Monday, August 28, 2023

It’s a cooler morning, started in the low 60s, quite a change from last week’s heat.  The guys are using this cooler morning to clean out 2 grain bins.  Wheat from #4 and #7 are being consolidated into bin #1A.   We are packing it away in hopes of a better price for it come January.

I have been working in the office today to refine the numbers for the 2024 crop budget.  I’m trying to get the wheat numbers nailed down pretty close, and begin with preliminary figures for corn and soybeans.  Soon, we will need to be making the decision of how many acres to allocate to 2024 corn and soybeans.  The crop budget projections help guide that decision.  Of course, there are agronomic factors that we must consider also.   We will review all the production factors and come up with a crop plan for ’24.

We received on Friday night about 1.3″ (33mm) rain.  It came in a thunderstorm during the night, that brought lots of lightning and thunder.  It woke me up as the rain pounded on the windows.  I’ll admit that when I got the rainfall report Saturday morning of 1.3″, I was expecting much more from the way the storm sounded.  I would not have been surprised if the report said 3 or 4 inches!  But this rainfall amount was very welcome, as well as the cooler days that are following.  I guess next week, it is supposed to heat up again with daytime temps in the mid-to-upper 90s again!  But we will enjoy these cooler days and nights while they last.

Friday evening, the skies looked pretty nice, with no hint of the storms that would come through at 1 am

I used the cool morning today to clean up some  pine tree limbs along the farm driveway that were knocked down during Friday night’s storm.  I had to cut them up with our Milwaukee battery-powered chain saw, and then use the backhoe front bucket to haul them away to a brush pile.  Eventually, that brush pile will be burned.  We like to keep our farmstead looking as neat as possible.  We don’t always get it looking ship shape, but we certainly try to do so.

We will soon be hooking up the JD 6145R tractor to our old 1560 drill.  We will use it to plant some rye at the Harry farm, where Shepard’s built the new drainage system and re-built some WASCoBs.  That rye should protect the area from water erosion through the winter.  It’s our attempt at a cover-crop.

We made a change for our corn planting system for 2024.  We will be taking delivery of a JD 8R 340 tractor soon, and have on order a JD 1775NT 24-row planter–which is expected to arrive here in February, hopefully in plenty of time for #plant24.   This should eliminate our need for using the Climate.com Fieldview system, for all our field operations records for 2024 should flow seamlessly into JD Operations Center.

Just this weekend, we began to notice the faint trace of the corn and soybeans beginning to mature and ripen.  There is now a distinct yellow cast to the appearance of the earliest-planted fields.  My guess is that about 3 weeks from today, our combines will be rolling.  I hope so, anyway.  I spoke with a neighbor yesterday evening as we were out for supper, and he told me they would begin the day after Labor Day.   So, #harvest23 is on the horizon!