Sunday, September 26, 2010

Harvest Trudges On


Harvest is moving slowly. It's for a good reason, there are so many bushels to carry away.
This is corn on corn making 218 dry bu per acre in this shot. I didn't think it would do that two months ago. It got sidedressed late due to wet weather and looked really bad the month of June. I was afraid it would be disappointing.
But it is not a bit disappointing. I do think the Headline fungicide application helped it take the heat and still mature properly. Maybe we should have done more, I don't know, but it sure seemed to help this farm.
I have seen some terrible results of corn on corn out west. I suppose they just got too much water. My friend in Washington Iowa said they had 192% normal rainfall. Wow, that is a lot.
Yet his yields are similar to these. So I guess we tinkered with the biology just right? One false move and it blows up in your face. I thought this might be N deficient but if it was, it wasn't enough to hurt the yield.
I imagine this is about as good a corn crop that has ever been raised on this farm. Now the residue levels on top are huge and there wonn't be much soil washing, almost as good as a cover crop and in some ways easier to manage.
There are 100 ways to approach a problem and this program worked well for this farm. It was based on sound agronomics and nothing off the wall. All of this is a commercial program available to any local farmer.
Ed

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