Tuesday, February 23, 2016

Ross and Rhoda are back on the farm after about 6 weeks down in Florida.  They must have missed the cold, huh?

We spent most of yesterday morning here in the farm office, meeting with representatives of Climate Corporation, discussing the use of their FieldView information systems.  We have been looking for a way to seamlessly tie together the information generated by our John Deere Greenstar and CaseIH AFS systems.   The FieldView Plus programming seems like one way to do that.  There are other options available, each with particular strengths and weaknesses.   Dow/Pioneer Encirca has some applicability, as well as the offerings from Granular Corporation.   All the benefits of each information system must be weighed against the cost, especially now when crop prices are depressed.  I hope we are nearing a decision, for that will affect the way our corn and soybean planting information is captured and managed.  If we make this change, we will need to be completely up-to-speed before the planters run!

We are also going to the Nellie farm today, on the banks of the White River.  The fields may be somewhat soft, so the Gator will assist us to get from the road to the river’s edge.  We will be forming a specific plan there for the repair of the levee that protects the Nellie farm from flood damage.  When a levee fails, the adjoining field gets severely damaged, with severe scour erosion and deep deposits of sand.  We now have our repair permit finally in hand from Indiana DNR, and we are ready for the work to commence, as weather and soil conditions allow.  This repair feels ‘urgent’.

Here is a view of White River, looking upstream, with our Nellie farm’s field on the left. You can see how the erosion of the river bank has ‘eaten’ into the levee. The levee will be moved out into the field about a hundred feet, and rebuilt to its current specs. The river bank will continue to erode and over time, the levee will be in danger again. We hope this construction event will gain us 7-10 years of flood protection before a similar relocation of the levee will be required again. In the 50+ years we’ve owned this farm, we have rebuilt this levee 6 times!  This photo was taken in December 2015, and submitted to Indiana DNR as part of the repair request.

It is a very beautiful, sunny and cool day in southwest Indiana.  Rain is predicted (100% chance) for tonight.