Harvest has come and gone...

What a whirlwind harvest season we experienced! We started about week later than normal, but finished a week ahead. Practically "ideal" weather allowed us to harvest unimpeded from start to finish with just two afternoon rain outs where we could send everyone home for a weekend. And by the end of harvest we were asking for rain to replenish the soils as the ground was hard and void of moisture. All in all, it was our best soybean harvest ever and our 2nd best corn harvest behind the 2022 crop year. We currently have all the fall tillage prep work completed and are within 400 or so acres of having all our intended fall anhydrous ammonia acres applied. While it's currently super cold and the ground is starting to freeze, we surely will get another opportunity to do some fieldwork this winter. The team in the shop is busy doing maintenance to equipment and getting things repaired and put away from harvest so it's ready to go for next season. We are also starting to haul out our December corn sales to nearby Bartlett Grain in South Jacksonville. This week we will focus our efforts on delivering our first installment of nonGMO soybeans to CG&B in Naples, IL. These will be loaded on barges and floated down the Illinois and Mississippi Rivers where they will be loaded on Panamex vessels and shipped to Japan. We have a narrow window of delivery each period so it will be all hands on deck to get this task completed this week. Office work such as planning for next year's crops as well as end of year reporting and tax planning are also top of mind. Next year's crop will go in the ground in a short four months and in fact we have our first load of seed being delivered this month to plant in 2025. Thank you to all our fulltime and seasonal employees for another great harvest and fall season as well as all our family members who pitch in and tolerate all the hours away from home we cram into two months. We hope each of you reading this had a wonderful Thanksgiving spent with family and friends and are looking forward to slowing down a bit for the Christmas Holiday season. 

Harvesting soybeans on the Lehman farm South of Pleasant Plains.

The new Case AF10 combine on our farm this fall with it's 50' draper head for soybeans. Quite a step up from the Class 9 and 8 machines we operate.

Applying dry fertilizer for next year's crops.

The new Case AF10 combine - pictured here with it's 18 row corn head.

A beautiful harvest sunset as we dump at our main grain facility.

Harvesting corn on our Greenfield farms.

Another truckload of corn headed out. Our grain cart can hold two semi loads at one time. 

Small little tile project to drain seven acres of wet end rows beside the road out of an 80 acre field.

Applying Anhydrous Ammonia nitrogen to feed next year's corn crop. This field was corn this year and will be corn again next year.

Summer...

Spraying a few acres of soybeans with a drone pictured below. This past week we received over 3" of rainfall which made it too wet to get the sprayers in the field. We called our neighbor who owns a drone and below are pictures of him applying three gallons per acre of water, insecticide and fungicide to the soybeans. We do this to try and kill the stinkbugs before they and chew on the immature beans inside the pod and ruin them. An added benefit is we kill the corn rootworm beetles before they can lay their eggs in the soil for next year's corn crop. By keeping the rootworm populations low or zero, we can plant a corn hybrid that does not contain the BT trait in it to kill the rootworm larvae when they are the chewing on the corn roots next spring and ultimately save us a little money as well as allowing us to plant better performing hybrids next year. We also apply a fungicide to ward off any diseases and help the beans mature more slowly which in turn we believe will allow them more time to finish the beans inside their pods making them larger and thus more yield. Summer is flying by and the kids will be going back to school soon. State Fair starts this week!

 

Planting Season is Here....

#Plant24 is off to a very good start. For us, it has been a dry planting season. You don't have to get very far to our East, North or Southeast where they haven't missed a rain and have not had the opportunities to plant like we have. We started planting soybeans the week of April 8th and as of now only have 280 acres remaining to be planted on our farms in Williamsville and Elkhart. We are right around 50% planted on corn which we feel puts us in a good position to harvest a few acres of corn early after Labor Day and then really move through the beans during what is typically very warm and dry days of September. Then on to the last of the corn for the month of October where the weather can be more variable. We like to space out our corn planting so the last corn we harvest isn't sub 15% grain moisture and hopefully still has plant integrity and is standing well. The corn market is starting to come back while the soybean market is still a dud. Oftentimes we will see the markets get stronger from planting season through June based on weather delays and forecasts for hot and dry summers. We will see if those marketing opportunities present themselves again this year. Below are pictures of some of the activities that have been happening on the farm in recent weeks. Have a great day!

The first planter fill of the year. Here we are loading the planter with soybeans to plant our first field of 2024 on April 8th.

Planting corn with the 20" planter on the Butzow farm West of Prentice.

Tag team planting the last field of nonGMO soybeans at Alexander before an impending rain.

With the good weather we were able to sneak in some waterway reshaping and reseeding on the Ashland Farms LLC Prentice farm.   

Planting corn on the pattern-tiled Gooden & Mae 120.

Refilling the planter alongside the highway outside Ashland where we were planting nonGMO corn on the Lathom field. 

Hauling corn to Bartlett Grain in South Jacksonville on a day where it was too wet to plant. It seems like every year there is a good opportunity to sell some of last year's corn from our bins during the next year's planting season. 

February Update...

We've experienced a bit of spring-like weather this past month which has allowed us to get outside and work on a few projects. 60 degree days in mid February was very welcomed, but as I type this we have 6" of snow outside and it is sub 30 degrees. Welcome to Illinois! See what we've been up to below. Have a great day!

A dry and warm stretch of February weather allowed our local tile company to add additional laterals to a farm we purchased a few years ago that already had tile every 200'. We wanted to reduced that spacing down to every 100' for even better drainage.

Disking down the trenches of the newly installed tile. Hopefully we get another round of cold weather and rain to weather these down so they are nice and smooth by spring planting.

Getting the planter out of the cold-storage shed and moving it to our heated shop so we can work on it ahead of spring. I think it was almost 60 degrees the day we moved planters. Crazy Illinois weather.

Hauling gypsum from the City of Springfield Power Plant. We target our wetter farms that are not tiled with this application. The additional Calcium improves water infiltration into the subsoil. It also adds Sulfur to our soil which corn plants love.

The warm February weather has also allowed us to scratch a few items off our list like picking up rocks and debris in places where tillage or Mother Nature has brought them to the surface. 

Mid Winter Update...

Winter has arrived and it's cold outside! We continue to stay busy working in both the shop and the office. Maintenance in the shop is ongoing as the guys have rebuilt both corn heads and are working on converting a frac tank over to bulk water storage. We have cored all our corn bins with numerous trips to Bartlett Grain in nearby Jacksonville. Year end office work continues and we are also working on finalizing our 2024 inputs and crop plans as well. 

The new farm shop is full of winter projects. While we still have plenty of finish work to complete on the building, we are glad to be moved in ahead of the cold temperatures to take advantage of the in-floor heat and continue our preventative maintenance work.

Our first two semi loads of Wyffels seed corn are in the shed. We have started to take delivery of some of our spring inputs and also still finalizing the last of our crop plans. 

Hauling corn from our bins to Bartlett Grain in nearby Jacksonville. Bartlett Grain sends four to five 100 unit car trains to Mexico every week via the Kansas City Southern Rail line. We are lucky to have them in our backyard creating such a demand for corn locally. 

Harvest 2023...

Harvest began for us this year on August 31st and ended on October 27th. We experienced some of the best weather for harvest we've had with only three days of rainouts. Yields were variable and somewhat corresponded with rainfall amounts from the summer. Despite how little rainfall we received, our corn and bean yields were surprisingly good. We were critically dry throughout the entire month of June. Corn looked like pineapple fields. Many had thrown in the towel and several areas were within days of what most assumed would be sub 100 bushel corn fields. Then on June 29th, we received a quick inch of rain along with strong winds from the derecho. That rainfall event pushed the low pressure system out of our area and sequential rains started arriving thereafter. It was truly amazing to see how well the corn yielded on such few inches of rainfall. We were very fortunate that we had a full profile of soil moisture going into the growing season where the creeks and tile were running. Currently we are not in that position as we are very dry. We have wrapped up our fall tillage and fertilizer applications. We are now cleaning up and working on equipment as well as setting up our new farm shop. Plans are underway for our 2024 crop and we will soon begin hauling grain from our bins to Bartlett Grain in nearby Jacksonville to fulfill our December contracts. Lastly, we'd like to thank all our employees for their dedication and long hours away from home and family. We could not be the business we are without our employees. I hope you all have wonderful Thanksgiving!

Putting the last load of corn for the year in the bin.

Harvesting corn on the Alexander Farm. Mile long rows!

Cutting nonGMO soybeans on the University of Illinois Hunter #3 farm near New Berlin.

Tag teaming soybeans in Greenfield. 

Greenfield soybeans at dusk.

Harvesting our 34 entry hybrid corn plot.

Harvesting corn on the UofI farm. Getting the end rows off so Wyffels Hybrids can come and harvest there research site. 

Dumping corn at our grain facility to be moved into the dryer and then into storage bins. 

Harvesting corn down the lane from our main shop on the LWJ Creed field. 

One of the first loads of corn of the year off the Grand Prairie farm which has been in our family for almost 150 years. 

Plant 2023 has come and gone...

It has been a while since I've updated our blog. Time sure does fly with two active kiddos. Planting for us started on March 30th and ended on Friday, May 5th. It was a fairly easy planting season with plenty of open windows to plant into dry soil, but the temperature extremes were the toughest for us to make decisions around. We planted soybeans from March 30th up to Easter and then we switched over to corn the week after while it was an unseasonably 80+ degrees. That was our first window of corn planting and we did not resume planting corn until April 27th. We did finish planting our soybeans in the time in between, but we wanted the ground to get a little warmer for the corn so we waited. by the time we finished planting, we were in need of a good rain as our geography was then extremely dry with no rain for the previous four weeks. Since then we have received 5-8" of rainfall and are now looking for a nice two week window so we can spray corn and get the weeds under control. I know, I know...farmers are never happy with the weather. What can I say? 

Below are a few pictures of one of our planters. I'll try to do a better job of keeping the blog updated going forward. Be well everyone!