December 14th...

Since we wrapped up our harvest on November 16th we have been applying anhydrous ammonia and finishing up our tillage operations.  We were able to wrap up the tillage weeks ago but the ammonia applications drug along due to the ground freezing. Fortunately, the weather warmed up enough on Sunday, December 1st to allow us to resume our ammonia applications.  After 3.5 days we finished and then the cold weather returned.  Since that time we have been busy cleaning fall machinery, hauling soybeans, attending meetings and working on year end books.  2013 was a very good year for our business.  However, margins for the 2014 crop look to be extremely narrow at this point causing us to reevaluate input decisions, cropping rotations, and machinery purchases into the new year.  

As you can see below most of the recent field activities have focused around installing new tile to a couple fields.  We are targeting areas that were excessively wet this spring.  
After starting the planting season an entire month behind and harvest also starting almost an entire month late, we feel very blessed to have all our tillage and fertilizer applications completed as well as the tile we wanted installed.  Thank you to all who helped us this fall!

Installing new tile lines on our Grand Prairie farm

Adding tile to a few wet spots on our farm between Ashland and Prentice

Snow beginning to fall as they were installing the last of the new tile lines

Loading soybeans on the semi in the snow

Recently we installed a ProTrakker hitch with assistance from Stevens Implement.  This hitch is tied in with John Deere's iGuide system which connects the GPS receiver on the tractor to the GPS receiver on our 20" strip-till bar.  The ProTrakker hitch has a sensor on it as well as hydraulic cylinders which can move 36" from side to side.  This allows us to have a 30' strip-till bar match up with our 60' planter without having wide or narrow rows.  We ran it on the last 400 acres of our anhydrous ammonia and it worked great.

Max & Owen with their first snowman of the year