One week til the party's over

That's my guess as to how much time we have left before significant damage starts to occur to our crops from the drought.  We watched 3 times yesterday afternoon and last night thunderstorms approach Winnebago county and then split apart and go around.  I'm happy for the folks up along Interstate 90 and over west of Algona that were able to pick up rains.  For the rest of us the next few days don't look too promising with highs near 100 again.  The only thing this rain gauge has had accumulate in it in the last 3 weeks as you can see is some runny bird shit.  At least it's getting used by someone!

Despite how dry it is, the crop still looks very good driving by on the road.  Our soybeans are a lush, dark green and other than a few hill tops pulling back, look great.  We have a few weeds coming through the herbicide applications that we made about a month ago but overall control was very good.  We plan to go out in the next week or two and walk some beans to get rid of the waterhemp and velvetleaf that are left.  Soybeans are in the R2 to nearing R3 stage which means they are starting to set pods on the bottom part of the plant.  Our plan is to spray fungicide and insecticide likely next weekend or early next week for our last trip across the beans.  If it doesn't rain or doesn't look like it will rain, we may reconsider. 

Last weekend I went out scouting and found a lot of rootworm beetles in one of our conventional fields feeding on the silks of the corn plants.  There was some actual silk clipping going on which can impede proper pollination so we had our local aerial applicator come fly on some insecticide to knock down the rootworms.  I scouted our other farms and didn't think the pressure they had warranted a trip so we've let them go.  Our early planted corn is all pollinated and the late planted corn that went in the 10th of May is starting to pollinate now which may be a bad thing with the 100 degree heat forecast for the next few days.  It will be interesting to go out and look at how successful the pollination was over the last 10 days later this week.  From what I looked at this week, it looked like most ears had pollinated 30 kernels out of 40 potential long by 16 rows around.  If those can hang on and not abort, that would equate to 170 bu corn assuming a final stand of 32,000 harvestable ears and that we got moisture to fill the grain out.  If we could get 170 bu/A corn, it would be a miracle looking at the current forecast.  My guess is that things will be closer to under 140 bu/A for our area without rains.  I read somewhere this week it takes 9" of soil moisture to fill a corn crop from silking to black layer.  We're about out of soil moisture now so we're going to need some big rains in August to hold on to the pollinated potential we have now. 

I went back again to our plowing vs strip till corn on corn line this last week and looked for differences and saw them again.  The strip till appears to have tasseled about 2-3 days sooner and is much more even in tassel emergence than where our plowed ground is.  It will be interesting with the drought stress to see how this comparison plays out for the rest of the season.  I hope that our strips will provide an advantage but am not holding my breath.  If it doesn't rain, no practice will make a difference.

I really hope we can luck out and catch a shower on Wednesday when the next frontal boundary comes through and that this pattern changes.  If not, I'm going to offset my potential losses by investing heavily in the local liquor store as I think their business could be booming over the next few months.  It's do or die time.