Who's Down with Old PP?

Another week of wet weather has occurred and very little field activity has happened in our area. After the rainfall last Tuesday, you could hear the disappointment and discouragement in people's voices that our window of opportunity is coming to an end.  The forecast continues to offer not much hope as the next week has rain chances about every 3 days.  Our fields would need anywhere from 3-6 days of sunshine and wind before they would be fit to plant decently at this point.  It's just one of those years.

I settled last Monday with my insurance adjuster on my sad excuse of a corn field and am hoping that I can get a chance to try to replant some beans and get somewhat of a 2nd crop off the farm.  If I can't plant beans by the 4th of July, I'll likely seed some form of a cover crop on my acres where the corn never grew in the first place.  Never thought coming out of a drought that I'd be talking about crop insurance settlements and cover crops the next season.

We are considering taking prevented planting on our last field that hasn't been planted as the economics look better there than trying to grow corn or beans planted after the 20th of June which is looking like a reality now.  Our plan will be to hopefully seed a cover crop mix in July if it dries out and do some tiling to improve our situation the next time we get wet weather like this.  Our cover crop will have annual ryegrass along with several other nitrogen fixing legumes species that should help scavenge and retain nutrients as well as fix more nitrogen for the 2014 crop.  Dad has an old 20' Tye drill that we used to drill beans with 15 years ago on 13" spacing.  I've been hounding him to scrap out for the last 5 years but I'm glad that his stubbornness to let go held strong as we might have a good opportunity to make hay with that old orange thing yet this year on all these prevented planting acres that  need a cover crop seeded!  We drug it out of the shed and are going to go through it this week to get it functional.   If we get in the field soon enough to plant soybeans our farms we need to tear up, we'll likely drill the beans instead of plant them in attempt to get canopy closure for weed control purposes in the potential short season ahead.

Our other corn on corn fields around Buffalo Center look very good considering the weather.  Stands remain good and over the weekend I thought the color improved as well with the little bit of sun we received on Sunday.  I was able to get out and take some pictures last week of some of the stands.  Compared to other fields of corn on corn in the neighborhood, I don't think we're lagging behind yet despite of the cool wet conditions.  If we can get strip tilled corn on corn to look like this in cold wet spring, I like our chances long term if we ever get back to a normal season.  Hopefully we can get started side dressing these fields if the weather allows as they are drier than our problem farms and have more tile.  These farms still have excellent potential assuming we can get heat for the remainder of the season.

Every year I do something a little bit different to try to have some fun and learn with growing corn a little bit differently than conventional wisdom would advise.  Last year many of you know, I dabbled in strip inter-cropping corn and soybeans and learned a lot in the process of doing so about what is possible with high populations of corn that are managed intensely with inputs and have more access to light and air movement.  The downside of inter-cropping is that it poses a number of operational and logistical challenges that make adopting it on a wide scale basis somewhat prohibitive.  My fellow strip-till enthusiast friend Sheldon Stevermer and I were discussing what we saw with my intercrop last year and he had the idea of trying to get the benefit of the "outside row effect" with intercropping across the whole field without the hassle of intercropping.  His ideas was to plant twin rows at high populations on 60" spacings so that you could still get more light exposure up and down the plant with the wider row spacing along with the greater air movement.  I thought it was a great idea and decided to give it a try this year.  I planted the experiment in my front yard  where I have about 3/4 of an acre that I had strip tilled the field and applied dry fertilizer last fall to.  In order to get the twin row 60" spacing, I shut off every other row on our planter and simply planted the field twice but on the second pass, I shifted over 8" and planted the twin row.  I maxed out the sprocket combination for population on the planter at 44,000 seeds/A and so we have each row in our twin row at that rate.  It was difficult to try to get lined up and offset the second row by 8" just by eye balling it but I got it close enough where I think we'll accomplish what we're after.

I sprayed herbicide on this patch last night and will follow up here in a week or so with some top dress applications of 32% and sulfur which I will try to direct toward the base of the twinrows to increase uptake.  One other idea I may flirt with is hand seeding some legumes as a cover crop in between the twinrows as well to keep weeds down and fix some nitrogen as well.  It's going to be fun to see if we can replicate the benefits increasing light interception and air movement and achieve some big yields trying this out.  So far we're off to a good start.  In a crappy year, you've got to have something to be optimistic or excited about and this is my little slice of fun for 2013.  More to come later on this experiment.