From the Fields: The end of summer

The last few days of summer are coming to an end as we approach harvest time. I must say I do love harvest, not only because the sights and smells, but also we can finally reap the benefits of all the work we did throughout the year. I haven’t seen anything even remotely close to us being able to run yet, but I’d say in the next couple weeks we will see some action. I have some friends down by the Vincennes area that I see posting harvest pictures on social media and it gets me really excited. I’m sure I’ll say this every year, but I think I’m more excited this year than ever. We tried a few new things to increase production and we have been very fortunate with the weather and timely rains, so I hope we see the returns.

We can never thank our customers enough, but we had a great day with them to start the week. It ended up raining in the morning, so we went out and pulled corn plants and shucked some ears on each LG Seeds hybrid. I also pulled some bean plants and did some pod counts with our Merschman Seeds rep for his presentation. We had a guest speaker from AgXplore talk to us about micronutrients and right timing of products, as well as some nitrogen stabilizer products they offer. One big takeaway from that presentation was late-season fertility isn’t just a trendy word in ag, it’s the future to row crop production in the Corn Belt. We see more and more on the seed side of things corn is being bred to like more late-season fertility than all upfront. This is why the nitrogen stabilizer products we talked about play such a vital role. They help the plant hold on to nitrogen for longer periods of time and keep it in the soil profile.

I spent the rest of the week hauling grain and cleaning out bins. We had a good amount of corn left over from the 2020 crop that we decided to pull the trigger on. We also completed September contract for wheat. We were able to clean the bin out and prepare for upcoming corn harvest. Once we were in the groove, there were a few soybeans in one bin that we hadn’t gotten around to, so we decided to run the sweep auger and clean it out. It will be a short time and we will be refilling everything once again with 2021′s crop.

I hope everyone took a breath and spent time enjoying friends and family during the Labor Day holiday weekend. In the ag industry we are all guilty of working too much and pushing too hard from time to time in the busy seasons. Let’s hope you could enjoy one last weekend of fun before we all get busy preparing to bring in the 2021 crop. Thanks for following along again with me this week. I can’t wait to see what lies ahead.