December 7 2008

December 7, 2008

Greetings,

I think this is a meaningful quote for today.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way......

Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
English novelist (1812 - 1870)

And harvest is still not completely over. It has indeed been an interesting fall, no matter how you look at it.

As far as the farm, it was a pretty good year. We finished the corn and did manage to get the strip tilling done. Try clicking on the link in the pictures and if all goes well you will get into youtube and see the video that I shot while doing some soybean stubble. I had done this area before in the same manner, strip tilling 8 rows then leaving 8 rows. The results in 2007 were 7 bushels more corn where strip tilled. This year it appeared that saving moisture was paramount to yield. Our neighbors on the 1/4 to the north of ours said the soybeans they had there were the poorest of all the land they farm. A pretty good indication of how dry we were compared to the rest of our local area. The hot winds of Labor Day weekend took their toll on the later maturing corn. It was also apparent the the more residue left on the surface the better the corn. Although a plot in the C rotation did very well at 180 bushels, it was a plot that was very wet. I think that Mr. Nelson and I spent several hours cleaning mud out of the gauge wheels in order to finish planting this spring and that was the last plot. The plots where wheat stubble was left undisturbed, no strip tilling and no residue managers was probably the best performing plots when taking into consideration landscape position. Also doing well were the plots that had fall cover crop peas planted into winter wheat. Even with the strip tilling there was a lot of residue that apparently preserved moisture in the summer in spite of using up moisture in the fall of 07. We will continue our work with cover crops as this was an interesting discovery this year.

The corn on corn variety trials were somewhat disappointing. It appears that even with strip tilling and added fertilizer yields were not comparable to 1rst year corn. How much this had to do with deep moisture in not known. Our corn on alfalfa did not fare the best either. The alfalfa ground is the best or one of the poorest depending on moisture. This year had abundant early season moisture so one would think that there would not be any difference but there was.

Have a good week.

Kelly Cooper- farm manager