Been a slow last week here from the crop standpoint. Received 2.5-4.5 inches of rain last week and started off Monday and Tuesday both with rain and another 1/2 inch. We have around 375 acres of corn in the ground and are ready to roll on both corn and soybeans at the same time here in the next few days.
Time has been spent treating soybeans and taking care of the seed business along with coaching my son’s USSSA baseball team. A few pics from the week are below.
Well, after quite a bit of time off from the blog, here we go again. Been a busy 2013 so far. All of our crops are in the ground for this year and have all emerged. We will be raising popcorn, white corn, yellow corn, alfalfa and prairie hay this year.
We welcomed a full time employee to our operation this year. Mason is a graduate of Hastings College and had worked for us part time while attending college and playing college football. He graduated in December and started work for us at the beginning of the year. We are happy to have him helping us.
I have spent a lot of time this year coaching a USSSA 8u Hastings Brickyard Bombers baseball team. Coaching 8 year old kid pitch baseball has been a great experience. To see where the kids are now compared to the beginning of the year and to see them start to have some success has been very gratifying. It has been a year of fundamentals and learning how to play the game the right way. The main thing we want out of our team is for them to look at us at the end of the year and say they can’t wait to play next year.
We broke from our color scheme on the farm this year and bought a John Deere tractor which has brought me much joy(sarcasm) in the form of all the ribbing I have taken from friends and neighbors.
Weather has created some interesting situations this year also. We have had a flipped pivot, some minor hail, gone from dry to wet and experienced relatively cool temperatures so far outside of one 100 degree day.
We have also decided after two years of subdivision living that it is time to be back on the farm and will start the construction of our new house in the next couple weeks. The mailbox is up, plans are done and we are off and running with it. I spend a lot of time talking about the disconnect from agriculture in our society and we felt like we were contributing to that with our children. There are many benefits of subdivision living like neighbors, kids for our kids to play with, socialization, etc, but we also enjoy the peace, family, responsibility, work ethic, freedom and privacy living on the farm provides us. So, back to the home place we go! Wishing you a safe and prosperous spring and summer season. The Weeks Family
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It has been a very busy summer here as we have been in one of the worst droughts I have seen. We have caught a few timely rains here that other areas of the state have not. Our non-irrigated corn is just barely hanging on. We will have a crop from it, but it will be less than expected. Our irrigated fields look great and yield projections for those will most likely be record yields the way it looks now as we are way ahead on Growing Degree Units and have very minimal disease and insect pressure.
The popcorn looks good this year as do all of the soybeans also. I have included a few pictures of gravity irrigation and pictures of the crops to catch you all up with what is going on. Hope to get back to posting a little more often, but mother nature and kids activities dictate my free time this time of year.
We are thankful to have the irrigation on our farms as much of this country’s ag producers are not so fortunate!
Our corn is nearing roasting ear stage and it looks like harvest will be around two weeks early this year.
Well, we finished up harvest a little over a week ago and it has been a blur of activity since then. We are shredding stalks on the gravity irrigated fields, discing up our organic quarter to return it to conventional production, drying grain in the bins to prepare the crop for winter storage, cleaning up equipment, winterizing equipment, storing equipment in the building for the winter, purchasing and making commitments for next years crop inputs, planning for next years crop and meeting with our seed customers to get next years orders.
Below are a few pictures to get you caught up on our farm happenings.
We have been very busy around here. Harvest is in full swing. We will finish with soybeans by tomorrow and switch to corn. The yields on the soybeans have been very good, but there are some larger varietal differences than I would like to see. Sounds like a front moving in will bring rain by Friday evening and we will head to Lincoln Saturday to watch the Huskers play Ohio State. We did get in a few days of goofing around before we got into harvest though.
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This is a picture of our kids and Kristi’s brother’s son as he got to explore the farm yesterday. They live in the city and this was his first chance to come to the farm for a tractor ride, explore the combine, and take a ride in the Rangers
Taking a ride in the ranger on our farm
The corn is growing quickly here and has hidden the pivot tires from view. We are around 10 days away from tasseling. The sweetcorn we planted tasseled a few days ago here.
Soybeans almost canopying the row. These soybeans are planted in 30 inch rows.
Sometimes I think Farmers get a bad rap and are accused of being
against the whole locavore, grow your own food movement. I personally do not think anything could be further from the truth. Fact is that Farmers like to grow
things. I know, ironic isn’t it, a farmer likes to get down and plant things in the dirt, nurture it, and then eat it.
We have had a garden as long as I can remember and will always continue to do so. I remember as a kid helping plant the garden and eventually, it became my little farm as I grew up. I have always loved having fresh vegetable to eat, I just wish there w
as a way to grow them in the winter when the wind chill is -20. See, I am a whateverisavailablethatisgoodforyouavore. I grow the garden in the summer and my wife sometimes goes to the local farmers market, then in the winter I rely on the southern and western US to grow the vegetables and fruits that we enjoy during that time of year.
So, since we are talking about gardening and growing your own food, what have you done this year to grow your own food? In our garden this year we have 4 varieties of tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, eggplant, jalapeno peppers, bell peppers, green beans, yellow waxy beans, asparagus, broccoli, pickling cucumbers, burpless cucumbers, acorn squash, butternut squash, butttercup squash, zucchini, yellow zucchini, gourds, pumpkins, and some sweetcorn. Let us know what you have growing and why you grow it. What do you do in the months you don’t have fresh vegetables and fruit to pick? By all means, during theses months that the farmers market are open, go for it and go local. In the middle of winter, let’s be thankful we are blessed with a phenomenal agricultural and transpor
tation system that allows us to enjoy all of these things year round no matter where we are located. Count our blessing that we are a country that can feed itself and feed itself well.
Here is a few photos showing the progress of our crops this week. The one crop I did not include is the alfalfa which is ready for the first cutting to be put down.
The last picture is of our electrical controls at our bin site that were blown down in the wind a few nights ago. We were lucky as the storm weakened by the time it hit us. There were pivot irrigation systems and bins destroyed by the same storm to the north, south, and west of us.
This is a picture of some of our soybeans pushing thru the soil. The power of the plant is amazing!!!
This is a video blog of planting one evening this year. Excuse the shakiness of the camera as some fields are not the smoothest.
Days of the Weeks 