Farm Friday

Soybean pods are formed and also need to fill out!

Corn cobs are formed - now need to fill out!

It is time to check on our corn and bean plants and see what they've been up to for the last few weeks.  Our weather has settled into an almost fall like state - not good - we need more heat days to get the corn and beans to produce.  The ears of corn are just starting to form and the bean pods are working on filling up.  This is a very crucial time on the farm as without those ears and pods we have no crop to harvest.  This year gently reminds me of 2009.

 We were visiting with a farmer friend and neighbor about that particular year.  I told him that I had been doing some scrap booking and had gotten to the harvest of 2009 and he said, "if I were you - I'd burn those pictures".  It was a h_ _ _ (you fill in the blanks) of a year and we can only look back at those memories and try to chuckle.  The pictures I was scrap booking was not so much of the actual harvest but of the guys trying to thaw out the cross over pipes at our bin site so the harvested corn kernels would go through. The corn was too wet so kept sticking and freezing in the pipes. We have our own drying system on the farm and if the corn has too high of a moisture content, we have to dry it down before we can put it in the bin.  We had a late spring - very similiar to this year - and winter came too soon!  We actually ended up harvesting about 400 acres in March 2010 - we fondly call the Spring Harvest.  The corn was dry and we hauled it right to the elevator - I guess we should have harvested all our 2009 crop in March! CRAZY!  (Sorry no photos here to share about harvest of 2009 - my great scanning option on my printer is not great at all - so to the store I will go to get a new one - arhhhh!)

Question - Why do we have our own drying system?  Like most farmers in our area, we have a set up for drying and binning some of our crop.  We do haul many bushels to our local elevator where they also have a drying system.  We can't hold all the bushels we produce (at least that's the hope) so we need to bring the extra bushels "to town" as we say.  Time is money during harvest and keeping trucks waiting in line to dump at the elevator all the time is not the best idea, so we handle our own crops at our bin site and keep harvesting rolling.

Okay, back to this year's crop.  The seeds were planted approximately 2 1/2 months ago and here is the growth stage.

Thanks for reading and looking - Still Loving Farming - Julie-

Soybeans - June 23, 2013

August 2, 2013 (took the photos before we left on our vacation)
Can you see a brownish cast to the tops of the bean plants?  This
is from spraying.  A couple of days after spray is applied for bugs
the beans shade out - the leaf will curl up into itself but than
will fan out again and be a healthy bean plant minus nasty bugs!

June 23, 2013

August 2, 2013

Corn - June 23, 2013

August 2, 2013 (can't see the hills anymore)

June 23, 2013

August 2, 2013