July 1st, 2012-Two from Tassel

It's hot and getting hotter and drier by the hour.  The forecast doesn't sound that promising this week either with  only a slight chance of rain coming tonight.  Hard to believe that 10 days ago we got 2-3 inches of rain and we're already bone dry again.  I just got back from scouting crops and doing some digging and the profile has very little moisture left in the top 8 inches.  If we don't get rain this week with the high temperatures forecasted, I'm afraid we'll start to see issues with pollination that will take place over the next 2 weeks. 

Our corn planted on April 25th is at V14 and has 2 leaves to emerge before the tassel is out.  Typically it takes about 3 days in temperatures like this for a new leaf to emerge so we will likely have tassels out by next Sunday to take pics of.  Hopefully there are silks out at the same time.  One of the problems with drought stress around pollination is the uneven emergence of silks matching up with pollen shed.  If  the 2 don't allign, you can have big problems.  Despite the heat, the corn looks phenomenal so far.  Green from top to bottom and very few signs of disease or nutrient deficiencies.  I did find one plant last week that may have had the start of Goss's Wilt developing on the farm that suffered so much wind damage earlier.  Not much of a surprise. 

The good news is that after digging a few corn root masses, it looks like we have very little rootworm pressure on our conventional corn and a very dense fibrous root system established in the zones.  I'd venture to say we have more fine root hairs than what I'm used to seeing from our conventional tillage days.  We still have some soybean residue left between the rows in our first year corn but much of it is gone.  I don't know how much of an advantage we have from a moisture preservation standpoint.  When I dig in the strip, the ground comes up very easily and seperates well.  When I dig between the rows where no tillage has been done it's a different story...big hard chunks of compacted soil.  Seeing how compacted the soil is in between the rows in both our corn and soybeans has got me re-thinking my approach to not doing any tillage besides my fall stripping...especially with our corn stalk residue.  When soils are that compacted between the rows, oxygen becomes depleted and residue breakdown is slowed to a crawl.  If we don't break the residue down well over the summer months, we will have more residue to contend with next fall and next spring going back to corn. I've been visiting with my friend Sheldon Stevermer about this over the last week and we've been kicking around some ideas in how to possibly address this without doing too much damage to the soil structure we're trying to establish and maintain.  Over time in the strip till system, the compacted layers should be marginalized by the increased soil life and biology that promotes natural aereation and porosity.  It's obvious by this video we have  a few years to go before we're there.

Residue mat holding moisture

Compacted soil between the rows

Loose soil under the zone

Our soybeans are the biggest that they've ever been going into the fourth of July holiday but it seems that they are lagging behind the neighbors that are using conventional tillage.  They look uniform and even but just not as bushy and impressive as fields that were tilled.  I'm thinking that there are several reasons for why we're seeing these differences:

1.  Lack of oxygen in the soil system from less tillage and compacted soil between the rows
2.  Root masses running into high salt load from my aggressive fertilizer program last fall
3.  Poor varietal placement on my part on one field

I will say after walking and doing some digging last night that the mat of cornstalk residue is definately retaining more moisture than tilled fields I've dug in.  I was able to find enough moisture to ball up soil underneath the mat which was encouraging.  Hopefully this translates into an advantage if things stay dry.  Weed control is fantastic with the exception of some volunteer corn that clumps that may come back with any moisture we receive.  I can find no waterhemp to speak of emerging after our post-emerge treatments completed a week ago. 

Overall, our crops have never looked so good before the 4th of July.  This isn't a function of strip till as everyone's crops in my area look the best they ever have in my opinion despite the tillage system.  This is however probably the most scared I've been about the amount of potential that could be lost if we don't get a rain in the next 10 days.  We will go from 250 bu/A corn potential to 150 bu/A or less pretty quick if things stay dry through July.  With new crop corn at $6/bu, that's a huge revenue swing in the balance.  I feel fortunate though as we still have a chance while others in Illinois, Indiana and the SE cornbelt are already toasted and discing corn under.  When you dig and see how dry our soils are right now, we're not that far away from the same issues. 

If it was easy, everyone would be doing it.  Enjoy the 4th holiday!

June 21st, 2012-Rain is a good thing.

Things were getting pretty interesting in the last week with a severe deficit of moisture in most of our fields.  Corn last Saturday already was starting to roll on headlands or on lighter soils.  We were lucky enough to get relief last night as we got 2-3 inches of rain across most of our ground and it was just in time.  Hopefully it came in time as the corn was/is going through some pretty critical stages right now with kernal/row establishment.  Soybeans should really respond as many fields look like they were sitting still waiting for moisture.  It's great to get the rain but I feel for the folks in the eastern corn belt who are really taking it in the shorts this year. 

I'm happy with our crops are looking but not as happy as I was a few weeks back.  I really thought that with the drought stress that we'd see some separation from a moisture conservation standpoint on the strips but haven't really observed too much.  It seems also that the corn has slightly stalled before this rain which may be a function of the roots hitting the sides or bottoms of the strip and struggling to penetrate the denser layer of soil.  I've also thought that with the dry conditions, the salt load in the zone from the banded fertilizer may be actually hurting us rather than helping.  Hopefully with the rain those concerns will be a moot point and things take off. 

Dad and I resumed field work on Father's Day as we were out of commission most of last week with my Grandmother's funeral.  We sprayed a chunk of my soybean farm but was forced to quit from the winds that picked up in the afternoon.  I had a lot of volunteer corn to contend with as the down corn from last fall combined with my aggressive trash whippers throwing a lot of dirt and covering equated to a lot of corn up.  We did have some lambsquarter in a few patches that came back from our burndown application that had some pretty good size that we had to get.  I hope that the herbicide works as the weeds were likely not too actively growing with the heat we had.  I'm hoping to come back next week on my farm and burn the beans and any remaining weeds with Cobra.  A lot of people don't like burning beans but there's been a fair amount of work done that shows that stressing the beans at the right time with the active in Cobra can have several benefits including induced systemic resistance to pathogens like white mold as well as encouraging branching of beans and shortening of internodes.  Dad thinks I'm nuts again doing this but that seems to be a common theme this year.  So far so good so we'll keep riding the lightning til we get burned.  Here's a shot of what the beans look like before burning.

I was able to get my inter crop plot side dressed last Sunday as the corn was getting pretty big. I waited til the heat of the day and drove slow to avoid snapping off the big corn.  I applied my V pattern of UAN and ammonium thiosulfate so that my outside rows now have around 250 lbs of nitrogen and the inside rows have about 180 total lbs of nitrogen along with some sulfur as well.  I'm disappointed with how many runt plants I have in my outside rows with the high population.  I'm guessing by harvest i'll only have 42-45k harvestable ears/A which will likely decrease the benefit of intercrop vs my check.  My check strip looks phenomenal to this point so I'm worried a little bit for now about the comparison this fall.  The intercrop strips of corn have a dome shaped canopy affect where the outside rows are noticeably shorter than the middle rows which are competing more for light.  The strips of corn look OK but not as even as they were a few weeks ago. 

I spent quite a bit of time this last week hoeing the volunteer RR corn in my 1 acre of soybean strips between the corn.. Some folks go to the lake on Saturday's, I go to my to intercrop to swing a hoe.    Here's some pictures of before and after and how I spent my Saturday afternoon.  It felt good when I was all done.  Nothing better than wiping out Monsanto Mushrooms.

I also sprayed the intercrop beans this week and had Dad shoot some live action of the Geisha in action spraying some glyphosate.  For those of you who own JD 4930's or Hagie STS 16's , we're coming for you.  

Hope everyone has a good week and gets some rain!!!

June 10, 2012

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!

Side dressing

June 2nd 2012

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.  

Wind Erosion in Iowa

Yesterday was a pretty awful day in the state of Iowa as wind erosion decimated the state.  I had a video from a friend of mine near Lake Mills, IA of dirt drifts blowing across a gravel road.  Not a good day for any farmer in Iowa or Minnesota.  As I was driving around tonight assessing the damage, my Mom called me and asked if I had been to our farm where we had plowed and strip tilled corn on corn on the same farm to see the differences on how the corn looked.  I hadn't and she told me that I needed to go take some pictures as my Dad was about sick at how the corn looked.  Here's what I saw when I arrived.  All of these pictures are within a 78 acre field.

Corn on Corn plowing

Corn on Corn Strip Till

Corn on Corn Plowing looking NW

Corn on Corn Strip Till looking NE

Plowing plants

Stip tilled plants 10 feet from plants above

Strip tilled COC looking across rows

Plowing COC looking across rows

May 19th, 2012-Planting complete

 It's been a busy last 10 days with the remainder of planting completed 2 nights ago.  It's really satisfying to be through our first spring of planting into our strips.  For the most part it has gone extremely well and we are happy with the results.  Our first planted corn is at the V1-V2 stage already and the stand is very acceptable considering the pounding rain and now thick crust that developed with the heat and wind of last week.  I'm a little concerned with the corn we planted 9 days ago last Thursday as we were planting into soft moist strips and the heat has dried the sidewalls of the furrow out and they're pretty hard so I'm hoping for rain tonight to soften things up the corn can get up and going by Monday.  It's crazy how fast corn can get out of the ground when you have heat.  Dad was able to get all of our burndown pre-emerge on before the wind started to blow which I feel extremely fortunate about.  Our Corvus and Verdict mixes have been absolutely fantastic so far at burning some huge lambsquarter and giant ragweed down.  We'll likely come around this week with some Banvel and spray the outside perimeters of the fields to finish off any giant ragweed that is left. 

Here's some fun video planting some soybeans for Dad last Saturday night with my youngest daughter.  It was nice to have some company and some coffee to keep me going.

I planted my field of soybeans last Sunday and Monday night with the 6 row JD 7000 planter that Dad bought last winter because of the guidance problems we had last fall from the solar activity I had encountered while stripping it that prohibited us from using our 12 row planter.  One thing learned from this is that it takes a lot more passes to plant an 80 with a 6 than a 12 row. There was neighbor across the road from me with a 60 ft roller on a Quad Track going about 12 mph that did 200 acres in about the same time that I had planted 20 acres.  I told myself that I made up for it with style points to justify everything in my head.  It was pretty difficult at times especially planting in the afternoon looking into the sun seeing the strips through the stalks as my eyes started playing tricks on me between the old rows and the fall strips.  I'm glad that we have the guidance on the main planter as I was a lot more tired and stressed at night after straining to see and drive the strips all day long. 

White hood is for purity reinforcement purposes.

I set the trash whippers pretty aggressive on my field as there were a lot of times where my strip was running right dow an old corn row from last year and I needed to clear the root ball out.  Needless to say the field looks pretty dark for a strip tilled field with throwing that much dirt while planting.  I'm a little bit concerned with the amount of weeds that I buried with dirt and whether or not they were susceptible to my herbicide burndown that we had applied on Tuesday.   We may have to come back and hit things again early with glyphosate if some come through the dirt again.  The beans are likely up this morning and I'm going to head over to take a look at how things are emerging. 

Our strip intercrop corn looks very good so far other than having a pile of weeds coming in it.  We burned it down Wednsday night with glyphosate so hopefully it will be cleaned up by next weekend so I feel good enough about taking pictures and posting.  The V population appears to have worked pretty well as I took some stand counts and had 48,000 plants on the outside rows and 35,000 in the middles.   I plan to drop in the soybeans in between the strips of corn today and side dress the corn for the first time this next week as I have no nitrogen on it other than the starter we applied with the planter. 

row of 48,000 plants/A

Here are some fun pics of Dad's sweetcorn patch that we strip tilled last fall and haven't touched yet this spring until this week.  The beautiful strips of bushy foliage are 18-24" lambsquarter that are doing quite well in the strip.  We've sort of intentionally let this get pretty bad to see what our burndown program is capable of killing.  We sprayed it Wednsday night with 5 oz/A Verdict, 5 oz/A Outlook and 32 oz/A Roundup Powermax with MSO and AMS.  The pic on the bottom is one I took last night 2 days after treatment.  If we kill these trees, these pictures should be worth some serious money to BASF...especially with rustic Parker wagons and government bin center stage in the shot.  We'll make sure to have our lawyers see to it that they can't be photoshopped out. 

Thriving in the shadow of government bin

Death becomes it

Never enjoyed 1.3" of rain so much...May 5th, 2012

Last night we had some severe weather pass over Canary Pointe with 60 MPH winds sustained for about 10 minutes and 1.3" of rain.  As soon as we came up out of the basement, I looked out to the fields to see how much water we had sitting and couldn't believe that we had no ponds on the field that surrounds my house after getting that much rain in a 20 minute period.  I looked to the neighbors fields and they weren't so lucky.  I took this photo right after the rain on our fenceline where we have strip tilled stalks with one pass last fall on the left and conventional tillage including plowing, leveling, field cultivating and planting on the right.  Our side of the fence is lower than the right and there is a county tile that runs right underneath this low spot that runs right to left and dumps into a dredge ditch 1/4 mile away.  The neighbors field had been moldboard plowed and leveled last fall with a vertical tillage machine and looked like a beautiful seed bed to work in to.  They had field cultivated and planted the field this spring.  It's obvious that looking at this picture that despite how pretty black tilled fields look, there are some hidden consequences of all that tillage that up until now, I myself had been ignoring.  I drove around some more to look at more of our own strip tilled fields to see if the same things were happening elsewhere and there were lots of examples of this.  There were stark differences in our fields and others who had strip tilled or had not field cultivated yet in regards to water infiltration after the heavy rains of the last few days.  Anything that had been field cultivated had significant ponding and erosion where field that were untouched, strip tilled or no-till.  I went and looked at our plowed fields that had field cultivated twice and been planted and they looked exactly like our neighbor in this picture.  It's obvious that field cultivation while convenient and pretty has some damaging effects to soil structure and water infiltration rates.  Here's some video I shot comparing practices today after the rain that illustrates things pretty well.

So while water infiltration appears to be an advantage with strip till this spring, weed control is posing to be a challenge as lambsquarter and other weeds have a big head start on the crop this year.  We've sprayed our burndown and pre-emergence herbicide on all but one farm that has corn planted up to this point.  It appears that our Corvus, Atrazine and glyphosate are slowly getting the job done and have had plenty of rain to be activated now.  Our challenge comes now with our soybean fields that won't likely be planted for another week as we dry out and weeds getting large and in charge.  I'm planning on going around and spot spraying the worst patches with the mini-truck sprayer today with some glyphosate to try to keep things at bay and buy some time.  90% of our fields are in good shape but the 10% is starting to make me a little nervous.  I'm trying a couple different burndown options in small trials to see which one I will like the best.  I've done mixes of 24D and Firstrate, 24D and glyphosate, glyphosate alone and Verdict alone on these big lambsquarter.  Here are some pictures of what we're up against. I'm hopeful at seeing the lambsquarter enjoy the hospitality in the strips and that soybeans will be as gracious after the the unwanted squatters are evicted.


Verdict alone applied to the left. Untreated to the right.  Picture taken right after application as baseline.



Sprayed with glyphosate and 24D 3 days ago

There are lots of fields both reduced till and conventional tillage that will struggle with lambsquarter this year in our area.  I do feel that we will be at an advantage over conventional till if we can achieve a good burndown as we will not be field cultivating and transplanting any of these weeds.  Hopefully we can get a good kill right off the bat and start clean with our planned pass of Verdict, Outlook, MSO, AMS and glyphosate.  Hopefully this weeks weather cooperates so we can get the corn finished up as well. 

I almost forgot to mention that I was able to get my strip intercrop trial planted on Tuesday night before the rain came.  I was able to get in about 7 or 8 strips of Pioneer 0533 planted with the  V population pattern working from outside to inside on the planter of 48,000, 42,000 and 37,000.  I then took the custom sprockets out and put in the normal sprockets and planted a 36 row block of 0533 at a population of 35,000.  It's going to be fun to see this comparison develop throughout the season.  Here's a quick video I shot while putting it in.