CCSP -No till Farm
Greetings,
Merry Christmas from the combine! Not very often you hear that around here. Many people are finished or close around the Forman and Oakes area. I just heard that North Dakota is 55% percent complete on corn, so there is a lot left else where in the state. Getting stuck will no longer be a problem as frost is going down rapidly. I was visiting with a soil sampler this morning and he said frost was down to 18 inches in some spots. Just 11 days ago on December 1, I was waiting for a little surface frost to do the strip tilling. By noon the next day I was using 85% of the tractor horsepower as compared to 45% on unfrozen ground and it has been getting tougher ever since. The soil sampler told me the frost appeared to advance 6 inches in one day. Our snow cover is sparse as seen in the photos taken Thursday.
The corn did yield very well in the plots this year. We were lucky enough to finish the weekend before Thanksgiving . Thanks to Dave R.'s skill in preventative maintenance. Not one breakdown. Getting the corn into the elevator was the biggest problem. With nearly all corn wet, dryer speed was slow, and of course nothing could be piled. It has been a tough fall for the elevator crews as well. Please click on the link to see the corn yields. You will see that unlike last year, corn seeded into undisturbed wheat stubble was the lowest yielding. No surprise that when moisture is limiting tillage takes valuable moisture away. But before you decide that everything needs to be plowed up, look at the highest yielding rotation, undisturbed alfalfa that was sprayed out in the fall of '08. The alfalfa plots were very consistent and out yielded the strip tilled soybeans by 18 bushel. Of course the flip side of that was the alfalfa plots producing some of the lowest yielding corn in 08. I have considered a rotation where wheat is seeded into the alfalfa plots instead of corn. With the high yielding wheat varieties, the nitrogen release may not be enough to cause lodging.
Have a good week.
Kelly Cooper- farm manager
Corn, strip tilled corn, strip tilled flax, and winter wheat on flax.
Thanks Roger for Taking the photo's!
click on thumbnails for a larger picture.