Merry Christmas!

Week ending December 18th...

Kevin Becker from Altorfer and Darin Younkers replacing the left side fuel tank on the CAT tractor

Emptying bins at the Martin Farm

More of the same since my last post. We have been hauling corn to the Illinois River terminals as well as ADM at Curran. Machinery is also still being cleaned up and put away. This past week Kevin Becker from Altorfer Equipment spent a few days at the farm working on the CAT tractor. The main job was replacing the left-side fuel tank. Due to a faulty fuel cap lid that did not let the fuel tank "vent", CAT had a re-call on the lid. Unfortunately, the faulty lid did it's damage before we made time for the two-day job to replace the fuel tank. Since the lid did not vent air to the tank, the fuel pump was pulling diesel out of the tank and eventually just caved in the sides of tank causing the tank to leak due to cracks. Luckily, our leak was not very severe and we could wait until after all the fall tillage work to get the tractor in the shop and perform the replacement. Thanks to Kevin Becker from Altorfer and Darin Younkers for their work on this project. We have our corn plans and hybrids finalized for the 2011 crop and are almost finished wrapping up our 2011 soybean variety selections. End of year book work and accounting are keeping us busy when the weather will not let us out to haul corn.

Week ending December 4th...

Dad wrapping up fall 2010 field operations; emptying the dry fertilizer cart

The Johnson Boys are ready for the Christmas Holiday

Making ginger bread houses with Owen; he lasted five minutes and NFL football won over his attention...

It is amazing to me how easy it is to create weekly posts when we are in the field, but when the field work is completed the task of keeping the blog up to date gets more challenging. Since my last post we have continued to clean up machinery and have started to haul corn to the terminals on the Illinois River at Beardstown. We have also been spending a considerable amount of time in the office working on 2011 crop plans, catching up on office work, and finalizing year end reports for landlords and accountants. Besides the peace of mind of having 100% of the fieldwork done, being able to be home more with our families is a wonderful blessing. Above are some of the pictures of our gingerbread project with Owen - he was interested for almost five minutes. We have also been working on wrapping on Christmas presents, but none of our previous pictures really displayed the fun of trying to wrap presents with an almost three-year old...

Week ending November 20th...

Applying dry fertilizer and anhydrous ammonia in Greenfield

Darin leveling ground ahead of the toolbar

This past week we wrapped up all of our fall tillage and fertilizer applications. We could have been done a week ago, but we were waiting and hoping for rains to loosen the large clods created by the chisel plow this fall on our remaining acres. Unfortunately, no rain has fallen on our Greene County farms since we harvested back in September. While the ground is dry, we were still able to find moisture with the applicator knives and with enough loose soil we are confident our last anhydrous applications met all environmental standards. In the picture above you see the John Deere 9630 and Krause Landsman leveling ground ahead of the toolbar; we did this to try and create more loose soil and minimize the size of the clods. The large and hard clods kept pulling the dry fertilizer hoses off the toolbar causing us to have to stop periodically. The concern about a loose hose also kept us from operating much after dark. However, we are done and this week will be focused on washing the remainder of machinery and putting it away until spring. Uncle Bob, Ronnie Brown and the Younkers' Brothers have done a masterful job of cleaning up and painting the vast majority of the tractors and implements.

Thanksgiving is Thursday - please take a moment to reflect upon all the things you are thankful for. We are thankful for our freedom, our family and friends, our ability to be employed as stewards of the land and the ability to make a living from the fruits of the land and lastly, we are thankful for another growing season where no one was hurt - just to name a few.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Week ending November 6th...

Bob making strips on the Whiznat farm

Dad applying Nh3, DAP, & Potash all in one pass with the strip-till bar on the Doolin field.

We began anhydrous ammonia applications last Friday. Since then we have covered all our acres that we plan to go to corn around the Ashland and Pleasant Plains areas. You may remember we just did these same operations a mere six months ago due to being delayed by Mother Nature last fall. We are experiencing some delays in product availability, but not near like earlier this spring. Our plan is to move to the northern farms this week in hopes that our south farms receive some rainfall later in the week as they are predicting. Anhydrous Ammonia needs moisture to bond to the soil; otherwise it volatilizes and escapes into the atmosphere through the dry soil particles.

Week ending October 31st...

Bob chiseling on the Whiznat farm

Loading the trailer with trees

The last of the trees coming off the trailer

Another great week of field work. We wrapped up chisel plowing this past week and are working on the last 150 acres of in-line ripping with the BlueJet. Now that the cooler weather has lowered the soil temperatures and the rain helped loosen the soil we also have one of the toolbars running putting on nitrogen and dry fertilizer.

Last week we also had the opportunity to help the Aupperle family haul ~150 trees from the nursery to their farm. They helped us clean up after the tornado last summer and it was a great opportunity to help them and return the favor. It was quite an impressive operation. They already had the holes dug for all the trees and the skid-steer would take the trees off the trailers and place them right in the hole. One skid-steer unloaded and planted all the trees in one morning.

Jeff Moss running the 9630 & BlueJet on the Williamsville Farm

Another good week of tillage. We encountered a few breakdowns this past week, which did not allow us to finish all our tillage like I had hoped. However, we only lack 200 acres of chiseling corn stalks and any additional in-line BlueJet ripping would be above and beyond what we anticipated completing. As I mentioned in previous posts the soils are pulling very hard this year due to all the rains the last few years and lack of good tillage last fall. The hard ground is rough on the tillage equipment as well as the tillage tractors. We have repeatedly had to replace ripper points and wear bars along with a few other items that needed the attention of a welder, but tilling the soil while it is dry is the best thing to get it back into condition for the 2011 crop. Dad also took advantage of the good weather and spent a few days trimming trees alongside fields and making surface drains on some of our poorly drained fields. A few anhydrous ammonia toolbars could be seen late last week in our area despite the dry soil conditions and warm weather. Thankfully a rain Saturday morning along with another Sunday evening gave the ground ample moisture for us to begin putting on anhydrous as soon as the soils dry.