DONE WITH HARVEST!

I know it’s been a while since I posted, but I’m going to use the excuse that I’ve been busy!  What a great Fall we have had.  We cut our first soybeans on September 14th and we were rained out for four days later that week.  Since September 18th, we just haven’t stopped.  The weather has been super and we’ve had so many beautiful sunsets to enjoy.  The most important part of our Fall is that it has been safe and relatively trouble-free.  No combine fires!

You can never get tired of days like these.

Our final average yield for soybeans was 56.2 bushels per acre.  Our ten-year average for soybeans is 56.2   I guess you could say our beans were average.  After the challenges we’ve experienced this year, we are real happy with average.  Soybeans seem to be just a little more adaptable to tough conditions than corn.

The corn has a few more variables as we grow seed corn, waxy corn, regular corn, amylose corn, and popcorn.  Overall, our corn is going to be about 70% of our ten-year average.  Kind of a bummer, but it could have been worse.

This is a popcorn field, in an area where water damaged the corn.

The same field of popcorn where the water was drained away.

It is great to have some good weather still in the forecast as we will continue to do some fall spraying, fertilizer application, drainage work, and some light tillage.  There are some guys that are taking the attitude that with all of the rain we had this year, they are going to chisel plow or rip as much ground as they can.  We are really not buying into that.  Yes, we had a lot of rain, but there are really not that many acres that water ponded on and caused compaction.  We had virtually no compaction this Fall as it was so dry that we never left a track.  So we are staying on the course that says to stay off of the ground as much as possible and no-till what we can to conserve soil.

Special thanks to our guys… Tony Richardson, Bob Basey, Parker Jones, Trent Richardson, Brian Smith, Jeff Jones, Guy Schafer, Dennis Carrell, and to our one girl, Ashley.  They really are a great team.  What a blessing to work with a group like this!

Parker and Trent get us ready to go on another beautiful morning.