Monday, October 7, 2024

Even though there is another hurricane bearing down on Florida this week, the weather forecast for here is wonderful for fall harvest.  There are temps in the 70s and 80s with full sunshine for every day in the week ahead.  We should be able to make good progress on #harvest24.

Larry has begun planting wheat.  We use a slightly different method here, broadcasting the wheat seed blended in with the granular fertilizer.  Then, we typically use a disk to work the seed/fertilizer mixture into the soil.   That has been our method of planting wheat here for 20+ years, rather than use a drill to plant the seed.  We think this eliminates putting more acres on the very expensive no-till drill.

In very recent years, we have become disappointed in the way the disk incorporates the seed.   Years ago, we pulled a separate roller behind the disk.  That worked quite well, but had some drawbacks. That mulching roller was high maintenance, and it made for a very long, strung-out setup.  So, we had the idea to trade the pull-type roller for a model that fastened directly to the back of the disk.  That was wonderful for disking corn stalks, but for this particular task, it was just too much weight on the back of the disk for it to perform properly… the front blades just did not engage the soil normally, and the whole result was not uniform.  Because we want to plant wheat in an excellent manner, we are doing a ‘demo’ of a new type of implement called vertical tillage.  This seems to do this wheat planting task quite well.

Wheat planting at Carnahan & Sons.

Nutrien puts down the wheat and granular fertilizer

Then, Larry comes along with a disk to incorporate the mixture into the soil.

Testing the new vertical tillage implement.

This tool does a much more uniform job of working the seed into the soil.  We will be searching for such a tool for next year’s wheat.  And, in addition, this implement will work corn stalks quite well, too.  It will be a reasonable upgrade to the farm.

Harvest is about at the halfway mark.

It is a busy morning at Carnahan & Sons.    We have 3 trucks taking corn to GPC and to Anson’s.  Brandon D is out with the backhoe, pushing out a couple fallen trees from two field edges.  Larry is out in the 9R540 planting wheat.  We will be headed to the corn field around 10 am, once the dew burns off.

Looking forward to this good-weather week.