June 28 2007

Remember-Field day July 12!

June 28, 2007

Boy, sure wish I would have sold some corn last week. It's gotta come back, right???

We have had a whole dry week. Well, it did rain 0.10 one night and the wind blew. Just a mile south of the plots a farmstead took a little damage. The plots faired fine. I have some lodging in the winter wheat that is on pretty much old chem fallow. There were 5 plots that I could not get in to seed spring wheat in 2006 and 4 are winter wheat for 2007. I backed off the nitrogen 50 lbs but they are lush. They looked real pretty to start with. The winter wheat is at early dough, late milk. The spring wheat is at watery milk. Winter wheat is showing a lot of leaf disease, spring wheat very little. Corn is growing rapidly and like the area fields, some looks really, really nice and other plots are tough. The corn on corn looks especially bad. I was hopeful that topdressing extra nitrogen and boosting the in-furrow fertilizer would help, but no such luck. In the process of straightening the plots out with RTK this year I cross over a row or two into the neighboring plot. As soon as the corn gets into the old wheat ground there is no comparison. We will make that a stop on the tour. Axial on the spring wheat and Everest on the winter wheat sure did a nice job on the wild oats. I need to do something for the canola that keeps coming in the soybeans. Turk is doing a good job of hand weeding, but we will have to use chemical strategy next year.

Remember our field day is coming up rapidly. This year we very excited to have Joel Heitkamp from KFGO coming to do his afternoon show live from our plots from 2:00-5:00. The tours will start at 4:30 and go through out the evening. . As always we will have a good lunch which we will begin serving at 5:30. Again on the schedule we will have the soil pit, tours of the plots, and a lot of good discussions.

Have a good week.

Kelly Cooper- farm manager