week update

Greetings,

The summer is almost over, wow, what a year! Lots of rain, nice looking crops, the sloughs are bigger than ever, prevent plant is questionable, CRP getting a lot of interest, and heat units ahead of average. Sure is nice to see the corn fully dented. Dave and I were machinery hunting yesterday and we decided if it froze last night the corn would be ahead of anything last year. Probably not too far off.

We got the wheat off with nice yields but nothing record breaking. My thanks to Dave and Turk for getting the job done as I had a family function to attend to. Some scab in the winter wheat but nothing we got docked for. I will get the yields posted shortly. The winter wheat did the best on the flax and soybean ground. There was no winter kill, just drown out and early wettness issues. The spring wheat suffered from me getting to ansy to plant. The way it has been going, if you can get the seed in the ground, you do it because it may not get any drier! The corn and beans look good. I think the kernel size looks small but the row numbers are high. That's why estimating yield by just kernel number is not very accurate. As typical with a warm wet year, there are a lot of "butterfly" worms. Mostly affects beans and I have seen quite a few in the past in potatoes in these condition. There is usually plenty of foliage so spraying is generally a recreational activity. Aphid populations were low.

Over a month has passed since our field day, but I still want to thank all of you that attended and contributed. We had a beautiful day, a little breezy at times, but it kept the bugs away! Nice turn out, excellent presentations, and a great meal sponsored by Titan Machinery and Amity Technologies. One of the highlights of the tour was as always, the soil pit. This year we dug at the end of a 2009 radish cover crop plot that was planted to corn this year. The radish roots were still present, going down to the bottom of the pit which was nearly 40 inches. (click on the bottom thumbnails for a better look ). Cover crop seeding has been a bush activity for the district that is finally winding down. Our multi-state project was able to bring in additional money to fund cover crop and strip till through a special provision of the Eqip program that several producers took advantage of.

Have a good week.

Kelly Cooper- farm manager