Monday, May 9, 2016
Yes, the rain continues… We did work in the fields last Saturday. The corn planter ran at the Burke farm, finishing our planned corn planting! So, there is one thing we can check off the list. The soybean planter ran at the Harry and Newman farms, too. But just before dark, the rain drove me from the soybean field, returning the tractor and air drill back to the main farm. Soybeans planted on Saturday were placed very shallow into the soil, in anticipation of the predicted rain.
Most of the planting conditions on Saturday were pretty good…
… until the rain came in the evening. Traveling home here on IN Hwy 550
We hope that no corn replant will be necessary. By virtue of the locations of the cornfields for this year, it is likely that we will not need to do any replant for corn. But we have already identified some areas of fields planted on April 25 and 26 that have suffered with too much water standing for too long a time. So, some soybeans will require replanting. We have notified the crop insurance adjusters. We need 8-9 days of good planting conditions to finish off the soybean planting, but we are not certain just when those days will be arriving. The 10-day forecast shows rain possible on 9 of those days!
These rainy periods compress not only the planting needs, but also the herbicide-spraying needs into smaller and smaller windows of opportunity. We celebrate that the corn is planted, and hope for some better days to get the soybean crop done, too.
We are working with Climate Corp’s FieldView system, new to us in 2016, to record our planting information. This seems like an appropriate way to seamlessly blend together the information generated by our JD Greenstar and CIH AFS systems. We are using the normal FieldView Cab in the CIH, but we are using FieldView Beta in the JD air drill. The regular FV seems to work okay in the corn planter, but we are helping work out the bugs from the Beta in the air drill. If this finally works as designed, we believe this will achieve the goals we seek. But it has not been flawless…yet.
Here, you see the JD 2630 Greenstar screen on the left, and on the right is an iPad showing the FieldView Beta
So far, our planting season weather has been the mirror opposite of 2012. Funny thing is, the yearly rain total still shows about an inch deficit from an average year, but what we have received is all coming in late April and early May!
Rain, rain, go away… come again another day… scattered across June, July, and August!
1Thessalonians 5:18
