Today has been a lovely day… blue skies, a gentle breeze, and about 60ºF (16C). It does feel cooler than the past several days. We were getting quite used to those days of 80+ temps. Back in long pants, no shorts today!
My plan was to plant some soybeans today. But last night, about 10pm, a pretty harsh storm hit, bringing us .3 to .6″ of rain. The winds were pretty stiff, and there was lots of lightning and thunder. It only lasted about an hour, but it was enough rain to stop the planters today! So, I don’t even think I’ll go look until Monday morning to see if there is a place dry enough where I can plant. Now that we are moving into the last 10 days of April, it feels like we should be planting.
Here is the radar as the Thursday night storm approached.
In the storm’s aftermath, I had lots of limbs to pick up in the yard this morning.
Brandon was able to start the corn planter yesterday. He searched and found one field that was dry enough (barely, but OK) to plant corn. This allowed him to call in Nathan from Hutson’s to get him up-to-speed on the operation of this new planter. Brandon has a few years’ experience planting corn, but that was with the previous CaseIH rig. This new JD has some additional features of from-the-cab adjustments to the row cleaners and the closing wheels that he had to learn. Nathan was quite a helpful expert to have in the cab with him. They discovered a few bugs in the system, in the way the tracking worked, and in the way the vacuum system operated. Also, a hydraulic line popped loose from the tractor, decorating the back of the cab (splattering it) with a coating of oil. Nathan answered every question, and offered good expertise to make this machine perform its best. He was a valuable asset yesterday. Brandon is very pleased with the new JD planting set-up… both the 1775NT planter and the 8R 340 tractor that pulls it.
If you look closely, you can see Nathan standing in the field ahead. Nathan was making sure the seeds were being placed accurately into the soil. He was a great help to Brandon yesterday.
And we now have some corn planted, even if it is only 30 acres…I guess we can celebrate that we have one field of corn planted! Got a few to go…
John plans to work the weekend, tomorrow and Sunday afternoon, to spray more burndown herbicide on fields going into corn. He is the farm’s expert on sprayer applications. Weather and wind permitting, he can make great headway on that task this weekend. He is feeling the pressure of staying ahead of both the corn and soybean planters. It is not quick and easy to switch the sprayer back-and-forth between the different chemistries that are specifically used for corn and then for soybeans or wheat. John cleans the sprayer system thoroughly each time a change is needed, and he puts in 3 to 5 hours in the cleaning and rinsing to make sure no residue of the previous chemistry gets applied to the next field.
John is feeling added pressure that an application of fungicide must be made to the wheat on Thursday or Friday of next week. The window of success for that is pretty small, and it must be applied exactly at the ‘flag leaf’ stage. Maybe a 24-to-36 hour window! That will be the final pass of crop protection on the 2024 wheat crop. It’s looking pretty good right now, and we are hopeful for a good yield come June.
I hope you all have a great weekend… the weather is supposed to be very nice, just a bit cooler than we’ve enjoyed this week.
