Corn Cam Part IV

The Corn has reached the R5 stage of corn development.  The ears of corn have fully formed and some of the kernels have developed dents.  

Dent corn or "field corn" is the majority of corn that is grown here in Western Kansas.  It is used to feed livestock, create ethanol, and high fructose corn syrup.  Dent corn is not like the corn you get from the farmers market and eat off the cob.  If you were to try to boil this corn and eat it you would regret it, because it only has about 1/5 of the sugars that are found in sweet corn and it is high in starches. 

We had to call in Air Support to spray our corn for the second time this year.  Our corn is being attacked by spider mites, which eat away at the leaves of the corn plant.  I actually snapped a pretty cool picture of the crop duster.  I think he is about a foot off the top of the corn.

It's pretty fun to watch these planes spray the fields.  They fly under power lines, dodge sprinklers, and fly about 1 to 5 feet above the corn.

-Farmer Ryan

Well, Well, Well

The person that is usually in charge of checking our irrigation wells just went on vacation.  So for the next couple of weeks I'm going to be checking all of our wells.  We have several different types of well engines, and motors and they are all over the place.  Below are some examples of our natural gas well engines.  All the engines we use are all big block Chevy's that have been modified to run on natural gas.   These engines pull the water from the well and they also generate three phase electricity.  The electricity is used to power the center pivot sprinkler systems.  It will take an entire blog post to explain sprinklers so you'll have to stay tuned. 

Below are some examples of electric well motors.  The electric motors run on three phase electricity.  There are two ways to get three phase electricity; 1. Have three phase ran to the location of your well (this can get EXPENSIVE) 2. Setup what a RotoPhase to generate three phase out of standard electricity.

Every morning I go out and check each well to verify it is up and running.  I also check the well engines to verify that they have the correct amount of motor oil, check the water pressure on the water coming up from the well and I check that the drip oil is dripping at the correct rate.  Drip oil is oil that is "dripped" down the well shaft and it keeps the well shaft lubricated.

There are times when I pull up that the wells are not running.  That's when the troubleshooting starts.  Most of the time the wells have been shut down by the safety switches on the Sprinklers.  The sprinkler systems are wired to shut down if they get out of alignment.  There a lot of other things that can cause these well motors to shut down. So every time I pull up to a well that isn't running I know its going to be an adventure.

I had a person ask me how much work it was to run irrigation on our fields. I told her all the things we have to do to keep them running.  She said that it sounded like it was as much work as having kids.  To which I replied -That makes me not want to have kids...  Just kidding Mom... Stop freaking out...

-All's Well Checker Ryan

Corn Cam Part III

Our irrigated corn is plugging away in spite of the heat and it has reached the R1 phase stage of growth.  The R1 stage is when the pollination occurs and during this period it is very important to have enough water and cooler temperatures.

The next two pictures show the tassels on the top of the corn plant and the silks coming out of the top of the corn cob.  The pollen from the tassels falls down and it pollinates the silks.  Once pollination occurs kernels of corn start to form on the corn cob.

Tassels:

Silks:

As I said in my previous post there are some farmers who are cutting silage out of their dry land corn.  The below picture is a silage machine and it is in the process of chopping up some drought stricken corn in a field by our farm.  Silage machines have tons of horse power and they offload all of the silage onto a truck.  Since there isn't any storage on the silage machines there has to be a steady stream of trucks to keep the silage machine running.

On a positive note the corn prices have risen dramatically in the last couple of months.  We are usually done harvesting our corn in November so the futures price that we watch is December corn.  If you would like to track the price as well you can use the following symbol @CZ2.  

It's pretty fun to watch the price of corn to go up this much, but at this point I'm hoping that our irrigated corn will actually produce some corn to sell.

-Farmer Ryan