Martin Family Farms

Spring Fever.....

    With all of the warm weather we have been able to get everything ready to roll into the upcoming planting season. The corn planters, sprayers, and tillage equipment are ready to go and hopefully it won't be long. This year we have very little work to do ahead of planting the crop. With the nice fall weather we had last year a lot of the prep work got done so now all we have to do is plant.   We have also taken delivery of our trees  and hope to begin planting those sometime this week.  We have also been able to take advantage of some of the calm days to do some of our annual prairie grass burning. Every year this activity amazes me and makes me wonder what it used to look like before the land was farmed and it was all prairie. What a sight that must have been.  This upcoming week we will be fine tuning the spring plans and doing some " catch up" jobs before we get too busy to do them.

 
burning one of our filter strips

Worth listening to.....

This week on the farm we attended Farm Credit College on Monday and had the opportunity to listen to Dr. Donald Jonovic. In all of the meetings that we have been to I would say that his presentation was one of the best that I have ever heard in terms of family farming. He described with pinpoint accuracy the situations and decisions that are dealt with on the farm and with different members of the family. I would like to take the rest of the family to hear him speak again. The following presentation was about Estate Planning and what people should to to protect their farms and investments. One can never underestimate the importance of having plans made.

The rest of the week we are getting the rest of our spring machinery out and fine tuning the corn planter.  Mother nature is finally going to provide us with some warmer temperatures, but hopefully she will keep the rain away from our area.  Our soil moisture is very adequate and any kind of significant rain would probably put us into the flood category. 

I also wanted to congratulate my son Drew for passing the Hunter Safety Course this past week !!

 

Busy times.....

    Wow, it is hard to believe that planting season is right around the corner.  This has probably been the busiest March we have had in a long time, and that does not count the work on the farm.  Erin and I are just getting the tip of the ice berg with activities with the kids and community.  We did manage to wrap up the end of basketball season last week and are now doing sign ups for summer baseball.  Coaching the kids has probably become my new favorite thing to do.  Being able to see the look on there faces and see them improve from beginning to end is a very rewarding experience.  School board activities have been really busy recently with our county getting ready to vote on a 1cent sales tax in April. I am not a proponent of any more taxes, but I support this one. The money from this one will stay in the county and be used to help upgrade our school facilities. A lot of the money will come from people outside of our district who travel and shop in our county. This will give some relief to our local property owners and allow us to keep our schools up to date. 

We did manage to get in all of our seed corn and began some site prep for the new shed I am putting up this summer. We had to clear about 2 acres of trees and will have to move some dirt to get the ground level. 

We had about 1.5 inches of rain this week and the next 10 days look dry which means that fieldwork will be here before we know it.

 clearing trees for the new shed
 seed delivery 2011