Wednesday afternoon, November 13, 2013

Four loads of corn were delivered to GPC today.  As Ben takes the truckloads out, corn must be moved by our closed-auger system out of the storage bins to refill the overhead load-out bins.

It has been a busy office day for me, working on end-of-the-fiscal-year projections.  It is necessary to closely define the remaining expenses for 2013, and project the income stream for the rest of this month.  I had to meet with Greg at Crop Production Services (CPS) to get a feel for what has been accomplished in the fall fertility program applications for 2014 corn and soybeans.  Those will be completed by the weekend.  Five farm locations have had or will soon have lime applied.

John is out with the JD 4730 sprayer, making some fall herbicide applications.  Fall herbicides have become more important in the past few years.   The advent of no-till farming practices have selected for different weed species that are more difficult to control.  This fall application ‘burns down’ the small winter annuals, and holds back the early emergence of weeds in late March or early April.  If some of these “new” weeds aren’t stopped as they emerge, they are extremely hard to stop after they get some size to them.  Marestail and waterhemp (a type of pigweed) are manageable, but sooner rather than later.

The fall application of phosphorus and potassium along with some micronutrients prepares next year’s corn fields with all the balanced nutrition they require… with the exception of nitrogen.  N will be applied a week to 10 days ahead of planting the crop next spring.  Lime is applied as the soil tests indicate.  It goes on with a variable-rate applicator and its utility is to raise the soil pH.   Balancing the soil pH is of primary importance; we seek to get that right first:  everything else works better when the pH is correct.

Haley is out there scraping off the big chunks of dried mud and crop debris from the JD 9360R tractor.  Once that is knocked off, we can bring that tractor inside to wash it.  Too cold for outdoor washing today.

Our electrician is coming to work on the circuit that powers the unload auger in our bin #9.   It stopped working yesterday, and we can’t figure why.   We are confident he will get it going again.

So, it has been a busy day.  Hope to be home in time to listen to the Purdue basketball game this evening.