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.
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