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.

Corn on Corn plowing

Corn on Corn Strip Till

Corn on Corn Plowing looking NW

Corn on Corn Strip Till looking NE

Plowing plants

Stip tilled plants 10 feet from plants above

Strip tilled COC looking across rows

Plowing COC looking across rows

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. 

White hood is for purity reinforcement purposes.

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. 

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. 

Thriving in the shadow of government bin

Death becomes it

Never enjoyed 1.3" of rain so much...May 5th, 2012

Last night we had some severe weather pass over Canary Pointe with 60 MPH winds sustained for about 10 minutes and 1.3" of rain.  As soon as we came up out of the basement, I looked out to the fields to see how much water we had sitting and couldn't believe that we had no ponds on the field that surrounds my house after getting that much rain in a 20 minute period.  I looked to the neighbors fields and they weren't so lucky.  I took this photo right after the rain on our fenceline where we have strip tilled stalks with one pass last fall on the left and conventional tillage including plowing, leveling, field cultivating and planting on the right.  Our side of the fence is lower than the right and there is a county tile that runs right underneath this low spot that runs right to left and dumps into a dredge ditch 1/4 mile away.  The neighbors field had been moldboard plowed and leveled last fall with a vertical tillage machine and looked like a beautiful seed bed to work in to.  They had field cultivated and planted the field this spring.  It's obvious that looking at this picture that despite how pretty black tilled fields look, there are some hidden consequences of all that tillage that up until now, I myself had been ignoring.  I drove around some more to look at more of our own strip tilled fields to see if the same things were happening elsewhere and there were lots of examples of this.  There were stark differences in our fields and others who had strip tilled or had not field cultivated yet in regards to water infiltration after the heavy rains of the last few days.  Anything that had been field cultivated had significant ponding and erosion where field that were untouched, strip tilled or no-till.  I went and looked at our plowed fields that had field cultivated twice and been planted and they looked exactly like our neighbor in this picture.  It's obvious that field cultivation while convenient and pretty has some damaging effects to soil structure and water infiltration rates.  Here's some video I shot comparing practices today after the rain that illustrates things pretty well.

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.


Verdict alone applied to the left. Untreated to the right.  Picture taken right after application as baseline.



Sprayed with glyphosate and 24D 3 days ago

There are lots of fields both reduced till and conventional tillage that will struggle with lambsquarter this year in our area.  I do feel that we will be at an advantage over conventional till if we can achieve a good burndown as we will not be field cultivating and transplanting any of these weeds.  Hopefully we can get a good kill right off the bat and start clean with our planned pass of Verdict, Outlook, MSO, AMS and glyphosate.  Hopefully this weeks weather cooperates so we can get the corn finished up as well. 

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.