Martin Family Farms

Let the Pollination begin...

As we end the month of June tassels are popping out in several fields. This will make the next couple weeks very important for weather, moisture, insect and disease management.  So far the weather for the next 7 days looks perfect with mid 80's for highs and into the 60's at night. With the wettest June Logan count has ever had we have plenty of moisture, so that leaves us to watch for bugs and disease. I am more worried about disease with all of the moisture we have gotten the past few weeks. We will be treating specific hybrids with fungicide to try and minimize these problems, but are hoping we do not have to do every field.  We are also hoping to finish up with our soybean spraying this week. With all of the wet weather I think the weeds are growing faster than the soybeans.

Summertime also means busy with the family and kids with Drew having three baseball games this week, and we are going to hopefully see the Cardinals win a game or two. Throw in some swimming at grandma;s and a little fishing (and of course mowing the yard) an no wonder time goes by fast.

It was just a matter of time....

After missing all of the big rains that surrounding areas had gotten the past few weeks, we finally took our turn  yesterday. Most of our area received between 2.5"-4" of rain in about 1 hour yesterday morning. Needless to say that there is now water everywhere. All of our ponds are full of water and the corn that was in them is now flat  from the water and wind. The drainage ditches, creeks, and streams are out of the banks, and any planting or spraying that was left to do is going to be on hold for at least a week. After having this happen the last two years also, it is kind of frustrating to see it again, especially after we had really good looking crops. Lets hope that mother nature can cooperate with us the rest of the year.

More corn growing weather.....

We are waking up to another thunderstorm this morning.  The corn is growing at a rapid pace in our area, and we should have some tassels out this week.  With more 90 degree temps predicted for this week it will once again feel like we are living in a greenhouse. After last weeks rains a lot of our ponds and low areas are still full of water which will cause some nitrogen loss and possibly stand reduction in those areas. With that said we are still looking pretty good. Last week I went about 40 miles west of here and there crops look a lot worse. A lot of yellow stunted corn and a lot of those farmers are still trying to get their soybeans planted.

This week we are going to be finishing up with spring paper work, and getting ready for the upcoming fall. With the wet fall we had we switched a lot of our soil testing to the spring. We will be evaluating those tests and preparing the rates for this fall. This fall we will be doing variable rate spreading of a lot of our dry fertilizer. This means that we will be putting fertilizer on areas of the field that need it and not spreading any where the levels are adequate.  The recommendations will be made based on the soil tests from this spring.

The boys also got a little fishing time in last week.

Rain, Rain , Rain,

As I write this we are once again getting more rain. It seems that the normal pattern the last several days has been hot and muggy all morning and then  it will rain and storm in the late afternoon. The amount of rain has varied greatly from farm to farm with most places receiving at least 2"-4" across the area. There was one area last night that received about 2" in 40 minutes.  It really does fell like we are living in a rain forest. A lot of the areas the ponds are starting to fill up with water and the crops are starting to show the effects of the standing water. However, there are some areas that have not had the heavy rain and some of those fields look tremendous. We will probably have some fields pollinating by the end of June.

Ropp Dairy Farm Tour

We spent our Saturday with our local boy scouts touring the Ropp Dairy Farm near Bloomington, Illinois. On this farm they take the milk produced from Jersey cows on there own farm and make their own cheese. Their cheese is distributed to over 90 different stores and vendors. It was very interesting to see the whole process from start to finish. We also learned about how well the animals are cared for and how important it is to having good milk production. I think that the livestock probably get better balanced and nutritious meals that a lot of people and kids do. The Ropp family mixes all of the key ingredients of a cows diet together so each mouthful of feed is a well balanced and healthy portion. They also showed us how they care for the new born calves to prevent disease and sickness. It was a fun day for all of the kids and parents. Check out www.roppcheese.com for more info. Here are the pictures of my kids at the farm.

  Left: Drew petting a new calf
 

Above: Alec learning how to hand milk a cow

Left:  Luke seeing what the calf is eating.

Another nice rain...

We received another 1.4" of rain on Tuesday night which will be very beneficial to the crops. The weatherman was calling for some heavy rain, but once again we missed the heavy stuff.  The crops are looking better each day and look like we could have decent yield potential. 

This past week we also got to be part of John Deere's product introduction video for the upcoming year. A couple of film crews and a camera man spent a few hours on the farm taping equipment, interviews and farm scenes for the upcoming video.  It was a unique and fun experience that will hopefully turn out well.

Going Good...

As we enter the second week of June we are very happy with the amount of work we have completed. We only have 2-3 days of corn spraying left and then 2 days for our beans.  They are calling for heavy rain here on Tuesday so hopefully we will miss the heavy amounts. We barely missed some bad storms here this past weekend with tornadoes touching down and heavy rain about 10 miles north of here.  It is hard to believe, but some of my first planted corn is already chest high means tassels should be out before the end of June. We have also been busy with Andy Bedolli and his tiling machine. We have been working on a couple of tiling projects while the ground is decent shape. Installing new tile is a fascinating process. It is amazing to see how the water runs into the tile as soon as it is put into the ground. Even more amazing is finding old tile that was installed decades ago by horses or dug in by hand that is working good today.

Seed Technology is working....

We were able to manage a very bad volunteer corn problem in a field with the use of smart stax corn this year. The field below was blown down last fall resulting in a lot of unharvestable ears. With all of the rain we have had this spring it has allowed a lot of those ears to sprout and grow in to volunteer corn. The new smart stax corn is resistant to two different kinds of herbicides where as the corn we planted last year was only round up resistant. This allowed us to spray on Liberty herbicide which killed the volunteer corn, but not the corn planted this year. This is only one of the ways that the seed technology is allowing us to better manage our operation.

Perfect weather....

The past week has been almost perfect in our area. With the exception of some of the very localized heavy rain last week we have had mid 80's and sun with about 1/2" of rain yesterday. The crops (and the weeds) are really starting to grow. We have been spraying corn as fast as we can trying to get the weeds killed before the corn shades the rows. The corn planted the second week of April closed the rows this weekend with the rest closely behind. When we have a big planting window like we did this year it can make spraying kind of hectic when the crop is growing fast. There are still some fields that are showing some problems and others that look pretty good. Our frost damaged corn looks really good compared to 3 weeks ago. It is amazing how mother nature can fix her own problems. This week we will still be spraying and getting things cleaned up around the farm. We have some other projects we are working on and I think we are going to get some tile installed in a few places while the crops are still small.

The picture below is what it looks like on our long term no-till/strip-till farms after a good rain. Notice the tracks in the soil. These are left from all of the earthworms coming to the top. This whole field looked like this. They do more tillage and good for the soil than any mechanical form of tillage.