Planting Update...

What a busy week!  On Monday we traveled to the John Deere Harvester Works in Moline, IL to view our new combine being built.  It was amazing to see all the details that go into manufacturing today's combines.  On Tuesday afternoon, we were able to get back in the fields and work on completing our soybean plantings.  We were fortunate to have Dan Brucker bring his planter and tractor down from the Bloomington area to help us cover more acres.  With his planter and our two planters, we managed to get all our soybean acres covered within a week.  A big thank you goes out to Dan for helping us.  We also finally wrapped up our corn on Saturday outside Jacksonville.  Is it bad to say we could use a rain on those fields to give the corn a good stand when we've experienced excessive rains all spring???  

We are now working on spraying herbicides and mowing roadsides.  Spotting in drowned out spots and washing up spring planting machinery are also some of the activities we are focused on.  What a spring - comparatively, we finished planting our 2013 corn crop 57 days later than we did our 2012 corn.  Unfortunately, that means our harvest this season will be pushed back into November and possibly even December.  Let's just hope our yield results will be significantly better than last year's as well.

Tom starting his new combine for the very first time on the John Deere Factory assembly line 

Much of the painting at Deere & Company is still done by hand 

Bob working ground on the Atwood farm across the road from our shop 

David replanting a wet hole in a corn field along Rt. 123

Tom spraying herbicides on corn outside of Ashland

Tom out with the disk on the Arnold Farm fixing wash outs from all the recent rains 

 Dan Brucker & Ron Brown loading the planter with more soybeans at the Arnold Farm outside Jacksonville

Dan Brucker making the final pass on a field outside Jacksonville 

Planting on our new County Line Farm South of Nortonville