March 18th...

Spring planting preparations are ongoing. We are also working on getting the last of the March grain contracts delivered. We finally received a nice three inch rain which we expect will get our field tile flowing once again. It has been since last July since the field tile ran. We were really dry. Very thankful for that. 

Loading nonGMO beans from the bin into semis

The nonGMO soybeans going from the pit at Cargill at Naples all the way out on the belt and direct into a 60,000 bushel barge on the Illinois River.

Trying something new this year...chicken litter in place of commercial synthetic fertilizer. It's much more expensive due to the freight from St. Louis, but we are going to try it on a couple farms for several years to gauge it's effectiveness.

February 6th...

Tile, tile and more tile seems to be what we've been up to on the farm lately. It has been an exceptional winter to install tile due to the dry ground conditions and milder weather. We have completed several projects and are set to begin another major project outside of Ashland on our "Whisnat Farm." On this project we will be installing 15" tile to not only help drain our excess water, but also collect the water "above" our fields from the neighbors to our North and get all that water collectively under ground and not running on top of the waterway. 

We have also been moving grain from our bins to end users in Decatur, the Illinois River in Beardstown and also the rail shuttle in nearby Jacksonville that ships corn into Mexico. When the weather has been nasty or all the grain deliveries have been completed for the month the guys have been working on projects in the shop. They completely rebuilt the hitch on our John Deere roadside and waterway mower as well as went through it and made sure it was ready to be used this summer. They also made a rear end seal repair to the Farmall 35hp utility tractor as well as putting the finishing touches on our new mobile fertilizer pump stand. We've also taken delivery of quite a bit of the seed corn we will be planting in just a few short months. 

We have been blessed with a few inches of recent rainfall and now extreme cold temperatures are on the way. Those two combined together should give Mother Nature a nice recipe to freeze and thaw the soil in the fields which typically provides us a beautiful seed bed similar to a garden come spring.  

Installing 40 acres of tile on the wettest portion of our Williamsville farm.

Laying out 15" Dual Wall Plastic pipe for our next tile project.

Down to the sweep auger in one of our corn bins.

Early Winter...

What wonderful weather we've had since harvest concluded. While still on the dry side, we have had several consecutive weeks in a row for outside activities such as dirt work pictured below, tile projects, tree trimming and hauling grain out of our bins. The month of December has flown by and everyone is looking forward to spending time with their families over the holiday season. Despite COVID and social distancing, 2020 will go into the books as one of our more successful years in this business. We were blessed with good yields, increasing prices towards the end of harvest, and our continued health. We want to thank all that help us with our business this past year and wish everyone a safe and profitable 2021. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Brent

Removing terraces on our farm outside Ashland.

Tom standing beside the tile trencher while it waits to start laying another run of tile. 

 

Harvest ends...

Harvest 2020 was over for us on Monday, November 2nd. As quickly as it started, it was over. This year it took just over seven weeks of work to put away our crop. The weather was about as good as one could order it with just two days off for rains and a few other Sunday's off for folks to spend time with family. Yields were variable, but pleasantly surprising overall. Areas that received even an additional two tenths of rainfall in August were the big winners. We have moved on from harvesting to tillage and fertilizer activities. Our area remains very dry and many are commenting that this has an eerie feeling to the fall of 2011 which was followed by the drought of 2012. Who knows, but time will tell. Thank you to all our employees and service providers for helping us get through harvest safely and efficiently!

Harvest 2020 begins...

We started our 2020 harvest last Wednesday, September 16th - the exact same date we began last year. Corn moisture's were high when we started, but have finally dropped into the 18-21% range as of today. We have even harvested a few of our nonGMO soybean fields that were planted the first week of April. Yields have been good on corn, but below our last several years production. Despite zero rain in August, soybeans have been a nice surprise, but they also haven't exceeded any records either. We had a good run of 11 days straight of harvesting. Last night's half inch rains were welcomed for us to get caught back up on office work, maintenance and gather our plans for the next run of harvest. Be safe!

Harvesting corn on the Grand Prairie Farm.

Dumping a load of corn at our dryer site.

First pass of soybeans this fall on the Dunlap Young farm.

July 19th....

The summer is flying by! We are quickly wrapping up our final acres of weed control on our soybeans and have begun working on a few in-field experiments. We are also scouting for diseases and spraying several corn fields with fungicide with the air plane. We will spray our nonGMO soybeans with fungicide and insecticide as well and those applications have also started. We are also cleaning out our grain bins and hauling corn to nearby Bartlett Grain in Jacksonville. When conditions allow, the guys are also staging lime with the dump trailer to get ready for fall applications after the crop has been removed. Below are a few pictures of an experiment we are trying this year on a few soybean fields. We are applying liquid fertilizer with the sprayer where we are dribbling the fertilizer between the rows. This allows us to get the fertilizer in the plant via the roots quicker and at higher amounts versus foliar feeding it which is less efficient.  

June 7th...

It has been a wild ride since my initial planting post. While we started planting on April 2nd, we did not end planting until May 26th. Two days later on May 28th we began replanting in earnest. Two of our three planting windows this spring were followed by 3-5 and sometimes 7" rainfalls. These created many areas that had standing water and thus drowned out the seedlings creating a need for us to replant the now barren holes within the field. David spent four days across four counties with the 4 row planter spotting in. We even replanted one entire corn field and one entire soybean field. The corn field had a majority of drowned out areas and the soybean field was crusted over after planting causing about a third of a stand of soybeans. So we went back in with another 80,000 seeds per acre to thicken up the stand. Once we finished planting the spraying operations took priority and Tom has most all the corn sprayed as well as all the early planted soybeans. We've also been hauling corn from our grain bins as well as starting to mow roadsides. The weather has turned from what was one of the coldest springs to now just plain hot with temperatures in the 90's. The hot temperatures along with the abundant sunshine and good soil moisture is really bringing along the crops quickly. 

Replanting drowned out spots on our Williamsville corn.

Blending up a starter fertilizer mixture our Peer Group is joint testing for corn. 

Installing the "new to us" generator at the dryer site. We had reached our power limits with the former generator so we replaced our 200KW unit with a 350KW model. This is the crane putting the new unit in place.