Fully Tasseled, But Does It Always Look This Good?

Jul 202010
 

It’s getting pretty busy preparing for the big summer field day on our farm. It’s Friday if you haven’t heard. Details are on www.agphd.com. I did manage to drive by the Blank Slate today, and it is fully tasseled and looking great.

If you find my field on Google Earth (great program), you’ll quickly discover that this is not always the case. You can locate the field by going to the corner of 481st Ave and 252nd Street in rural Garretson SD. The Blank Slate is the Southeast corner of that intersection.

One of the cool things you can do with Google Earth is go back in time. Google has several years of data archived for nearly every location you can choose around the globe. You can check out the fields you are farming and ones that you would like to buy or rent in the future. Now do you see how cool this can be?

Find any picture of the Blank Slate in July and you’ll see all the patches that simply burned up on the hilltops and around the terraces. We’ve had a little more rain than normal, but I’ll suggest that taking the first steps to solve the fertility problems are positive factors as well. After all, when a plant is hungry and wanting some fertilizer the first thing it does is suck in more water. When you are not doing a good job managing soil fertility, you will not be efficient using water either.

Hope you can make it to the big field day. If you can, I’d be happy to show you the Blank Slate field and give you some insight on all the other things going on at the Hefty farm.

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Is Nutrition THAT BIG of a deal?

Jul 122010
 

I did some informal evaluations of the various fertilizer treatments on the Blank Slate on Thursday with Lonny Smith. Thanks for visiting, Lonny!

One thing that we noticed was leaf disease as pictured above. The interesting part of the story to me was how the incidence of leaf disease varied greatly throughout the field.

On the strips where 10 gallons of fertilizer was applied at planting (5 gal Sure-K plus 5 gal Pro-Germinator with micros) we saw the most disease. To be fair, my soils had almost zero fertility and very little organic matter. We needed to apply more than 10 gallons of fertility to raise a decent crop. Where we followed up by side-dressing another 10 gallons of the same mix we saw much less disease.

On strips where 15 or 20 gallons of the same fertility mix were used at planting as the total fertility treatment, there was disease present. It was less than the 10 gallon strip, but more than the areas where 10 gallons was applied at planting and another 10 gallons at side-dress.

The lesson learned from the Blank Slate field is this. If fertility runs short, the plant is weakened. A weak plant is more susceptible to disease. Once a plant has one stress (in this case it’s nutrient deficiency), adding more stress (i.e. disease) will multiply the misfortune. A slightly nutrient deficient and slightly diseased plant will now be the first to suffer from moisture stress, heat stress, etc.

We’ll see how this all turns out when the combine runs through the field in the fall. By the way, I snapped a picture of the first tassel on the Blank Slate while we were walking the field on Thursday.

There is some unevenness in the field due to the lack of topsoil in areas, poor drainage, etc. We’re still a little bit away from seeing the whole field tasseling. If the disease really starts to blow up across the field, it will be difficult to time a fungicide application to hit when the entire field is fully tasseled.

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Tasseling, but not on the Blank Slate just yet

Jul 022010
 

I don’t have a picture today, but there is corn tasseling south of Sioux Falls. It’s not every field or anything, but there are some fields starting to tassel. Most of the fields I’m talking about were planted between the 10th and 15th of April.

The Blank Slate was planted a couple weeks later, but it’s coming along fast. At tassel time, insects and disease can be a problem on wetter years like this one. We’ll keep scouting.

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How close should tile lines be?

Jul 012010
 

Brian and I took a driving tour through Minnesota today and were discussing drainage tile along the way. Many of the tile lines in Minnesota were installed on 100 foot spacings. With the high organic matter and heavy clay soils there, heavy rains are not able to move down through the tile lines quickly enough. Farmers are installing additional tile in between those lines at either 33 or 50 foot spacings to improve things.

On the Blank Slate, we are anxious to install drainage tile to reduce soil erosion and poor drainage issues that have been going on for years. The picture you’re looking at is from the west valley of the Blank Slate. It’s actually the beginning of an unnamed water tributery (otherwise known as a Blue Line on the FEMA maps).

As we get the drainage plans completed, I’ll share them with you.

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