Summer Update
I hope this post finds everyone happy, healthy, and enjoying the summer so far. It’s been a busy couple of months for us! Since my last post, we have planted, sprayed, sidedressed, and sprayed again! One more spray trip over everything, and that will be the last of the field work until harvest. Summer is going by so fast! Our first planted sweet corn is almost ready, the field corn is tall and starting to tassel, and the soybeans are starting to get their first pods, so it will be harvest time before we know it!
The planting season went really well. We started the season earlier than we ever have before by planting soybeans on April 4th. The weather started to turn dry about the middle of planting season, but other than that, conditions were good. We finished planting both corn and soybeans on May 7th. Our one hiccup was with the strip till bar. Our plan was to strip till all of the ground ahead of the soybean planter. But, after a couple of days in the field, the strip till bar’s wings collapsed when we were moving it down the road. Luckily, no one was hurt and we were able to get it off the road and home safely. But we had to park it for the rest of the season. The warm and dry weather really helped the crops come out of the ground quickly and we were sidedressing nitrogen by May 13th. The dry spell continued for a couple of weeks, but then we got a much needed rain, which really helped everything out. Concerning rainfall, our area of Bureau County has been extremely lucky. Other parts of Illinois have been too dry, while others have been too wet. But we have seemed to straddle the two extremes and have gotten rain when we needed it, without strong storms or excessive rainfall. Things are looking good going into corn pollination too. The weather forecast shows cooler temperatures and rain, exactly what we like to see. We will probably start applying corn and soybean fungicide in the next week or so. The corn fungicide is applied aerially, and we apply the soybean fungicide with our ground sprayer. We apply fungicide every year, but we think it might be a little more important this year. Even thought we have had some hot and sunny spells, we have also had quite a bit of cooler and cloudy weather, which can promote disease. By applying fungicide, we are hoping to protect our crops from that, and keep them healthy and strong until harvest. After those two trips are done, we have done pretty much all we can for the 2021 crop, and all we can do is wait!
One of the thing I have been doing the past several years is taking a photo of our last planted field every year on June 29th. It started out as an accident. In 2019 a “One Year Ago Today” memory came up on my phone, so I decided to take another picture, in 2020 the same thing happened, and now it’s become kind of a tradition. It’s been interesting to see how different some years are, and how similar other years look. In 2018, we had corn tasseling. In 2019 we had only been done planting for a couple of weeks. Last year we were a couple of weeks from our (second) major wind storm, the one that would do the most damage to the crops here. Hopefully things will stay calm this year and things will continue to look as good as they did on June 29th!
We can also finally close the book on the bin site damage from last year. We finished all repairs on June 1st, it is a huge relief to have that completed. We know that there are many farmers in the country who are still struggling to get their grain systems put back from storms last summer, and we are keeping them in our thoughts.
I will be back sometime in August to post a pre-harvest update. In the meantime, please check out our socials, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, to keep up with us. One of my summer goals is to be more active on those platforms, so follow us if you aren’t already! We hope you enjoy the rest of your summer, stay safe!
