Post flooding, the beans that are left are looking great! Scouting for aphids is next on the list. After a couple of times out, it was determined that spraying would pay off in 2018. Normally scouting is much more prolonged but the aphids were coming hard and fast with exploding populations!
After years of struggling through harvest with limited corn storage, we took the leap this year to construct a second corn bin. When the original bin was constructed in the min 1980s, corn yields were far below what they are today. With the increase in yield, as well as expansion of acres, we were spending more time than we liked hauling corn to the elevator during harvest to make room for what was still standing in the fields. In years where time is short, this can cause major disruptions in getting the crop out of the fields in a timely manner. Lacking storage also takes away marketing opportunities and forces sales when the prices are usually at their worst.
To prepare the site we had to remove the black down to clay. Power lines had to be worked around carefully. An excavator and dump truck were used to remove the dirt. After that, pack-able fill was hauled in, spread on the pad site in layers and packed with a rented, remote controlled, packer.
Spring 2018 brought plenty of water for our area of Minnesota. June alone brought us about 8″ of rain. We were handling the frequent rains ok until the July 3 rain hit. We received 4-5 inches of rain overnight. This was followed by another 1.5″ of rain over the noon hour on July 3. Needless to say, it was over for any chance of crops doing well in low lying areas. Fields were so full that water was flowing across roads to the neighboring field. Crossing through flowing water was quite risky because you never know if the water washed the road away. Drainage ditches overflowed and water remained across some roads for weeks.
University of MN Bean Plot
Water flowing from right to left.
Ponding across the road.
Best laid plans….. This was the year for us to try something new in our corn fields. We have been experiencing root and stalk issues the past few years and feel that the cultivator is the culprit. Our plan was to do different trials consisting of 1) no cultivation 2) early cultivation but not ridging and 3) early cultivation followed by ridging. We managed to get the first cultivation in in a timely manner while the plants were still small. We left the cut away discs down to be as aggressive as possible with our weed control. On our ridging pass, the plan was to raise the cut aways and just use the sweep with ridging wings. This plan was thwarted by the onslaught of rains that followed. By the time things let up, the corn was tasseling. So much for trial 3.
Planting soybeans on ridges.
Ridges after planting soybeans.
It took until May 16 to get rolling in soybeans. A couple of weeks later than ideal but there are places south and east of us that are continuing to struggle with water issues preventing them from planting corn. This year is a little different than what we’ve done for seedbed preparation prior to soybean planting. Most of our planting is still on ridges but we do have one field that is following corn that wasn’t ridged in 2017. To prepare that seedbed we did a fall pass and a spring pass with our Excelerator vertical till machine. The results were beyond expectations! We couldn’t have asked for a better seedbed.
Planting was finally under way on May 5. It’s been a long wait this spring but there are areas of Minnesota and Iowa that continue to get rains with no end in sight. We have a window of opportunity that needs to be taken advantage of by covering a lot of acres in as short of a time as possible. That’s the same race that happens every spring in one form or another. It’s a race against weather, field conditions, yields etc. Every day, this late in the season, impacts our corn and soybean final yields.
May 4th was our first day of working a field for spring corn planting. The weather was perfect and soil conditions were close to ideal. The field that we had tiled last fall was the first field ready for us. Nothing beats tile helping pay for itself the first year it’s used!
On May 3, as the fields start to dry out from our extended winter, we were able to do some leveling of the tile lines we installed last fall. We borrowed a modified disc from our neighbor to accomplish this task. This worked much better than what we’ve done in the past using our Sunflower brand chisel. Planting has not started yet but we will do our first tillage for planting tomorrow.
This spring we traded off our, quite reliable but aging, Polaris Ranger for a 2018 model. As we were visiting with the dealer about how we could protect the dump bed from getting scuffed up when picking rocks, he mentioned that he has been looking for someone to build a steel bed liner that could easily be inserted for protection. With nothing available locally, and nothing found on the internet, Dennis and I proceeded to draw up plans to manufacture our own version. We acquired some sheet metal from a neighbor that is in the business and proceeded with our plans. We are quite pleased with how the dump box turned out and it worked well for this spring’s rock picking season.
