June 2025 Update

It's officially summer, and the crops are soaking up the sunshine they missed earlier in the growing season.  Moisture has been adequate as well with 1.5-2” of rain in the last 2 weeks.  Thankfully, we missed the very heavy rains, hail and strong winds that other areas experienced. 

With the great growing conditions, we are seeing excellent growth in all of our crops.  The corn is growing fast, with the plant transitioning from the nutrition supplied by the seed to nutrition in the soil. With that happening, we are applying our side dress application of Nitrogen. Soybeans are also coming along nicely; the rains helped germination to fill in the spots where seeds were lying dry because of the thick “drifts” of residue.  We are frustrated with our weed control for several reasons – our pre-application of herbicide was not activated in the dry conditions, now with warm, wetter conditions the weeds are growing so fast and, the most frustrating, weed resistance to herbicides.  Even though we have a pretty good rotation of crops and vary the mode of action of the herbicides as much as possible, it is still a battle.  We are applying an additional pass of herbicide to corn using our See and Spray technology, covering entire fields and applying product on 30-80% of the acres, depending on the field.  This technology is great and we are learning this year how to really use the system.  We have experimented with the settings of the sensors to see where we need to be with enough coverage for control without setting it too sensitive where it sprays things that are not there.  What we learn this year will help us modify our system, probably thinking differently about weed control.  We are also experimenting with planting soybeans into green standing rye and letting it grow until the beans are about 5” tall before terminating the rye so that the mat of dead rye helps with weed suppression. 

This season, we are collecting tissue samples from 3 fields every week and sending them to the lab for analysis.  It has been interesting to see the levels of the nutrients in plants and how that correlates with the soil sample analysis.  For now, we are mainly watching to see if each of the nutrients stays within the optimal levels and if one does not, how long it stays that way.  We are trying to look at trends overtime to plan for next year, not necessarily a knee jerk reaction when a tissue sample shows something low all of the sudden.  There are many foliar applications that can be applied, we are just trying to learn which ones might be helpful and which ones are not cost effective.   We tend to do many experiments and trials on our farm, sorting through the many products that are out there.  Many claim to and probably do work, but figuring out what is practical is the challenge.

Our oats, rye and triticale are all headed out and looking great as well.  The cereal rye is much thicker than the hybrid rye but that has been our experience in the last few years.  It seems that we have not quite figured out how to push that crop into the yield goals needed for profitability.  The sunflowers got a side dress application of nitrogen so they are off and growing. 

Our cover crop mix for our summer grazing is filling in nicely.   We used Premium Graze, which is a blend of warm season grasses and forage brassicas including radishes, turnips, millet and sorghum sudangrass.  The grass has been a little slower to grow than we would like, probably because of the cooler temps early on, but it should take off now and be a great feed source for the cattle for the summer.  The permanent fence went up last week so we just need to move the cattle and set up the temporary fence for the paddocks.

All in all, things are looking very good and developing at a good target rate.  We are grateful for the opportunities that we have to do what we love in this free nation.  As we look toward and celebrate July 4th, lets take a few moments to remember and be thankful.