August 22 2008

August 22, 2008

Greeting,

I want to first thank our Dickey County partners for letting me use their computer to update the website. I switched computers at work and ran into a problem with ordering a new software program.

The last month has had some nice surprises in the wheat department. The winter wheat ran in the 70 to 100 bushel range and the spring wheat in the 60-80 bushel area. Proteins were a little on the low side as can be expected with the high bushels. The winter wheat had looked good the whole year so I had expected nice yields especially with the dry weather. The spring wheat however had some issues at emergence and just did not get off to a good start. I had blamed the seed treatment for causing sticking problem in feeding down the drill tubes but am not quite sure what happened. The end result was thin and thick stands in the row. At the end, I thought the spring wheat ran out of moisture. We had the new variety "Faller" in this year which I thought held up very well. We just needed a little more rain. The neighboring yields seem to be in the same ballpark. Drier soils were in the 50 bushel range and soils with the most water holding capacity were in the 70s.

I heard one report of where someone double spread his winter wheat with left over fertilizer and the yield monitor went from 70 to 140 bushel. It was a good wheat year, so a little more fertilizer could have paid in some cases.

We were very happy with the flax with a overall 24 bushel average and nice quality. I think we could still do better. This year we had good weed control but the stand was a little thin.

Have a good week.

Kelly Cooper- farm manager