July 2

Today is dad's birthday. Happy birthday, Dad!

Yesterday was Caolin's birthday, happy birthday, Caolin! She had a fun time at the Cincinnati Zoo with Liam and family.

The wheat market closed up 25 cents in harvest! Now that does not happen every day! Markets are so fickle right now it makes my head spin. I just hope I get more corn and soybeans sold at a decent price. Time will tell on that one.

I had a shot at renting another 80 acres for double crop soybeans and turned it down after I saw the soil test results. It needs 500 pounds of fertilizer per acre to have a chance! We are in another dry spell now so the soil moisture would have to get them out of the ground and pray for rain the rest of the summer. That is just too risky for me.

I think it will end up for sale as the family moves to new things. There are several farms for sale here now in the 3-4000 dollar range and nothing is moving because we are inbetween crop years and the economy is a big question mark.

LuAnn helped me spray the border on our beautiful soybean field behind the house. I have giant ragweeds as tall as the corn on the new farm so I bush hogged all I could yesterday and need to spray some. Thank goodness the chemical program worked and there aren't any inside the field. Nothing worse than weeds as tall as the cab of the tractor or combine!

I am spraying the 170 acres of non GMO soybeans headed for Asia this winter today. They are canopied over with a few weeds sticking out and more under the canopy. I hope that cleans them up for the year. Then there will be one last summer spraying of the double crop soybeans and we should be done except for bush hogging and border spraying of weeds. They sure had a good year but so did the timely planted crops.

Timing was everything this year and there wasn't enough good days for every field so you fantastic crops right beside really sad looking crops. Fortunately we don't have any of the really sad looking crops.

That's it for July 2, 2010. This was a great day in 1915 and 2009.

Ed Winkle