Friday, February 10, 2017

The tiny bit of snow we received Wednesday evening is slowly, but surely slipping away.  We’ve had a couple pretty chilly days, but today we are supposed to warm up into the mid 50s.  So, bye-bye snow!   Snow has been noticeably absent this winter, with only the early January snowfall that covered the ground.

Just a little dusting of snow remains… today’s sunshine will melt it away!

We’ve been writing some planting prescriptions.  Our seed dealer has most of our soybean seed in his warehouse now, so he has advised us of the seeds/lb.  We use that information along with the soil survey to build those prescriptions in our JD Apex system.  Those will be loaded into the planter tractor’s GS 2630 screen, and will control the population of the soybeans planted according to the prescription maps.

Here is the soil survey map for the Dennis field (164.1 acres) at the home farm. It has 9 different soil types! This becomes the basis of our prescription map.

Here is the resulting planting prescription map. It shows the 3 ranges of population, with red being the low rate, yellow being medium, and green being high. The population assignments are counter-intuitive, with the lower rates being on the better soils.

We have also built the prescription maps for the application of our nitrogen for our corn crop.  Why apply by prescription map?  Better use of N, better for the environment, better for the bottom line.  Nitrogen prescription maps are built with higher rates of N on more productive soils.  In the future, as we develop our expertise with FieldView, we will probably include actual production history and grid soil samples in the matrix for building nitrogen prescriptions.

We are also celebrating today the basketball win last night of Purdue over Indiana.  Sweet.

Have a good weekend.