From the Fields: That pineapple look

We finished wheat harvest last week. We finished on June 24, so we finished harvest in a week. The wheat was better than I thought. Just because we had so much rain, I thought for certain there would be some nitrogen losses, maybe we would lose some yield, but the yield was in the 90s for our farm and test weights were just phenomenal this year.

All the corn has been sidedressed. All the corn has been sprayed for weeds. We are good on corn until tasseling and fungicide application. This week, things are better than the last two weeks. Temperatures cooled off, we got three inches of rain. The two weeks prior, there was no rain and triple-digit heat indexes about every day. That put stress on the crops and the cows. We’ve been dry before, but it was getting pretty bad. You couldn’t tell now, but the corn had that pineapple look before the rain.

The only good thing about how dry it was is that countywide, it has to be about a record for wheat harvest. Usually there’s a shower in there that sets things back a couple of days. Some years we are not able to finish planting double-crop beans until July 4. We are all done planting double-crop beans except for two fields because we were putting up straw. I was doing that earlier, bucking little square bales. Once the straw is all off those two fields, they will get planted.

The second cutting haylage is done. Third cutting hay is going to be about July 7. Second cutting was average. Last year’s second cutting was phenomenal, but this year it was average. There were no pest problems or anything like that. With the third cutting, the rain will help some, but I still expect third cutting to be a little light. Down here, we can get five or six cuttings.