Nov 17 2007

November 17, 2007

Greetings,

All combining, strip tilling, and late spraying are done on the farm. The NTX 5310 strip till machine donated by Titan Machinery did a wonderful job. We experimentally put down some liquid fertilizer this year for the first time with the strip till. I was a little cautious not knowing how the old sprayer we used as a tank/pump was going to function but the system appeared to function fine.

Harvest reports-The best bean plot was 49 bushels, with most of the plots in the low 40's. It appeared that the higher nitrogen plots did better. I thought the high n plots looked better from the start, and on the combine we could see more growth.

The corn was likewise. The rotation with alfalfa was best there also. The best corn plots was 203 bushels, with many in the 150-180 range. The poorest was the corn on corn. As mentioned earlier, we went to RTK planting this year, which kept us from strip tilling, and planting in between the rows. The strip till unit worked like a dump rake when crossing the corn rows. When the planter went through the rows the seed did not get placed well. We knew this would happen, but this fall we can strip till between the rows and hopefully yields will improve. Walt Albus at the Oakes field trials said his strip tilled corn on corn did very well this year. The biggest problem on our corn on corn was stand, but even where stand was good the yield was around 135. Some plots had harvest population as low as 14K. We seemed to have more pheasant and blackbird damage on the corn on corn plots. I am speculating that they have been in corn plots finding corn all year so they just started on the new crop as it was planted.

We did a strip till/no strip till multi side by side on one of our bulk areas. The strip till did over 7 bushels better. We also conducted a multi pass test of Avail/no-Avail on 2 different varieties on another bulk area. I do not have the statistics run but just looking at the raw numbers nothing is jumping out. It was my guess that nitrogen ran out too fast this year. I am hearing that much of the corn on corn did not do well, but there was some success. The disappointments seemed to cover both tilled and no till practices.

Overall I would have to say it was a good year. Not that things could not have been better. The high prices are causing us all to pause. It is hard to believe that selling wheat at 6.08, and beans at 7.56 would prove to be a mistake. Yet selling corn at 3.60 last spring turned out to be pretty good.

Another surprise is the low availability of diesel and ammonia. Although I have not heard that anybody was actually shut down, most dealers were rationing. Field work appears to be just about finishing up, so supplies will probably build. A couple weeks ago it was looking a little scary.

Have a good week and a happy Thanksgiving.

Kelly Cooper- farm manager