Corn Cam Part II

We are entering what I have started to call the CORNTASTROPHE phase of 2012.  There have been some extreme temperatures; one day during harvest it was 115 degrees outside.  We are also about 4 inches behind on moisture for the year.  It was so dry during corn planting season that we didn't plant any dry land corn.  The below pictures were taken on a neighboring farmer's field.  

As you can see this corn isn't going to make it

At this point in time most of the dry land corn in this area is going to be tilled into the ground or cut into silage.  Silage is used to feed livestock and essentially is just chopped up plant material.  The problem with using this corn as silage is it can be high in nitrates that actually kill cattle.  So the dry land corn out here is pretty much a bust. 

We do have a decent amount of irrigated corn and I've got some pictures below.  The corn is about six feet tall and most of it has reached the V15-17 stage of corn growth.  Water is very critical at this stage and we are running our wells as much as possible to keep our corn growing.

The finger looking things coming out of the bottom of the corn plant are called brace roots.  They help to pull nutrients from the top layer of soil as well as you guessed it... brace the plant.

Because the drought that is hitting us is actually hitting the corn belt as well, corn prices have risen dramatically in the last month.  I heard a report that stated that the USDA has dropped expected average corn yield for the United States by 15% in the last week alone.  After driving around North West Kansas I feel like they should have dropped it more than that. 

If anyone reading this is taking orders for rain.  I would like to put in an order for about 4" of rain over the course of the next week, and then have temperatures of less than 90 degrees until the corn is ready to harvest.   Thanks!

-Farmer Ryan

I've been training my whole life for this...

Lately I've been spraying herbicides on the summer fallow fields.  A summer fallow field is when farmers don't plant any crops on the field over the summer.  This allows moisture and nutrients to build up over the course of a season, in this case summer, and give the next crop in the rotation the best conditions for production.  The only way to maintain the moisture and nutrients in the fields is to stop any weeds that starts to grow.

Spraying is probably the most fun and stressful thing I've done since I started on the farm.  When you spray you have to determine which chemicals are needed in order to kill the species of weeds that are growing, then calculate how much of each type of herbicide is needed.  If you mess up your calculations you can cause serious issues that can affect crops for seasons and even years.

Once you have all the chemicals needed you have to load the tank in a very specific order.  Some herbicides don't play well with others and can gel in your tank.  If that happens you get the wonderful job of trying to clean those out. Yikes.

The sprayer I have been using has a 90 foot boom on it that sits about 30 feet back from the tractor.  Here is were some of the stress comes in; imagine trying to get a boom right next to a fence when its 75 feet away from you and not hit the fence.

SWITCHES!

The fun part comes with the spray boom controls.  There are 9 switches and 1 hydraulic lever that I use to control the boom.  These switches control the how the boom moves.  The boom can move up and down, it can tilt on the right and left side, and it can swing open and closed.  The boom needs to be about 3 to 5 feet off the ground depending on the weather conditions and the topology of the field.  There are also 5 switches that allow you to toggle the 5 different spray sections on and off.  This allows you to select only certain parts of the boom to spray at any given time.

 

On the spray tractor there is an Autosteer GPS Guidance system.  This system drives the tractor while I control the spray boom.  It also keeps track of where the tractor has been so that you don't over spray or miss any areas on the field.  

The end goal of summer fallow fields is the below picture.  Nothing is growing and all the moisture and nutrients are being conserved.

A lot of people are surprised when I tell them that I have been the one that is spraying the fields.  I've just been telling them that I've been training my whole life for this.  I would like to thank Nintendo, Sony Playstation, and Xbox for the countless hours of training.  

-Weed Death Engineer Ryan