Martin Family Farms

With harvest well behind us field work and fall anhydrous applications are in full swing in central Illinois. The soil temperature and conditions are almost ideal for fall field work and mother nature has been cooperating with the weather. We have had some small amounts of rainfall in the past couple of weeks but nothing to keep us out more than a day. However, it would be nice to get a couple of inches of rain in the ground before winter gets here. I do not think there are any field tiles that have water in them now which is not good for subsoil moisture going into spring. We are also trying to catch up on all of the fall bookwork and getting organized before the end of the year gets here. Oh Yeah and we went to see the Cardinals win the World Series last week in St. Louis. What an experience that was. Erin and I took Drew and Alec down to the game and I have not and probably will not ever see anything like it again in my life. Going to a game 7 and seeing your team win is one of the few things in sports that ever happen so we are still trying to soak it all in.

Does it get any better than this? This week has brought an end to the 2011 harvest on our farm. This combined with the Cardinals making it to the NLCS is making it a pretty good week in my book. We were able to finish up with harvest on Monday, which was probably the earliest that we have finished in a long time. It was a nice ending to harvest finishing up at home with the kids out of school (Colombus Day) and everyone riding in the combine, auger wagon, or truck. Overall I wish we would have had better yields, but with all of the heat and lack of rain I am happy we had a crop and can focus on the 2012 growing season. Now we will be getting the fall field work into full swing, putting the combines away and getting ready to apply anhydrous when the soil temperatures cool down.

As we enter into the first of October we are very happy with the progress that we have made. By the end of the week we should be done with all of the corn (except for some replant) and caught up with the soybeans that are ready. Our first soybean yields were pretty good and better than expected in a couple of the better drained fields. Our best soybeans were the fields that followed multiple years of corn. Corn yields are still holding up pretty decent. We have had some pretty bad spots, but the overall yield will be better than we thought (but still way below the 5 year average). One thing we have noticed is some of our replant corn spots have been yielding a lot better than the original planting. We have also noticed that the corn following soybeans is also 30-50 bushel better than multiple years of corn on corn. I think this is mainly due to some of the heavy rains we had this spring causing us to lose some of our nitrogen. Tillage operations are in full swing on the farm. We have been running our new Salford over a lot of our strip till acres and have been doing a little chiseling in a few farms. The weather looks good this week so hopefully we can make some more progress as we try to finish up with harvest.