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!
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