Martin Family Farms

It is hard to beleive that we are already in the last week of September and we are on the downhill side of harvest. Although we did start the end of August we are still making good progress. Yields have still been variable, but where we did have some rain we had some really good corn. It is amazing the difference a one inch rain made on some of these farms that were lucky enough to get one in July. That one inch of rain probably made those farms another $300 per acre in gross revenue. We have not cut any soybeans yet, but will this upcoming week. I have not heard any reports from area farmers about the beans but I am not getting my hopes up. This past week we also started using our new HD Extreme Salford machine to help get the stalks ready for anhydrous application later this fall. Although we did make some good progress this week we also had our share of breakdowns. Repairs included bearings in a transmission on a semi, snapping rolls and slip clutch on corn head, header control sensors, and last but not least one of the combines threw a rod through the wall of the engine. Thanks to Cross Bros. for keeping us rolling the last few days. Hopefully next week will be a little less eventful and get us closer to the finish line.

We are finally waking up to a rainy day here for the first time in over two months. The only problem is it's too late to do a lot of good for the crop. The heat last week pretty much finished off the corn and turned the soybeans from green to yellow in two days. Harvest is progressing good while we are coverin a lot of acres we are not getting the bushels we had hoped for. There are several good spots in the fields, but there are also several bad spots which translates to a lot of variablitliy within a field. We are about 25% done with corn harvest which is the most we have ever had done at this point in the year. The corn is really starting to dry so it looks like harvest will continue in full swing during the uopcoming week.

Rough First Week

The first full week of harvest 2011 is almost in the books and it has been a rough one when it comes to yields. A lot of variability is what we have seen so far. 60-225 is what the yield monitor has hit this week with most field averages coming in 50-75 bushel below our 5 year average. We are hopefull that we will have some better fields, but also know that in the dry areas that there will be some bad ones. We do have some farms that have not had any rain in over 2 months. The soybeans need a rain really quick as the beans in the pods now are pinhead size and will probably not amount to much. Lets hope for a better week ahead.