Martin Family Farms : May 2010

Nice week...

Despite all of the locally heavy rainstorms around the area this week we only received a few light showers in a few places. Areas as close as 10-20 miles receive between 3"-7" of rain this week. A lot of flash flooding in those isolated areas. We have managed to finish up with nitrogen application and gotten a good start on our post emergence corn spraying. There is a lot of variation showing up in different fields. Some of the fields (mainly bean stubble ground) are looking very good, however a lot of the corn on corn ground is starting to show problems from compaction, nitrogen burn, and being to wet. One of our area agronomists said it is the worst looking corn on corn crop he has ever seen. Hopefully, with some help from mother nature we can overcome these problems, but there is still a lot of uncertainty.

May 28, 2010 6:06:25 AM

Just what the doctor ordered....

We are going from furnace weather to air conditioning in just a few days as it really feels like summer now. With lots of sun and 90 degree temps it is just what the doctor ordered for the corn and soybeans in the area. In just two days we have noticed significant growth in some of the corn. Hopefully the weeds will be coming also, so we can begin spraying this week and start to finish up with the spring season. With a good week of weather we will finish up with sideressing, and just have spraying left.

It was kind of nice having a weekend in May when we were not in the field. We kicked off the 2010 summer baseball season, went fishing, cleaned up the yard, and took the kids arrowhead hunting.

May 24, 2010 6:59:00 AM

We need some sun...

Once again we missed a lot of the flooding rains that occurred this week . We did have another 1.5"-2.0" on most of our farms. There was some water standing on Monday, but it has soaked in now and I do not think we will have any crop loss form ponding. After looking at the frosted corn we have decided to let it grow out of it. We might have some minimal stand reduction and some uneven plants, but we met with 2 different agronomists and both agreed that the plant would recover fine.

This week we are reviewing all of our planting maps, scouting, and getting ready for the next dry spell. When it dries up we will be finishing with nitrogen sidressing on corn, and we will begin spraying our post emergence corn.

We also managed to get a little fishing time in with the kids this week. The bluegill at our pond were hitting pretty good which made for some exciting fishing. Grandpa and Luke below enjoying the first bluegill of the season.

May 19, 2010 8:39:15 AM

We got lucky...

With all of the heavy rains that have fallen over Illinois this week we only received between 1'-2" inches and avoided all of the flooding. Both northern and southern Illinois have had 4"-5" rains that caused a lot of flooding and probably crop loss. Fortunately our rain was just right. All of our corn is now emerged and soybeans are just coming thorough the ground. So far everything is looking pretty good, but we are going to have to keep getting rains to get the roots to grow in the tight soil conditions that we have.

Today we are going to make a final determination on our frost damaged corn. It is looking better, but still not sure if it will make it. We will have to decide if the cost and timeliness of replanting will be more cost effective and offer better yield potential than leaving the crop that is out there.

This year we added the swath control to our planter. This shuts off the planter automatically when it meets another area that has been planted (example...end rows & point rows). It eliminates over planting, and reduces stand ability problems on the ends. Below is a picture of what it looks like along our end rows. Notice there is no over planting.

May 14, 2010 7:28:17 AM

Always something....

With the great start to the growing planting season we knew it could not be that good all year. This past Sunday morning we had a pretty good frost in our area. At first it did not seem to bad, but after looking at some fields yesterday we are going to have some really uneven corn now. As long as the growing point is below the ground the plant will continue to grow and push out the dead leaf material, but it will be shorter than the plant next to it which will cause some unwanted competition. It is not bad in every field, but we do have some that we will have to watch later in the week to see if we will need to replant or take what we can get. Some of the counts that I took yesterday had 15%-70% of the plants effected.

On the bright side we are waking up to about 1.7" of rain in the gauge this morning. This is the "soaker" that we needed. This will really help the rest of the corn and soybean plants emerge and let the roots grow down into the soil.

Here is a good plant on the left and frost damage on the right

May 11, 2010 5:47:42 AM

WERE DONE!!!!

After a really good stretch of weather this past week we finished up with both corn and soybean planting. We also finished up with corn and bean chemical application for the first time. We have a few acres of nitrogen left to sideress but we are very happy to have a lot of work done. This is definitely the earliest I have ever finished with planting since I have started. Last year we did not start planting corn until the first week of May. However, every spring does have challenges. This year I would say that the soil conditions are probably the biggest obstacle we have faced. As I have said in the past the ground is very hard and mucky underneath the top 2 inches. This has caused some uneven corn emergence and even some decreased population. I do think this is in isolated fields and not really wide spread. A lot of our populations look really good and with some good growing conditions will raise a very good crop. Now it is time to start scouting for cutworms, weeds, and any other problems that we might find in the fields.

Here is a picture of Alec (4) making sure the depth is o.k on the soybeans.

May 7, 2010 8:57:40 PM

Almost There....

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.