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