A Year in the Life of a Farmer: Kindreds prepare for spot replants

Follow the Kindred family throughout the entire year. Each month, look for updates about the family members and the decisions they make on their farm.

ATLANTA, Ill. — Ron and Jay Kindred were setting the population on their four-row planter to prepare for replanting some corn upon arrival late Wednesday morning, May 26.

“We’ll be replanting some corn when the ponds dry up after this next rain goes through. All of the corn is up enough that we can see where we need to plant-in,” Ron said.

Ron returned the previous day from an overnight trip to Davenport, Iowa, with his colleagues on the Illinois Soybean Association board of directors where they had meetings with their Iowa Soybean Association counterparts.

“We had a strategic planning meeting between Illinois and Iowa just to see what’s on their radar screen, what’s on our radar screen and see if there’s any way we can work together to have an impact on policy or investments on the research side and ways we can collaborate,” he explained.

While Ron was giving a rundown of what’s been happening since we met last month, Jay was giving a virtual tour via cell phone of the farm for fifth-graders at Prairieland Elementary School, Normal, and answering the youngsters’ questions about agriculture.

Post-Applications

Next on the Kindreds’ agenda will be post-emerge herbicide applications and they were expecting some parts for the sprayer to arrive soon.

“We got the sprayer out last week knowing that we have some things we need to work on. We found a few more things to work on and we have parts ordered. Then we can get it back together, run some stuff through it to get it calculated and be ready to go. We don’t do any pre-emerge on our own. We hire that all done, but we do our post-emerge applications,” Ron said.

“We typically try to spray the soybeans at about R1, maybe into R2, but generally around R1. For the corn, I kind of go by the size of the weeds. Corn grows so fast that I don’t mind spraying it a little earlier. It just depends on the year. I go by weed size and weed pressure.

“I don’t want the weeds to be around too long in it. If we have a lot of weed pressure early then we may spray it smaller than we would another year. What we use has some residual in it, so I’m not too concerned of weeds coming back and being a problem later on.

“It obviously pays to start clean and stay clean. It doesn’t work out every year, though. We had some cool weather this year and some of the chemicals didn’t work quite as good in some areas. We’ve had some areas that had to be re-sprayed to get some grass that didn’t get killed on the burndown.”

Timely Planting

Planting season went very well for the Kindreds, who added 1,200 acres this year through a new partnership.

They planted all of their soybeans first and were done by about April 27. They then turned to corn planting and finished that on May 8 and wrapped up planting seed beans on May 14.

“The evening we finished corn on May 8 we got a pretty hard rain. We had planted in some timber soil that day and it was in great shape. The soil conditions overall this year were just almost perfect to plant into, but the corn in the timber soil struggled a little bit coming out of the ground and we’re still keeping an eye on that corn,” Ron said.

“We’re going to do some stand counts and see what we’ve got. But they are small areas, they’re not big areas. I don’t anticipate tearing up any big fields or anything. I just think we’re maybe going to have to plant some spots to fill-in.

“It’s interesting to farm timber soil. It’s a challenge every year it seems like. We have two farms that have quite a bit of timber soil on them. We probably have 50 to 60 acres that would be what I would call timber soil.”

Overall, the Kindreds are pleased with how the planting season progressed.

“The soybeans that we planted early took a while to come up, but the stand is pretty good on them and I think we’re in pretty good shape. We may have some ponds to replant, but overall we have a lot of potential with them,” Ron said.