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
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