Thursday, August 6, 2015

It’s raining this morning, we’ve received 1.02″ (26mm) so far.  It’s welcome… not that we were seeing corn ‘rolled up’ with stress yet, but this will help.

Pulled an ear yesterday to see how the pollination went.  It wasn’t perfect–filled to the tip– and there were some isolated “blanks” on the ear.  But it was not bad, either… we’ve certainly seen worse this year from around the corn belt.

Typical ear at the Home farm. It has a tiny ‘nose’ on it, meaning it is not filled with kernels fully to the tip.

John flew the Phantom 2 over most of the corn yesterday.  It was revealing to see ‘down into the crop’ from above.  We could see some water damage in almost every field.  It is hard to estimate exactly how much that will tick back the final yields, but still we seem optimistic about the final harvests.  We will do some more aerial observations of the soybean fields next week.  The ‘hit’ to soybean yields may not be as severe.  One thing we did learn: in fields that have drainage tile systems, the water damage was less noticeable.  The combine yield monitors will tell the final tale, beginning in about 4-5 weeks!

Here at the Newman farm, near Wheatland, this field looks pretty healthy. You can see Indiana Hwy 550 running across the top, and US 50 to the right.

The Shake farm is showing many small spots of water damage, but only in the bottoms of the many WASCoBs.  Still not too bad considering…

Here, the “Old House” field at Steen shows water damage to the corn, again especially in the WASCoBs. Again, that’s US 50 on the upper right.

The yellow spots in the corn may indicate that it is running out of nitrogen, because the rain washed the nutrient down through the soil profile. It could also be that the roots were damaged in the ‘ponded’ water and unable to efficiently access the N.  Or it could be a combination of both!

John has the JD 4730 sprayer shining like a new one, and Brandon has been polishing on the trucks.

All clean… is this machine done for the season? Probably.

Late this month the combines and headers will come out of storage to be prepared for Harvest15!