusting accident on July 18th. John was great farmer and aerial applicator and his impeccable example and standards pushed me to want to do things better all the time with my own operation. I always looked forward to comparing farming notes with him on nearly a daily basis during the growing season as there was never any BS to sift through with him. He never made things to be more or less than what they were. John and his brother Joe (Friesenborg & Larson) are one of the few large operations who farm big, but do it well with class and dignity. That was evident when nearly 1000 people showed up for John's wake and roughly 600 for the funeral. It was a good reminder to me that the value of a life well lived is worth a lot more in the end than many of the superficial things that most of us allow to consume our time and energy. Life isn't going to be the same without him around as he was one of the good ones. I always joked with him about converting him into a strip tiller...he'd always get a shit-eating grin and look at me and say "Don't count on it Sparky!!!" Only 38 years old and leaves behind a great family in his wife and 3 young kids. Tough times for a lot of folks in our community dealing with this.
Corn has hung on amazingly well in our corner of the world similar to the beans. I don't know how we pollinated as well as we did throughout all the heat in the middle of July but somehow we did. Although the ear counts are not tremendous, they are better than the sub 100 bu/A horror stories we here about in Illinois and SE Iowa. Fields are showing stress but remain fairly green and healthy looking somehow yet. There are pockets of spider mites that are bothering some fields as well causing them to turn more than others. I've found yield ranges in the ear counts that I've done so far anywhere from 0-80 bu/A on the hills to 180-220 bu/A in the low ground. Corn is dented for the most part and the milk line on the kernels is slowly starting to work it's way down toward physiological maturity. The cooler temps and moisture should hopefully slow that process down so that kernel fill and test weights will be as good as possible. Test weight is probably the biggest yield determining factor left as I don't think we're going to tip things back anymore that what we already have at this point. I'm hopeful that our area will average somewhere between 140-165 bu/A right now.
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| Plowing ears on left, Strip till corn on corn ears to right |
I stopped and looked at our first planted strip tilled corn on soybean field that is straight conventional corn and it looks to be our best potential so far. It's a good farm with productive soils and had quite a few ear counts that looked good. The only downside is that we had a popup thunderstorm hit that farm with marble sized hail last Wednesday afternoon and strip the corn leaves up pretty good. I think that things are far enough along that it shouldn't make too much of a difference now.
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| Good ears in the heavy bottom ground |
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| Soybean stubble remaining yet between rows from this spring |
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| 330 bu/A strip intercrop yield check with my crop consultant |
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| Spider mite stipling |
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| Small ears where spider mites are |
Overall, I feel extremely fortunate that we will have the opportunity to harvest a very average crop to what we have been used to the last few years. A few weeks ago I was worried that we wouldn't get anything and that I wouldn't be able to fill my forward contracts. There are many folks in the cornbelt that would be envious of the position we are in here in north central Iowa. We're not going to have a bin buster, but we'll have something to at least put in the bin. Given all that's happened in the last month in my life, I'm trying to focus more on the positive than the negative. Here's to cool temps, slow rains, and test weight for all!!!
Saturday, July 14, 2012
One week til the party's over
That's my guess as to how much time we have left before significant damage starts to occur to our crops from the drought. We watched 3 times yesterday afternoon and last night thunderstorms approach Winnebago county and then split apart and go around. I'm happy for the folks up along Interstate 90 and over west of Algona that were able to pick up rains. For the rest of us the next few days don't look too promising with highs near 100 again. The only thing this rain gauge has had accumulate in it in the last 3 weeks as you can see is some runny bird shit. At least it's getting used by someone!
Despite how dry it is, the crop still looks very good driving by on the road. Our soybeans are a lush, dark green and other than a few hill tops pulling back, look great. We have a few weeds coming through the herbicide applications that we made about a month ago but overall control was very good. We plan to go out in the next week or two and walk some beans to get rid of the waterhemp and velvetleaf that are left. Soybeans are in the R2 to nearing R3 stage which means they are starting to set pods on the bottom part of the plant. Our plan is to spray fungicide and insecticide likely next weekend or early next week for our last trip across the beans. If it doesn't rain or doesn't look like it will rain, we may reconsider.
Last weekend I went out scouting and found a lot of rootworm beetles in one of our conventional fields feeding on the silks of the corn plants. There was some actual silk clipping going on which can impede proper pollination so we had our local aerial applicator come fly on some insecticide to knock down the rootworms. I scouted our other farms and didn't think the pressure they had warranted a trip so we've let them go. Our early planted corn is all pollinated and the late planted corn that went in the 10th of May is starting to pollinate now which may be a bad thing with the 100 degree heat forecast for the next few days. It will be interesting to go out and look at how successful the pollination was over the last 10 days later this week. From what I looked at this week, it looked like most ears had pollinated 30 kernels out of 40 potential long by 16 rows around. If those can hang on and not abort, that would equate to 170 bu corn assuming a final stand of 32,000 harvestable ears and that we got moisture to fill the grain out. If we could get 170 bu/A corn, it would be a miracle looking at the current forecast. My guess is that things will be closer to under 140 bu/A for our area without rains. I read somewhere this week it takes 9" of soil moisture to fill a corn crop from silking to black layer. We're about out of soil moisture now so we're going to need some big rains in August to hold on to the pollinated potential we have now.
I went back again to our plowing vs strip till corn on corn line this last week and looked for differences and saw them again. The strip till appears to have tasseled about 2-3 days sooner and is much more even in tassel emergence than where our plowed ground is. It will be interesting with the drought stress to see how this comparison plays out for the rest of the season. I hope that our strips will provide an advantage but am not holding my breath. If it doesn't rain, no practice will make a difference.
Despite how dry it is, the crop still looks very good driving by on the road. Our soybeans are a lush, dark green and other than a few hill tops pulling back, look great. We have a few weeds coming through the herbicide applications that we made about a month ago but overall control was very good. We plan to go out in the next week or two and walk some beans to get rid of the waterhemp and velvetleaf that are left. Soybeans are in the R2 to nearing R3 stage which means they are starting to set pods on the bottom part of the plant. Our plan is to spray fungicide and insecticide likely next weekend or early next week for our last trip across the beans. If it doesn't rain or doesn't look like it will rain, we may reconsider.
Last weekend I went out scouting and found a lot of rootworm beetles in one of our conventional fields feeding on the silks of the corn plants. There was some actual silk clipping going on which can impede proper pollination so we had our local aerial applicator come fly on some insecticide to knock down the rootworms. I scouted our other farms and didn't think the pressure they had warranted a trip so we've let them go. Our early planted corn is all pollinated and the late planted corn that went in the 10th of May is starting to pollinate now which may be a bad thing with the 100 degree heat forecast for the next few days. It will be interesting to go out and look at how successful the pollination was over the last 10 days later this week. From what I looked at this week, it looked like most ears had pollinated 30 kernels out of 40 potential long by 16 rows around. If those can hang on and not abort, that would equate to 170 bu corn assuming a final stand of 32,000 harvestable ears and that we got moisture to fill the grain out. If we could get 170 bu/A corn, it would be a miracle looking at the current forecast. My guess is that things will be closer to under 140 bu/A for our area without rains. I read somewhere this week it takes 9" of soil moisture to fill a corn crop from silking to black layer. We're about out of soil moisture now so we're going to need some big rains in August to hold on to the pollinated potential we have now.
I went back again to our plowing vs strip till corn on corn line this last week and looked for differences and saw them again. The strip till appears to have tasseled about 2-3 days sooner and is much more even in tassel emergence than where our plowed ground is. It will be interesting with the drought stress to see how this comparison plays out for the rest of the season. I hope that our strips will provide an advantage but am not holding my breath. If it doesn't rain, no practice will make a difference.
I really hope we can luck out and catch a shower on Wednesday when the next frontal boundary comes through and that this pattern changes. If not, I'm going to offset my potential losses by investing heavily in the local liquor store as I think their business could be booming over the next few months. It's do or die time.
Sunday, July 1, 2012
July 1st, 2012-Two from Tassel
It's hot and getting hotter and drier by the hour. The forecast doesn't sound that promising this week either with only a slight chance of rain coming tonight. Hard to believe that 10 days ago we got 2-3 inches of rain and we're already bone dry again. I just got back from scouting crops and doing some digging and the profile has very little moisture left in the top 8 inches. If we don't get rain this week with the high temperatures forecasted, I'm afraid we'll start to see issues with pollination that will take place over the next 2 weeks.
Our corn planted on April 25th is at V14 and has 2 leaves to emerge before the tassel is out. Typically it takes about 3 days in temperatures like this for a new leaf to emerge so we will likely have tassels out by next Sunday to take pics of. Hopefully there are silks out at the same time. One of the problems with drought stress around pollination is the uneven emergence of silks matching up with pollen shed. If the 2 don't allign, you can have big problems. Despite the heat, the corn looks phenomenal so far. Green from top to bottom and very few signs of disease or nutrient deficiencies. I did find one plant last week that may have had the start of Goss's Wilt developing on the farm that suffered so much wind damage earlier. Not much of a surprise.
The good news is that after digging a few corn root masses, it looks like we have very little rootworm pressure on our conventional corn and a very dense fibrous root system established in the zones. I'd venture to say we have more fine root hairs than what I'm used to seeing from our conventional tillage days. We still have some soybean residue left between the rows in our first year corn but much of it is gone. I don't know how much of an advantage we have from a moisture preservation standpoint. When I dig in the strip, the ground comes up very easily and seperates well. When I dig between the rows where no tillage has been done it's a different story...big hard chunks of compacted soil. Seeing how compacted the soil is in between the rows in both our corn and soybeans has got me re-thinking my approach to not doing any tillage besides my fall stripping...especially with our corn stalk residue. When soils are that compacted between the rows, oxygen becomes depleted and residue breakdown is slowed to a crawl. If we don't break the residue down well over the summer months, we will have more residue to contend with next fall and next spring going back to corn. I've been visiting with my friend Sheldon Stevermer about this over the last week and we've been kicking around some ideas in how to possibly address this without doing too much damage to the soil structure we're trying to establish and maintain. Over time in the strip till system, the compacted layers should be marginalized by the increased soil life and biology that promotes natural aereation and porosity. It's obvious by this video we have a few years to go before we're there.
1. Lack of oxygen in the soil system from less tillage and compacted soil between the rows
2. Root masses running into high salt load from my aggressive fertilizer program last fall
3. Poor varietal placement on my part on one field
I will say after walking and doing some digging last night that the mat of cornstalk residue is definately retaining more moisture than tilled fields I've dug in. I was able to find enough moisture to ball up soil underneath the mat which was encouraging. Hopefully this translates into an advantage if things stay dry. Weed control is fantastic with the exception of some volunteer corn that clumps that may come back with any moisture we receive. I can find no waterhemp to speak of emerging after our post-emerge treatments completed a week ago.
Overall, our crops have never looked so good before the 4th of July. This isn't a function of strip till as everyone's crops in my area look the best they ever have in my opinion despite the tillage system. This is however probably the most scared I've been about the amount of potential that could be lost if we don't get a rain in the next 10 days. We will go from 250 bu/A corn potential to 150 bu/A or less pretty quick if things stay dry through July. With new crop corn at $6/bu, that's a huge revenue swing in the balance. I feel fortunate though as we still have a chance while others in Illinois, Indiana and the SE cornbelt are already toasted and discing corn under. When you dig and see how dry our soils are right now, we're not that far away from the same issues.
If it was easy, everyone would be doing it. Enjoy the 4th holiday!
Our corn planted on April 25th is at V14 and has 2 leaves to emerge before the tassel is out. Typically it takes about 3 days in temperatures like this for a new leaf to emerge so we will likely have tassels out by next Sunday to take pics of. Hopefully there are silks out at the same time. One of the problems with drought stress around pollination is the uneven emergence of silks matching up with pollen shed. If the 2 don't allign, you can have big problems. Despite the heat, the corn looks phenomenal so far. Green from top to bottom and very few signs of disease or nutrient deficiencies. I did find one plant last week that may have had the start of Goss's Wilt developing on the farm that suffered so much wind damage earlier. Not much of a surprise.
The good news is that after digging a few corn root masses, it looks like we have very little rootworm pressure on our conventional corn and a very dense fibrous root system established in the zones. I'd venture to say we have more fine root hairs than what I'm used to seeing from our conventional tillage days. We still have some soybean residue left between the rows in our first year corn but much of it is gone. I don't know how much of an advantage we have from a moisture preservation standpoint. When I dig in the strip, the ground comes up very easily and seperates well. When I dig between the rows where no tillage has been done it's a different story...big hard chunks of compacted soil. Seeing how compacted the soil is in between the rows in both our corn and soybeans has got me re-thinking my approach to not doing any tillage besides my fall stripping...especially with our corn stalk residue. When soils are that compacted between the rows, oxygen becomes depleted and residue breakdown is slowed to a crawl. If we don't break the residue down well over the summer months, we will have more residue to contend with next fall and next spring going back to corn. I've been visiting with my friend Sheldon Stevermer about this over the last week and we've been kicking around some ideas in how to possibly address this without doing too much damage to the soil structure we're trying to establish and maintain. Over time in the strip till system, the compacted layers should be marginalized by the increased soil life and biology that promotes natural aereation and porosity. It's obvious by this video we have a few years to go before we're there.
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| Residue mat holding moisture |
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| Compacted soil between the rows |
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| Loose soil under the zone |
Our soybeans are the biggest that they've ever been going into the fourth of July holiday but it seems that they are lagging behind the neighbors that are using conventional tillage. They look uniform and even but just not as bushy and impressive as fields that were tilled. I'm thinking that there are several reasons for why we're seeing these differences:
1. Lack of oxygen in the soil system from less tillage and compacted soil between the rows
2. Root masses running into high salt load from my aggressive fertilizer program last fall
3. Poor varietal placement on my part on one field
I will say after walking and doing some digging last night that the mat of cornstalk residue is definately retaining more moisture than tilled fields I've dug in. I was able to find enough moisture to ball up soil underneath the mat which was encouraging. Hopefully this translates into an advantage if things stay dry. Weed control is fantastic with the exception of some volunteer corn that clumps that may come back with any moisture we receive. I can find no waterhemp to speak of emerging after our post-emerge treatments completed a week ago.
Overall, our crops have never looked so good before the 4th of July. This isn't a function of strip till as everyone's crops in my area look the best they ever have in my opinion despite the tillage system. This is however probably the most scared I've been about the amount of potential that could be lost if we don't get a rain in the next 10 days. We will go from 250 bu/A corn potential to 150 bu/A or less pretty quick if things stay dry through July. With new crop corn at $6/bu, that's a huge revenue swing in the balance. I feel fortunate though as we still have a chance while others in Illinois, Indiana and the SE cornbelt are already toasted and discing corn under. When you dig and see how dry our soils are right now, we're not that far away from the same issues.
If it was easy, everyone would be doing it. Enjoy the 4th holiday!
Saturday, June 23, 2012
June 21st, 2012-Rain is a good thing.
Things were getting pretty interesting in the last week with a severe deficit of moisture in most of our fields. Corn last Saturday already was starting to roll on headlands or on lighter soils. We were lucky enough to get relief last night as we got 2-3 inches of rain across most of our ground and it was just in time. Hopefully it came in time as the corn was/is going through some pretty critical stages right now with kernal/row establishment. Soybeans should really respond as many fields look like they were sitting still waiting for moisture. It's great to get the rain but I feel for the folks in the eastern corn belt who are really taking it in the shorts this year.
I'm happy with our crops are looking but not as happy as I was a few weeks back. I really thought that with the drought stress that we'd see some separation from a moisture conservation standpoint on the strips but haven't really observed too much. It seems also that the corn has slightly stalled before this rain which may be a function of the roots hitting the sides or bottoms of the strip and struggling to penetrate the denser layer of soil. I've also thought that with the dry conditions, the salt load in the zone from the banded fertilizer may be actually hurting us rather than helping. Hopefully with the rain those concerns will be a moot point and things take off.
Dad and I resumed field work on Father's Day as we were out of commission most of last week with my Grandmother's funeral. We sprayed a chunk of my soybean farm but was forced to quit from the winds that picked up in the afternoon. I had a lot of volunteer corn to contend with as the down corn from last fall combined with my aggressive trash whippers throwing a lot of dirt and covering equated to a lot of corn up. We did have some lambsquarter in a few patches that came back from our burndown application that had some pretty good size that we had to get. I hope that the herbicide works as the weeds were likely not too actively growing with the heat we had. I'm hoping to come back next week on my farm and burn the beans and any remaining weeds with Cobra. A lot of people don't like burning beans but there's been a fair amount of work done that shows that stressing the beans at the right time with the active in Cobra can have several benefits including induced systemic resistance to pathogens like white mold as well as encouraging branching of beans and shortening of internodes. Dad thinks I'm nuts again doing this but that seems to be a common theme this year. So far so good so we'll keep riding the lightning til we get burned. Here's a shot of what the beans look like before burning.
I was able to get my inter crop plot side dressed last Sunday as the corn was getting pretty big. I waited til the heat of the day and drove slow to avoid snapping off the big corn. I applied my V pattern of UAN and ammonium thiosulfate so that my outside rows now have around 250 lbs of nitrogen and the inside rows have about 180 total lbs of nitrogen along with some sulfur as well. I'm disappointed with how many runt plants I have in my outside rows with the high population. I'm guessing by harvest i'll only have 42-45k harvestable ears/A which will likely decrease the benefit of intercrop vs my check. My check strip looks phenomenal to this point so I'm worried a little bit for now about the comparison this fall. The intercrop strips of corn have a dome shaped canopy affect where the outside rows are noticeably shorter than the middle rows which are competing more for light. The strips of corn look OK but not as even as they were a few weeks ago.
I spent quite a bit of time this last week hoeing the volunteer RR corn in my 1 acre of soybean strips between the corn.. Some folks go to the lake on Saturday's, I go to my to intercrop to swing a hoe. Here's some pictures of before and after and how I spent my Saturday afternoon. It felt good when I was all done. Nothing better than wiping out Monsanto Mushrooms.
Hope everyone has a good week and gets some rain!!!
I'm happy with our crops are looking but not as happy as I was a few weeks back. I really thought that with the drought stress that we'd see some separation from a moisture conservation standpoint on the strips but haven't really observed too much. It seems also that the corn has slightly stalled before this rain which may be a function of the roots hitting the sides or bottoms of the strip and struggling to penetrate the denser layer of soil. I've also thought that with the dry conditions, the salt load in the zone from the banded fertilizer may be actually hurting us rather than helping. Hopefully with the rain those concerns will be a moot point and things take off.
Dad and I resumed field work on Father's Day as we were out of commission most of last week with my Grandmother's funeral. We sprayed a chunk of my soybean farm but was forced to quit from the winds that picked up in the afternoon. I had a lot of volunteer corn to contend with as the down corn from last fall combined with my aggressive trash whippers throwing a lot of dirt and covering equated to a lot of corn up. We did have some lambsquarter in a few patches that came back from our burndown application that had some pretty good size that we had to get. I hope that the herbicide works as the weeds were likely not too actively growing with the heat we had. I'm hoping to come back next week on my farm and burn the beans and any remaining weeds with Cobra. A lot of people don't like burning beans but there's been a fair amount of work done that shows that stressing the beans at the right time with the active in Cobra can have several benefits including induced systemic resistance to pathogens like white mold as well as encouraging branching of beans and shortening of internodes. Dad thinks I'm nuts again doing this but that seems to be a common theme this year. So far so good so we'll keep riding the lightning til we get burned. Here's a shot of what the beans look like before burning.
I was able to get my inter crop plot side dressed last Sunday as the corn was getting pretty big. I waited til the heat of the day and drove slow to avoid snapping off the big corn. I applied my V pattern of UAN and ammonium thiosulfate so that my outside rows now have around 250 lbs of nitrogen and the inside rows have about 180 total lbs of nitrogen along with some sulfur as well. I'm disappointed with how many runt plants I have in my outside rows with the high population. I'm guessing by harvest i'll only have 42-45k harvestable ears/A which will likely decrease the benefit of intercrop vs my check. My check strip looks phenomenal to this point so I'm worried a little bit for now about the comparison this fall. The intercrop strips of corn have a dome shaped canopy affect where the outside rows are noticeably shorter than the middle rows which are competing more for light. The strips of corn look OK but not as even as they were a few weeks ago.
I spent quite a bit of time this last week hoeing the volunteer RR corn in my 1 acre of soybean strips between the corn.. Some folks go to the lake on Saturday's, I go to my to intercrop to swing a hoe. Here's some pictures of before and after and how I spent my Saturday afternoon. It felt good when I was all done. Nothing better than wiping out Monsanto Mushrooms.
I also sprayed the intercrop beans this week and had Dad shoot some live action of the Geisha in action spraying some glyphosate. For those of you who own JD 4930's or Hagie STS 16's , we're coming for you.
Hope everyone has a good week and gets some rain!!!
Sunday, June 10, 2012
June 10, 2012
This week the crops really took off with the heat and are now in need of a rain pretty badly as I saw some fields starting to curl on the way home this afternoon from my youngest daughters birthday party. Our corn has reached the V7-V8 stage on our planting dates of April 25-27th and our May 4th-5th dates are at V5-V6. Our soybeans really took off this week and have 2 sets of trifoliates on them and look great minus a few spots of iron chlorosis on high pH spots that started to show this week. I hope that the rain called for tonight materializes as things will start to go backward this week without any.
I spent several nights this week driving around the countryside looking at crops and in general, most crops look awfully good in our local area. I can't remember a summer when all of the corn had good color this time of the year. You have to look hard to find a field that appears to be short of nutrients or other problems. I attribute this a lot to the fact the natural breakdown of organic matter and other nutrient cycling through microbial sources was likely sped up due to the early start of the growing season in March. This has made lots of nutrients available quicker than years with colder starts when mineralization and microbial action is slower.
It's interesting looking at fields that were planted this spring in really dry conditions early and still being able to see field cultivator tracks and sweeps at an angle across many fields. You can see the pattern and the difference in plant height quite clearly on fields effected. I wish I had more time to try to quantify these patterns and how substantial comes to yield in the fall. It's nice not having those patterns in our fields where we stripped. We'd have them previous years in our fields and they always drove my Dad and I nuts looking at them.
We'll finish spraying our last field of corn tomorrow and then switch right over to soybeans and spray my farm as our sprayer had a few problems making the burndown application a few weeks back and have scattered spots where the lambsquarter weren't completely knocked down. My extra aggressive setting of my trash whippers when I planted appears to have been a mistake. It looks like I planted a lot of volunteer corn by throwing so much dirt and covering up corn laying on the surface. My farm has quite a bit more coming than Dad's soybeans where we used the bigger planter and didn't have the whippers so aggressive. Live and learn, I guess. I was hoping to wait and spray 2 weeks later than this but I won't be able to tolerate looking at the field for another 2 weeks with the volunteer corn coming and other sprayer misses.
Our strip inter crop trial is really taking off now that we have some nitrogen on it and I'll likely have to do my 2nd side dress pass this week before the corn shades the row. The biggest issue I have in the inter crop to contend with is the amount of volunteer corn coming in the soybeans. What's ironic is that most of last years corn planted on this field was conventional so I thought that there would be little risk in having to deal with it by applying glyphosate and killing it off. There must have been quite a bit of pollen drift from the RR corn that we bordered the field with as I've got a lot of volunteer corn to hoe out. It'll be a good chance for me to take the girls up and put them work the next time they want to fight over whose American Girl doll is prettier. I'll have to get some video of our bean walking experiences....as I'm sure they'll be good.
On a personal note... my family was dealt a pretty big blow when my Grandma Smith passed away Saturday evening. Grandma had always been a great supporter of mine and my pursuit of farming. Even at the age of 92, she was always curious as to what was happening on the farm and was always quick with a story from her experiences throughout the years farming with my grandfather until his death in 1975. As I visited with her over the last year and told her about what we were doing in changing to strip till, she was always a force of encouragement and told me to "go for it." "Your grandfather wasn't ever afraid to take a chance and you shouldn't either," she would say. I'm eternally grateful for her support and love over the years and hope that I can continue to "go for it." She was a great lady with a tremendous spirit filled with kindness who will be missed by many!
I spent several nights this week driving around the countryside looking at crops and in general, most crops look awfully good in our local area. I can't remember a summer when all of the corn had good color this time of the year. You have to look hard to find a field that appears to be short of nutrients or other problems. I attribute this a lot to the fact the natural breakdown of organic matter and other nutrient cycling through microbial sources was likely sped up due to the early start of the growing season in March. This has made lots of nutrients available quicker than years with colder starts when mineralization and microbial action is slower.
It's interesting looking at fields that were planted this spring in really dry conditions early and still being able to see field cultivator tracks and sweeps at an angle across many fields. You can see the pattern and the difference in plant height quite clearly on fields effected. I wish I had more time to try to quantify these patterns and how substantial comes to yield in the fall. It's nice not having those patterns in our fields where we stripped. We'd have them previous years in our fields and they always drove my Dad and I nuts looking at them.
We'll finish spraying our last field of corn tomorrow and then switch right over to soybeans and spray my farm as our sprayer had a few problems making the burndown application a few weeks back and have scattered spots where the lambsquarter weren't completely knocked down. My extra aggressive setting of my trash whippers when I planted appears to have been a mistake. It looks like I planted a lot of volunteer corn by throwing so much dirt and covering up corn laying on the surface. My farm has quite a bit more coming than Dad's soybeans where we used the bigger planter and didn't have the whippers so aggressive. Live and learn, I guess. I was hoping to wait and spray 2 weeks later than this but I won't be able to tolerate looking at the field for another 2 weeks with the volunteer corn coming and other sprayer misses.
Our strip inter crop trial is really taking off now that we have some nitrogen on it and I'll likely have to do my 2nd side dress pass this week before the corn shades the row. The biggest issue I have in the inter crop to contend with is the amount of volunteer corn coming in the soybeans. What's ironic is that most of last years corn planted on this field was conventional so I thought that there would be little risk in having to deal with it by applying glyphosate and killing it off. There must have been quite a bit of pollen drift from the RR corn that we bordered the field with as I've got a lot of volunteer corn to hoe out. It'll be a good chance for me to take the girls up and put them work the next time they want to fight over whose American Girl doll is prettier. I'll have to get some video of our bean walking experiences....as I'm sure they'll be good.
On a personal note... my family was dealt a pretty big blow when my Grandma Smith passed away Saturday evening. Grandma had always been a great supporter of mine and my pursuit of farming. Even at the age of 92, she was always curious as to what was happening on the farm and was always quick with a story from her experiences throughout the years farming with my grandfather until his death in 1975. As I visited with her over the last year and told her about what we were doing in changing to strip till, she was always a force of encouragement and told me to "go for it." "Your grandfather wasn't ever afraid to take a chance and you shouldn't either," she would say. I'm eternally grateful for her support and love over the years and hope that I can continue to "go for it." She was a great lady with a tremendous spirit filled with kindness who will be missed by many!
Saturday, June 2, 2012
Side dressing
June 2nd 2012
It's been really interesting to see progression of crop growth over the last 10 days since the high wind and erosion event. There are a lot fields that got beat up and look rather ugly....especially soybean fields that were planted shallow or rolled as emergence is pretty poor. We were lucky to get the rains that we received as our rootless corn has found some roots now that we have moisture and our soybeans were planted early and deep enough into moisture that our emergence has been really outstanding. I'd say it's probably the best and most even our soybeans have ever looked planting into our strips. Here's a shot of some of them around my house earlier this week.
Our late planted corn is coming along nicely and the stands look quite good considering it was still damp when we planted. Dad spent the week getting a good look at the crop by getting all of our side dressing applications of nitrogen completed along with a little bit of spraying. He has been pretty pleased driving across everything with the exception of the farm that we plowed where we had 30 acres sustain substantial damage from the wind erosion. It is recovering though and will come back eventually albeit looking pretty tough for the foreseeable future. Dad commented to me that he has never seen our corn look as even and with good color across the whole field including the hill tops where we strip tilled. He really thinks having all of our fertilizer placed under the roots is paying off so far. I think he's right. I had one farm where I screwed up and didn't have the dry fertilizer on a few passes across the field I can see the difference in the color of the plants over the hill tops right to the row. I'll have to try to get some pictures of this next week. Sometimes those screw ups turn into good checks you can really learn from.
I was able to get to my strip inter crop last night and side dress some nitrogen on the corn. I put 140 units of N across the strips as well as the block of normal planted corn with 28% treated with Instinct nitrogen stabilizer. My plan is to come back in about 10 days before the rows shut and do my V pattern where I'll apply higher rates of 28% and ammonium thiosulfate on the outside rows and lower rates to the middle rows. The strip inter crop corn without any nitrogen on corn on corn strip tilled looks unbelievable green so far. I'm glad I was able to get the N on yesterday as I think my luck was about ready to run out on keeping the corn looking nice.
Here's some video I shot while side dressing my nitrogen on with my employer's little JX80 case tractor with a 5 coulter side dress bar that we made for doing plot work.
Thursday, May 24, 2012
Wind Erosion in Iowa
Yesterday was a pretty awful day in the state of Iowa as wind erosion decimated the state. I had a video from a friend of mine near Lake Mills, IA of dirt drifts blowing across a gravel road. Not a good day for any farmer in Iowa or Minnesota. As I was driving around tonight assessing the damage, my Mom called me and asked if I had been to our farm where we had plowed and strip tilled corn on corn on the same farm to see the differences on how the corn looked. I hadn't and she told me that I needed to go take some pictures as my Dad was about sick at how the corn looked. Here's what I saw when I arrived. All of these pictures are within a 78 acre field.
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| Corn on Corn plowing |
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| Corn on Corn Strip Till |
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| Corn on Corn Plowing looking NW |
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| Corn on Corn Strip Till looking NE |
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| Plowing plants |
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| Stip tilled plants 10 feet from plants above |
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| Strip tilled COC looking across rows |
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| Plowing COC looking across rows |
Saturday, May 19, 2012
May 19th, 2012-Planting complete
It's been a busy last 10 days with the remainder of planting completed 2 nights ago. It's really satisfying to be through our first spring of planting into our strips. For the most part it has gone extremely well and we are happy with the results. Our first planted corn is at the V1-V2 stage already and the stand is very acceptable considering the pounding rain and now thick crust that developed with the heat and wind of last week. I'm a little concerned with the corn we planted 9 days ago last Thursday as we were planting into soft moist strips and the heat has dried the sidewalls of the furrow out and they're pretty hard so I'm hoping for rain tonight to soften things up the corn can get up and going by Monday. It's crazy how fast corn can get out of the ground when you have heat. Dad was able to get all of our burndown pre-emerge on before the wind started to blow which I feel extremely fortunate about. Our Corvus and Verdict mixes have been absolutely fantastic so far at burning some huge lambsquarter and giant ragweed down. We'll likely come around this week with some Banvel and spray the outside perimeters of the fields to finish off any giant ragweed that is left.
Here's some fun video planting some soybeans for Dad last Saturday night with my youngest daughter. It was nice to have some company and some coffee to keep me going.
I planted my field of soybeans last Sunday and Monday night with the 6 row JD 7000 planter that Dad bought last winter because of the guidance problems we had last fall from the solar activity I had encountered while stripping it that prohibited us from using our 12 row planter. One thing learned from this is that it takes a lot more passes to plant an 80 with a 6 than a 12 row. There was neighbor across the road from me with a 60 ft roller on a Quad Track going about 12 mph that did 200 acres in about the same time that I had planted 20 acres. I told myself that I made up for it with style points to justify everything in my head. It was pretty difficult at times especially planting in the afternoon looking into the sun seeing the strips through the stalks as my eyes started playing tricks on me between the old rows and the fall strips. I'm glad that we have the guidance on the main planter as I was a lot more tired and stressed at night after straining to see and drive the strips all day long.
I set the trash whippers pretty aggressive on my field as there were a lot of times where my strip was running right dow an old corn row from last year and I needed to clear the root ball out. Needless to say the field looks pretty dark for a strip tilled field with throwing that much dirt while planting. I'm a little bit concerned with the amount of weeds that I buried with dirt and whether or not they were susceptible to my herbicide burndown that we had applied on Tuesday. We may have to come back and hit things again early with glyphosate if some come through the dirt again. The beans are likely up this morning and I'm going to head over to take a look at how things are emerging.
Our strip intercrop corn looks very good so far other than having a pile of weeds coming in it. We burned it down Wednsday night with glyphosate so hopefully it will be cleaned up by next weekend so I feel good enough about taking pictures and posting. The V population appears to have worked pretty well as I took some stand counts and had 48,000 plants on the outside rows and 35,000 in the middles. I plan to drop in the soybeans in between the strips of corn today and side dress the corn for the first time this next week as I have no nitrogen on it other than the starter we applied with the planter.
Here are some fun pics of Dad's sweetcorn patch that we strip tilled last fall and haven't touched yet this spring until this week. The beautiful strips of bushy foliage are 18-24" lambsquarter that are doing quite well in the strip. We've sort of intentionally let this get pretty bad to see what our burndown program is capable of killing. We sprayed it Wednsday night with 5 oz/A Verdict, 5 oz/A Outlook and 32 oz/A Roundup Powermax with MSO and AMS. The pic on the bottom is one I took last night 2 days after treatment. If we kill these trees, these pictures should be worth some serious money to BASF...especially with rustic Parker wagons and government bin center stage in the shot. We'll make sure to have our lawyers see to it that they can't be photoshopped out.
Here's some fun video planting some soybeans for Dad last Saturday night with my youngest daughter. It was nice to have some company and some coffee to keep me going.
I planted my field of soybeans last Sunday and Monday night with the 6 row JD 7000 planter that Dad bought last winter because of the guidance problems we had last fall from the solar activity I had encountered while stripping it that prohibited us from using our 12 row planter. One thing learned from this is that it takes a lot more passes to plant an 80 with a 6 than a 12 row. There was neighbor across the road from me with a 60 ft roller on a Quad Track going about 12 mph that did 200 acres in about the same time that I had planted 20 acres. I told myself that I made up for it with style points to justify everything in my head. It was pretty difficult at times especially planting in the afternoon looking into the sun seeing the strips through the stalks as my eyes started playing tricks on me between the old rows and the fall strips. I'm glad that we have the guidance on the main planter as I was a lot more tired and stressed at night after straining to see and drive the strips all day long.
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| White hood is for purity reinforcement purposes. |
Our strip intercrop corn looks very good so far other than having a pile of weeds coming in it. We burned it down Wednsday night with glyphosate so hopefully it will be cleaned up by next weekend so I feel good enough about taking pictures and posting. The V population appears to have worked pretty well as I took some stand counts and had 48,000 plants on the outside rows and 35,000 in the middles. I plan to drop in the soybeans in between the strips of corn today and side dress the corn for the first time this next week as I have no nitrogen on it other than the starter we applied with the planter.
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| row of 48,000 plants/A |
Here are some fun pics of Dad's sweetcorn patch that we strip tilled last fall and haven't touched yet this spring until this week. The beautiful strips of bushy foliage are 18-24" lambsquarter that are doing quite well in the strip. We've sort of intentionally let this get pretty bad to see what our burndown program is capable of killing. We sprayed it Wednsday night with 5 oz/A Verdict, 5 oz/A Outlook and 32 oz/A Roundup Powermax with MSO and AMS. The pic on the bottom is one I took last night 2 days after treatment. If we kill these trees, these pictures should be worth some serious money to BASF...especially with rustic Parker wagons and government bin center stage in the shot. We'll make sure to have our lawyers see to it that they can't be photoshopped out.
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| Thriving in the shadow of government bin |
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| Death becomes it |
Sunday, May 6, 2012
Never enjoyed 1.3" of rain so much...May 5th, 2012
So while water infiltration appears to be an advantage with strip till this spring, weed control is posing to be a challenge as lambsquarter and other weeds have a big head start on the crop this year. We've sprayed our burndown and pre-emergence herbicide on all but one farm that has corn planted up to this point. It appears that our Corvus, Atrazine and glyphosate are slowly getting the job done and have had plenty of rain to be activated now. Our challenge comes now with our soybean fields that won't likely be planted for another week as we dry out and weeds getting large and in charge. I'm planning on going around and spot spraying the worst patches with the mini-truck sprayer today with some glyphosate to try to keep things at bay and buy some time. 90% of our fields are in good shape but the 10% is starting to make me a little nervous. I'm trying a couple different burndown options in small trials to see which one I will like the best. I've done mixes of 24D and Firstrate, 24D and glyphosate, glyphosate alone and Verdict alone on these big lambsquarter. Here are some pictures of what we're up against. I'm hopeful at seeing the lambsquarter enjoy the hospitality in the strips and that soybeans will be as gracious after the the unwanted squatters are evicted.
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| Verdict alone applied to the left. Untreated to the right. Picture taken right after application as baseline. |
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| Sprayed with glyphosate and 24D 3 days ago |
I almost forgot to mention that I was able to get my strip intercrop trial planted on Tuesday night before the rain came. I was able to get in about 7 or 8 strips of Pioneer 0533 planted with the V population pattern working from outside to inside on the planter of 48,000, 42,000 and 37,000. I then took the custom sprockets out and put in the normal sprockets and planted a 36 row block of 0533 at a population of 35,000. It's going to be fun to see this comparison develop throughout the season. Here's a quick video I shot while putting it in.
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