Tuesday, July 30, 2024

Brandon has been busy with cleaning corn bins, moving the grain to the overhead load-out bin in anticipation of the sales contracts that must be filled beginning Thursday, August 1.  He is also working on the wheat.  It is his goal to have empty and cleaned-out bins by mid-August.  Bill will be returning Thursday to run the Volvo truck to help with the corn deliveries to ADM in Newburgh and wheat deliveries to ADM in Evansville.

I will be out this afternoon with the JD 6145R and rotary cutter to mow off some riparian strips on ditch levees at the Waldo and/or Dunn farm locations.   It will work much better if we allow the dew to burn off.   I have been busy this morning in the farm office, working on the computer to set up the excel sheets for recording the truck loads during harvest.  Each load is compiled into a spreadsheet for corn, soybeans, and double-crop soybeans (DCB).   In that way, each bushel of production is documented by farm location.  This makes reporting production to  our crop insurance provider much more convenient.

Most of the fall harvest comes here to the farm, either to the grain dryer (usually that’s the corn) or directly into storage.  But also, many loads are sent directly from the field to market to fill the contracts of corn or soybeans that were sold for harvest-time.  The trucks are quite busy during fall harvest!

I was out yesterday afternoon at the Huey farm location, spraying some herbicide on roadside johnsongrass and waterhemp.  I try to keep the appearance ‘clean’, and that is also a harvest aid for when the combines start rolling.  The Flat Right field at Huey looks especially nice right now,  I think there’s not much that is more beautiful than a field of healthy and weed-free soybeans!

Flat Right at Huey…what do you think?

I made the first payment today on the 9R 540 tractor.   It’s pretty easy to do, with the online system at JD Financial.   Of course, we look forward to the day when I’m making the last payment.

John has been doing some spraying in the soybeans…applying a fungicide.  Every acre of soybeans gets a fungicide nowadays.  It really helps the beans stay healthy and it boosts the yield.   He has also done small bit of application of glyphosate to stop johnsongrass, but that is not on every acre, just spots in fields that need it.

Here, John loads the R4044 sprayer.

When August arrives, there will be a flurry of bin-cleaning and trucking activity.  When that is caught-up, we will turn our attention to preparing the combines and trucks for fall harvest.  I look for harvest to begin a bit earlier than typical this year.  So, by Labor Day, we better have our preparations made!

Pat and I celebrated our 46th anniversary on Sunday.   It was a typical busy Sunday, so we had a lovely dinner at Biaggi’s in Evansville on Friday night to celebrate.   46 years went by pretty fast!

School starts here one week from today, but over at Washington, those kids go back this Friday!   The start of school really signals the end of summer.