A Year in the Life of a Farmer: Tiling project in progress following wheat harvest on Rahn farm

AgriNews will follow the Rahn family throughout the entire year. Each month, look for updates about the farmers and the decisions they make on their farm.

MOUNT CARROLL, Ill. — Wheat is strategically planted on the Rahn farm to provide opportunities for manure applications and tiling projects.

“We applied manure to this field and we try to do that on spots that need a pickup on fertility,” said Elmer Rahn, who farms with his wife, Annette, and their sons, Correy and Mitchel, and their families.

“My wheat was a pretty good crop, above-average yield and good quality,” Elmer said.

A lot of rain during July impacted Correy’s wheat harvest.

“It was ready and then it rained, so by the time we got to it, there was some field loss which turned into a nice cover crop,” he said. “It was over 100 bushels, so I was happy with the wheat.”

The 40-acre field did not have any tile.

“We’ve probably pattern tiled two-thirds of this farm and when we get this field done, it will be 90% tiled,” Correy said.

“This spring, it was challenging to get fieldwork done in a timely way,” he said. “You could tell the areas that don’t have tile — those fields got pushed down to the bottom of the list.”

Any tile that is bigger than 6 inches, the Rahns dig in.

“We can do 4-, 5- and 6-inch tile with our tile plow,” Correy said. “With GPS on the tile plow, that keeps the tile at the right grade for the percent of slope for the water to flow.”

The tile plow, Correy said, has paid for itself.

“We’ve seen the quickest return on investment from tiling,” he said.

With a lot of rain while the soybeans were flowering at the end of June and beginning of July, soybeans are starting to show some disease in Carroll County in northwestern Illinois.

“There’s white mold and sudden death, but I’m not surprised with all the rain,” said Kellie, a Pioneer sales representative and Correy’s wife.

Kellie monitors rootworm traps for both the family farm and her customers.

“This is the last week we trap and I’m not finding any rootworm beetles in the beans,” she said.

“For corn following beans, the numbers have been low and in a couple of corn-on-corn fields the numbers have been in the moderate to high range for rootworm beetles, which follows the course of what we should see.”

For corn diseases, Kellie has seen some gray leaf and northern leaf blight.

“Tar spot has been confirmed in the county, but I haven’t seen it,” she said.

The Rahns apply fungicide and insecticide twice on both their corn and soybean crops.

“We had tar spot really bad in 2018 that hurt stock quality and plant health,” Kellie said.

“Unfortunately, we don’t know if the fungicide will do any good until after we put it on and sometimes the insecticide is more important than the fungicide,” Elmer said.

“If you don’t put fungicide on and you find out you should have put it on, you can’t go back. We apply fungicide and hopefully the corn is standing and disease free so we don’t have to harvest downed corn.”

“It’s a double-edge sword because you want harvest to start to get it finished, but we try to keep the plant as healthy for as long as we can by spraying fungicides,” Correy explained.

“When we keep the plant healthier, it is packing on sugar and starch so the plant is carrying out its life cycle instead of premature death which sometimes delays harvest a little bit.”

With the abundant rainfall this year, Elmer said, there is plenty of moisture to finish the crop.

The Rahns expect to begin harvest about the third week of September.

“A lot can change in the next month — we thought we’d harvest wheat July 4 and that totally changed,” Kellie said. “Our goal is to be ready for harvest by Sept. 15.”

Preparations by the family are in progress for their upcoming appreciation event.

“Kellie invites her Pioneer customers and we also invite our landowners, neighbors and hay customers,” Annette said. “We’ll have pork, beef, all the fixings and an ice cream bar.”

This is the 14th year that Kellie has been a Pioneer sales representative.

“We want it to be a family environment so there will be lots of games for the kids,” she said.

Mitchel is preparing to harvest his fourth cutting of hay in the next week or two.

“This morning we had a load of hay go to Milan and yesterday a load of wheat straw went to Wisconsin,” Annette said. “Everybody in this area has plenty of hay so we have to expand our marketing.”

Brazil Trip

Last month, Elmer and Annette traveled to Brazil with a group of about a dozen people that included board members of the Pearl City Elevator Coop, their wives and a couple of managers.

PCE Coop CEO Rodrigo Zobaran was born and raised in Brazil.

“Rodrigo came to the states to get his master’s degree and he worked for a company in Wisconsin,” Elmer said. “We were really fortunate to hire him and he has colleagues in Brazil.”

“The trip was sponsored by Bayer and it was a very good opportunity to talk to farmers,” he said.

“We went to two of the largest ranches in Mato Grosso,” Annette said.

“They’ve got 50,000 to 100,000 acres and they’ll have 5,000-acre fields,” Elmer said. “But unlike the U.S. where we’ve got roads every mile, if they have a road it’s because they built a dirt road.”

Farmers plant two crops each year in Brazil.

“It is their wintertime now and their spring planting starts around Sept. 1,” Elmer said. “They put beans in and harvest them in January and right behind the combine they will no-till the corn in.”

The rainy season starts around late August and lasts for six months, followed by six months of hot and dry weather when the temperatures can be from 100 to 110 degrees.

“It is important they get the corn in so it gets a good start before the hot and dry period,” Elmer said. “They harvest the corn in May and some farmers are planting cotton as a second crop instead of corn.”

The group from Illinois saw farmers harvesting cotton and they also visited a cattle ranch.

“They had 50,000 head of Zebu cattle which are white because it gets so hot in the summer,” Elmer said. “It takes two and a half years to feed them to market weight.”

The farm is set up with a row of eucalyptus trees, a road, fenceline bunks, a pen of cattle and a drainage ditch behind the pen.

“The rainwater goes in the drainage ditch and it is all collected into a pond that is used for irrigation,” Elmer said.

“They do those rows over and over and that’s how they’re sustainable, by controlling all the runoff and they compost the manure for fertilizer for their fields,” he said.

The Brazilian farmers are producing 40 to 45 bushels of beans per acre and 100 to 120 bushels of corn per acre, Elmer said.

“They can compete with production and they have all the tools in their toolbox,” he said.

“They had a shed with 35 John Deere 780 combines and 12-row heads because it’s so important for them to get the corn out and get the next crop in,” he said. “It’s all about doing it in a timely manner.”

Infrastructure is a challenge for the farmers.

“When they load a truck, it takes five days one way to get from Mato Grosso to the port in Sao Paulo on a two-lane road,” Elmer said. “The trucks can carry 125,000 pounds compared to 50,000 pounds in the U.S.”

“It was a very interesting trip and we have a lot to learn from them,” Annette said. “I came back realizing we have to be better marketers.”