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.