Grain bin fire...

All of us at Johnson Family Farms would like to say thank you to the following people for helping us with our recent grain bin fire:

• All the individuals of the Pleasant Plains Volunteer Fire Dept.
• Cartwright Township Road District
• Sunrise Ag Service Company - Mark Hobrock
• David Younkers
• Kenny Terpening
• Chris Dowson

After recent rains we are back harvesting corn, however we are planning to switch back to beans as the weather permits.

Good first week...

Yesterday we wrapped up our first week of harvest. We have quite a few fields opened up and a handful of grain bins partially full so the fans can dry the corn down. To-date we have not cut any soybeans, but we have fields that are ready. We plan to start soybean harvest tomorrow most likely on the Reiser - Ashland farm.

Corn yields are still bouncing from good to great. We are finding that the Diplodia ear rot damage is consistently in the continuous corn fields. Some hybrids are worse than others, but spraying for Japanese beetles or spraying fungicides did not seem to affect the severity of the Diplodia damage.

Attached are pictures of us harvesting corn on the Foster - Ashland Farm as well as a few good pictures of the Diplodia ear rot.

Back in the fields...

Even though the area experienced significant rains on Sunday, we are back in the fields harvesting corn as of Tuesday afternoon. We are now in our earliest planted corn (Gooden/Maes Farm) and although the corn is yielding good, we are seeing alarming amounts of Diplodia ear rot damage. From what we are hearing from neighboring farmers, the ear rot is significant in all earlier planted corn. Hope we miss the rains the remainder of the week...

Rain...

The story today was rain. This morning's storm dumped between 2.1 & 3.0" of rain on the farms near our base of operations. The forecast is calling for 30 to 40% chances of rain everyday this week through Saturday. We hope to get back in the fields soon, but we need Mother Nature to cooperate.

Harvest is here...

Yesterday we started harvesting the first of our 2009 corn crop. Yields are better than we expected and moistures are ranging from 18 to 23%. We spent most of the day harvesting end rows and opening fields up. We started on the Creed field and moved across the lane to LWJ's big field. Once we had half of the bin full we decided to move over to the Grand Prairie farm. We filled about half of one of the little bins and quit for the evening. Bob also got started yesterday on the Whiznat farm and based on a few yields checks with the weigh wagon he was very pleased. The April planted corn appears to be very good, but it also has major amounts of Dipolida damaged kernels on the outside 24 to 48 rows. It is really nice to get harvest started; especially four days earlier than we started in 2008.

Things at the farm have been busy since my last update. We are getting the combines and other fall machinery ready to go as well as wrapping up a few remaining summer projects. The grain bins are all empty in preparation for this year's crop. We are also finishing up an electrical project at our Grand Prairie farm bin site where we had to bring in 400 amp service to provide enough power for the additional fans we have added to the bins. This involved taking down the old power lines and running the new lines under ground from the road back to the bin site. We hope to have that completed by week's end.

We have not started harvest yet, but one of our neighbors began today and I am told the moisture was between 25 & 30%. This particular field was planted prior to Good Friday, so it should be one of the driest fields around. I was told the corn was "good."

As you can see from the picture, our plot planted on April 26th still has a lot of green left in it - should be October before we harvest it. The other picture is of the new combine in the shed being worked on by Steve Clement from Brandt. He is installing the Trimble AutoPilot system which allows the combine to steer itself. David and Dad have also been working on installing the yield monitor as well as other "add-on's" we utilize during harvest.

I hope to be able to share some of our actual yield results on the next update.

Getting closer...

No pictures for this update, but I did want to post that Dad was out walking corn today and stepped into one of our fields planted on April 18th and amazingly discovered that it had already black layered (roughly 32% moisture). That is a great sign considering how cool the weather has been this summer. Last week's weather was good for moving corn along to maturity as well as providing for record attendance at the Farm Progress Show in nearby Decatur.

As of today, we hope to start harvest on Monday, September 21st. We'll see what the weather brings us as I have windows open on the house this evening as I type. Enjoy your week!