This spring has been extremely busy here on the farm. In addition to the usual work of hauling grain and repairing equipment we have been working on a construction project. We had to replace the grain bins that hold wet grain out of the field to feed our grain dryer. They were built in the early 1970s and had rusted out.
To build the replacement, the old bins had to be lifted out with a crane, hauled off with a tractor, the concrete pads that they sat on had to be removed and the concrete moved.
After the old bins were gone, we had to dig out a new footing for the new bin, then pack it with gravel for stability. Then new concrete was poured and finally the new bin erected. The old grain bins were ripped apart with our grapple and skid steer and scrapped. This work was spread out over the course of a couple weeks but took up a lot of our time.
Luckily for getting that work done, this is our first year planting organic corn so we had a little extra time to get the machinery ready. We started planting corn on may 12th, which was a little earlier than we planned and we were able to plant our 50 hybrid corn plot in great conditions.
The weather that week was very warm and dry so the corn flew out of the ground. We want the corn to emerge as fast as possible so that it can out-compete any weeds that might germinate after we complete our first post planting tillage passes.
This year we added a new tool for weeding our fields after we plant (also known as blind weeding) called a tine weeder. The last two years we solely used a rotary hoe for blind weeding and we had no back up for if the rotary hoe broke down and that caught up to us.
The tine weeder uses long angled tines and spring pressure to rip out weeds when they are very very small. Its slower but more aggressive than our rotary hoe. It took us some time to learn to set it, but once we did it works great.
We followed up corn by planting our last round of transitional soybeans. This is our last group of fields that we are transitioning. We also are going through the organic certification process and inspection all while planting.
The wheat crop is looking good, and we will likely start harvesting that crop at the end of June. As of may 16th the wheat had started to head out and looks like it has pretty good yield potential.
We have several fertilizer trials going on in our wheat crop and were really looking forward to seeing how those trials work out.
Following our wheat crop we are planning to plant a cover crop consisting of field peas and radishes on about half our wheat acres, while the other half has clover already planted. The covers serve to build soil, control weeds and provide nutrients for the next years corn crop. Were trying multiple versions just for fun.
We have a lot of experiments this year.