March 23rd...

We are quickly coming up on the end of March and winter just won't concede to spring. We have spent the majority of the winter months hauling grain from our bins. Recently we've begun servicing our spring planting and tillage equipment and are ready for fieldwork to begin. We have almost all our anhydrous ammonia to still apply before we can even think about planting corn. Ideally we would have completed this last fall, but the weather shut us out of fall field work sooner than normal. As I type this we are almost dry enough to begin applying our nitrogen, but rain looms on the radar and next week's forecast includes another inch of rain we don't really need right now. We patiently wait for our government to reach a trade deal with China so we can resume exporting our soybeans without tariffs. The winter of trade wars has been hard on the soybean market and has not presented us with many of the normal marketing opportunities for new crop soybeans. Hopefully the next time I post we will have some or all of our 2019 crops planted and the temperatures will be a consistent 70 plus degrees.

Vac'ing out soybeans from a few smaller bins that are only accessible when the ground is frozen.

Picking up our grain bags on our Greenfield farms.

Delivering corn to Cargill East St. Louis - literally across the Mississippi River from the Arch.

Working on the planter so we can have the ability to switch from starter fertilizer to banded nitrogen.