Hunting

As a high school student, Richard Siedenburg did not plan to join his dad farming, but that changed after spending time in other countries in the U.S. Army and Army Reserves.

What a great harvest we had, huge crop and great weather to harvest in. Aside from the dusty road conditions, I do not recall an easier harvest ever.

We have all but finished our harvest for the year. Corn chopping went extremely smooth with no rain delays and to my recollection only one truck needing pulled all season long — surely a record.

Harvest is in full swing for Mark Seib, a grain farmer from Posey County in the southwestern corner of Indiana.

As summer presses onward, From the Fields contributor Mark Seib continues balancing farm and family life.

Like most southern Illinois farms of my youth, my family had a closet filled with guns.

The earth provides an overabundance of food, but the distribution of that food is the struggle.

We live back in the woods, so the only time I witness the sun rise is when we get started at o-dark-thirty and get out and about on the ranch somewhere. Turkey season came in mid-April and is soon to wrap up.

The Endangered Species Act turned 50 years old late last month. Signed by President Richard Nixon in 1973, the legislation was expansive and controversial.

The fat market has moved lower now that the holiday buy is completed, but I don’t see the justification. There are no more cattle out there and demand seems to be just as good.

An exploding population of hard-to-eradicate “super pigs” in Canada is threatening to spill south of the border, and northern states like Minnesota, North Dakota and Montana are taking steps to stop the invasion.

Animal welfare advocates filed a lawsuit seeking to invalidate Wisconsin’s new wolf management plan, accusing state wildlife officials of violating the state’s open meetings law and disregarding comments from wolf researchers and supporters.

A lack of snow and warm temperatures that suppressed deer movement led to a lackluster opening weekend of Wisconsin’s nine-day gun season, with hunters killing thousands fewer deer than last year.

We finally got a frost that finished off our corn after wheat. I have been busy pumping manure and did not get involved with chopping that last field of corn, but Brett reported it had made 12 tons.

Marvin Frederick expected to be drafted into the Army since he had a 23 lottery number. “I knew it was coming so I waited for the letter in the mail,” he said.

We have not received any real precipitation since we started chopping corn, so the dusty roads have been an issue, but on the flip side we haven’t had the chain hooked to trucks yet.

Two years ago, a Marshall County farm field looked like most of Illinois’ 12 million acres of tile-drained cropland. But a local contractor moved over 6,000 cubic yards of earth to create a smart wetland.

We’ve been taking advantage of the dry soil conditions and doing a lot of deep soil tillage ahead of our manure application this year. Surely, we have created some compaction issues with all the trucks and harvest equipment when we were making cow feed.

Two major farmland auctions recently attracted capacity crowds, with bidders coming from as far away as Florida and Tennessee. Schrader Real Estate and Auction Company marketed both farms and conducted the live auctions.

The same dry weather that has made our corn harvest go so smoothly has also wrecked our pastures. Only one herd of cows remains that is not needing some supplemental feed.

Alligator season is underway in Louisiana, and with meat prices high, people within the industry expect a good year. Alligators bring in an estimated $250 million to the state annually, according to the Louisiana Wildlife and Fisheries Department.

Our once lush and green pastures are all of a sudden pretty desert-like as we are experiencing some drought-like conditions that our western cattlemen have been plagued with all summer. Fortunately for us, we have, or very soon will have, lots of crop residue to utilize as feed for the fall.

Tickets are available for the annual Illinois Conservation Foundation Director’s Hunt. The two-day controlled pheasant and quail hunt will be Nov. 29-30 at Wayne Fitzgerrell State Recreation Area in southern Illinois.