As we enter the first week of May we only have 100 acres of corn left to plant. We also hope to get our soybeans planted this week. We are a little behind on spraying due to the strong winds we had this week. I think we had wind gusts between 45-50 mph on Thursday and Friday. Not only did this keep us from spraying,but it blew a lot of the trash from the fields into ditches, yards, and covered up a lot of the rows that were planted with the trash. This will probably cause some uneven emergence where this has happened. A lot of our corn is up or will be this week. We had a light shower on Friday night and about 1/4" on Saturday night. These little showers really made a big difference and will allow a lot of the corn that was in hard soil to emerge and be productive. We are still finding very hard and mucky soils with all of the dry weather we are having. I do not think they will get any better this year. Hopefully we can get some fall work done this year and correct a lot of the problems still left from 2009. Below is a picture of the difference in seed size when conditions do not allow for uniform planting depth. We do have some of this in certain areas, but it is not widespread. These two plants were next to each other. The big one was planted at normal depth, the smaller one was in a hard/dry spot that had to wait for a rain to germinate.
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