Watching the Fill

Sorry for the lack of posts over the last month.

I've been pretty disconnected from the farm over the past couple of weeks as I lost one of my very good friends and neighbor, John Larson, to a tragic crop dusting accident on July 18th.  John was great farmer and aerial applicator and his impeccable example and standards pushed me to want to do things better all the time with my own operation.   I always looked forward to comparing farming notes with him on nearly a daily basis during the growing season as there was never any BS to sift through with him.  He never made things to be more or less than what they were.  John and his brother Joe (Friesenborg & Larson) are one of the few large operations who farm big, but do it well with class and dignity.  That was evident when nearly 1000 people showed up for John's wake and roughly 600 for the funeral.  It was a good reminder to me that the value of a life well lived is worth a lot more in the end than many of the superficial things that most of us allow to consume our time and energy.  Life isn't going to be the same without him around as he was one of the good ones. I always joked with him about converting him into a strip tiller...he'd always get a shit-eating grin and look at me and say "Don't count on it Sparky!!!"  Only 38 years old and leaves behind a great family in his wife and 3 young kids.  Tough times for a lot of folks in our community dealing with this.

I've slowly gotten back to re-engaging in the farm over the last week doing a fair amount of walking of soybeans and corn.  We finally have caught some rains over the past 10 days.  Albeit light and a little late, the rain will help fill the soybean pods and hopefully add to the test weight of the corn.  We applied fungicide and insecticide to the soybeans back around the 20th of July not because we had lots of disease or bugs but to try to remove any additional stress on the beans as the tried to flower and set pods in the unrelenting heat.  At the time, the early bean pod counts were looking pretty poor but they have seemed to find away to put some more on as temps have cooled and we've gotten a little bit of rain to keep them going.  I would guess that our soybean potential assuming we catch a few more rains will be around 40-45 bu/A.

Corn has hung on amazingly well in our corner of the world similar to the beans.  I don't know how we pollinated as well as we did throughout all the heat in the middle of July but somehow we did.  Although the ear counts are not tremendous, they are better than the sub 100 bu/A horror stories we here about in Illinois and SE Iowa.  Fields are showing stress but remain fairly green and healthy looking somehow yet.  There are pockets of spider mites that are bothering some fields as well causing them to turn more than others. I've found yield ranges in the ear counts that I've done so far anywhere from 0-80 bu/A on the hills to 180-220 bu/A in the low ground.  Corn is dented for the most part and the milk line on the kernels is slowly starting to work it's way down toward physiological maturity.  The cooler temps and moisture should hopefully slow that process down so that kernel fill and test weights will be as good as possible.  Test weight is probably the biggest yield determining factor left as I don't think we're going to tip things back anymore that what we already have at this point.  I'm hopeful that our area will average somewhere between 140-165 bu/A right now.

I went out to check out the ear size in my corn on corn strip till vs plowing tonight and didn't see a lot in differences so far.  The picture below was just one check as I could find really nice ears and crappy ears on both sides of the line.  The combine will have to be the judge on this one.  The one thing that was apparent is anywhere where I had trash that wasn't cleared from the strip with the planter, ear size was definitely impacted.  Earlier in the season, you could not tell much of a difference but it was quite clear that moving the trash off the strip needs to take a higher priority for us if we're going to do much with corn on corn in 2013.


Plowing ears on left, Strip till corn on corn ears to right

 

I stopped and looked at our first planted strip tilled corn on soybean field that is straight conventional corn and it looks to be our best potential so far.  It's a good farm with productive soils and had quite a few ear counts that looked good.  The only downside is that we had a popup thunderstorm hit that farm with marble sized hail last Wednesday afternoon and strip the corn leaves up pretty good.  I think that things are far enough along that it shouldn't make too much of a difference now.

Good ears in the heavy bottom ground



Soybean stubble remaining yet between rows from this spring

 I took my daughter Avery up to our strip intercrop plot on Sunday and we had some fun teaching her about doing ear counts, spider mites, light interception and how to walk through corn and soybeans without tripping when your only 7.  She's a lot of fun to take to the field as she asks lots of great questions and takes an interest in what I'm doing.  The intercrop plot looks pretty good in places.  On the good soils where we don't have any spider mites we did some yield checks on the outside rows that came out as high as around 330 bu/A of corn with 48,000 harvestable ears/A.  It seemed like the east outside row of the 6 row strip had bigger counts than the west outside row in most of the strips which I'm assuming is because of the increased temperature stress those plants had being exposed to full sun during the heat of the afternoons.   We have a few pockets of spider mites in a few of the strips that will likely drag yields down somewhat as well.  The regular planted check block of corn  next to the strips looks to be very good as well so it will be interesting to see how things shake out when we compare things in hopefully about 5-6 weeks.  The soybeans strips in between the corn have come on better than I thought that they would've as well.  I couldn't find much for bugs in them or disease to this point.  They are rib high on me and podded fairly well.

330 bu/A strip intercrop yield check with my crop consultant

Spider mite stipling

Small ears where spider mites are





Overall, I feel extremely fortunate that we will have the opportunity to harvest a very average crop to what we have been used to the last few years.  A few weeks ago I was worried that we wouldn't get anything and that I wouldn't be able to fill my forward contracts.  There are many folks in the cornbelt that would be envious of the position we are in here in north central Iowa.  We're not going to have a bin buster, but we'll have something to at least put in the bin.   Given all that's happened in the last month in my life, I'm trying to focus more on the positive than the negative.  Here's to cool temps, slow rains, and test weight for all!!!