July 28th...

The summer has flown by and school will be starting again shortly. Our crops have taken advantage of the July heat and really taken off. All our corn is now tasseled and pollinated and the soybeans have closed the rows. We have shifted our focus to scouting for fungicide applications, mowing roadsides, our grain center project, and getting harvest equipment ready. As luck would have it, our area has switched from being really wet early in the season to now dry. Our farms in the Williamsville and Elkhart areas have not received an adequate rain in almost two months. While we feel good about our corn's root systems, we are getting critical on needing a substantial rain on those farms. Despite being dry, we realize we are extremely fortunate for the crop we have compared to others in the Midwest. Right now corn harvest appears to be on time and we are looking to start sometime the week of September 9th. 

Spraying fungicide with an airplane on our April planted corn.

We have also been cleaning out the remainder of our grain bins and hauling the corn to nearby Bartlett Grain in Jacksonville. Prices have improved and many have the same idea as us to get the bins cleaned out during this stretch of cool weather. 

Hauling rock for our bin project at our grain center. We also have been hauling lime and spotting it in fields to be spread after harvest this fall. 

Sweet corn fundraiser for Owen's 11U Springfield Cardinals baseball team. We picked over 140 dozen ears of sweetcorn and sold them to help offset tournament fees for next summer. It was a blast watching the boys pick, bag, and sell corn.