November 13 2009

Greetings,

Mid November and corn harvest just beginning! Most local elevators are not taking corn yet, but will probably start next week. Most people around the local area are getting done with beans and are starting corn if they have there own drying facilities. The moistures are in the mid 20's for the most part. The rain today will not help but I heard one forecast this morning saying that next week will be real good with temperature in the 60's. Let's hope so. I think the bean yields were heavily influenced by soil wetness. If you had good well drained ground yields were high 40's to low 50's. Other complicating factors were population and planting date. The more population the better, depending on white mold of course, and early seeding was better. Our variety was Pioneer 90M92 which stood up well and looked good.

The corn looks good. Early reports talk of high bushels low test weight and moisture that seems to be coming down on at least some varieties. I think next week corn harvest will be getting pushed very hard. It is really late and and there a lot of acres to cover. Mold is present and easy to find but I have not seen anything that worries me. There is some stalk problems in the corn on corn in the plots. Not really sure what is going on. It is affecting several varieties and some of them are in our variety trial which is on soybean ground and there are no problems there.

Cover crops have been fun this year. I have been very impressed at how the turnip, radish, and rape have continued to grow in the cold and are still growing even as of today. We decided on the spur of the moment to put on some extra nitrogen. I put some 28% in the atv sprayer, replaced the nozzles with streamer nozzles and took off down the middle of the plot. 138 lbs nitrogen was a rough estimate of what got applied. Please look at thumbnails 4,5 and 6. The difference is very apparent. Our plan for next year is to plug an application into a rotation to see if the nitrogen will be there for the following crop.

The winter wheat finally grew a little last week. It is definitely showing the affects of the cold October we had with just 1 1/2 leafs in flax stubble. They always talk about killing the winter wheat at least three times before having a record yield so I am just going to wait till spring to see what we have.

Good luck with harvest and lets hope the snowmobilers have a disappointing season until at Christmas! (yea, I know some of you guys got sleds too:)

Have a good week.

Kelly Cooper- farm manager