Hi Everyone!

I’m sorry I haven’t given a farm update in quite a while.  I could try to come up with an excuse, but I got nothin.   My last update was after our trip to Kenya in March.  You’d think I would have sent a Spring update and now we’ve moved right on to summer.  The bottom line to the 2016 crop season is that things look good!

Getting the planters ready to roll.

The Spring was wet, but nothing like last year.  Last year we had several BIG rains where we would get 3 or 4 inches at a time.  This year, the rains came often, but without big quantities at a time.  It was tough to get in the fields but we were always just a couple of dry days away from trying.  Our timeliness for planting ended up being ok.  One big thing about evaluating how good a crop can be is to know how much the crop has been under stress.  This crop has been under very little stress so far.

One of my favorite days of the Spring… rockin’ with my girls! (picking rocks out of the fields)

My favorite crop to harvest! Blue skies, golden wheat.

We have been raising more wheat each year.  There are several reasons to raise wheat… it is good for the soil, it is harvested at a different time of the year (early July) so it spreads the workload, it leaves the field in good shape to work on drainage, and it’s a daggone pretty crop to look at.  The only problem with wheat is that it is hard to make money at it.  So we are really trying to get the most out of a wheat crop.  This means that we are really trying to raise high wheat yields.  This year we had the best wheat yields we have ever had.  Our best field made 114 bushels per acre when our long-term average is more like 80.

Thanks for catching up with us.  I will try to keep updated more often!  Please contact me if you have any questions or comments.

Don