Question for farmers

[HOGFARMER]

How is harvest going?  What are your yields compared to other years?

I hope to finish tomarrow her in NE Ohio.

Thanks

[Faron]

We finished in mid October.  Yields were not great.  Beans a little over 40 bushels.  Corn about 140.  We just needed one or two more good rains late.  It is very dry here yet.  We did get enough rain lately to get our wheat and rye up.  We are working on tiling some creek bottom land that was tiled 35 years ago on 60 ' centers.  We have our own tiling equipment, so we are tiling on 40' centers this time.  Tile is getting hard to get.  Our regular supplier said it could be mid December before he could get us tile.    We made some calls and got a load elsewhere, and looks like we can get more.

How are things in Ohio?

[Randy88]

Bean yields were good, mid to upper 50's and corn lagged behind slightly than what its been somewhere around 170-180 beans were too dry, in the single digits and up to about 10 percent and corn came in between 13 and 16 and since it was in the 80's for temps it took no gas to dry, never done that ever before, kinda evened out last year since we used three times the amount of gas to dry corn.    We are also tiling and the ground is so hard it takes forever to get anything done, tile is almost impossible to get, they keep promising we will have some more next week but apparently next week isn't on their schedule, have two days worth of tile left and then our stockpile is gone and we wait, again, this is the first time I've ever had to wait for tile in october and november, I've been told that I should have ordered more in the summer and had taken delivery of it, must have missed something, if everyone did that they'd have run out in july instead of october, there was no response to that statement from any of the sales guys but total silence.   I'm thinking making tile is what we need to be doing, seems theres more demand than supply and apparently a lot of potential customers out there that are currently unhappy with who's supposed to be supplying them tile, looks like a wide open field of oppertunity to me.   

[Kansas]

Faron, where do you market your rye? I remember dad talking about planting rye many years ago, but I don't think I have ever seen a field of it. Is that a specialty crop there, or is it a standard crop grown there?

[SwampDonkey]

Do you guys cut beans and corn in the dew of the night. These fly by nighters around here cut after dark around here. Never a sole in the fields in daylight. When dad cut wheat and rye it had to be dry weather and in daylight. I can't figure this "new" local tribe out.  : I've seen them cut corn for hogs the first of December, it spoiled and got dumped in January. I guess these guys don't have to make a living like the rest of the farmers. The farmers I grew up with have all their crops in by mid October and field rocks from the potato harvest all gathered as well as the plowing done, except maybe the corn fields.

[chain]

We had a family from Croatia farming near our timber farm, they had just moved in the previous year. But I witnessed them shelling corn by flashlight one November evening.

Locally here, the drought continues with red-flag warnings just about every day. All crops are out with cotton leading the others as rice, soybeans, and corn yields fell to the hot dry weather. We had average yields as which we were happy with, from 10bu-54bu.[irrigated] acre. on soybeans.

This drought tough on shrubs and shallow-rooted trees, on the plus side..nursery folks will be very busy next spring. The animals of the fields seem to have gathered around our farmstead as skunks, 'coon, 'possums, coyotes, bobcats, owls and hawks seem to have a free-for-all every night. Really stinks bad every morning from skunks >:(...think our blind spaniel was bitten last month. He use to sleep in the large flower bed but now he panics if he's not insde the carport[or house] by nightfall.

[ely]

what is the tile that you guys speak of? sorry if thats a stupid question but i am sorta new at farming.

[sandhills]

We finished here a week ago last Saturday which is early for us, thanks mostly to dry crops for a change.  Our yeilds were down a lot from last year due to tremendous amounts of rain shortly after planting then it dried out in July.  It's still dry here also and this was one of the driest, scariest harvests I can remember.  We took a disc with us almost everywhere we went and tried to work into the wind as much as possible.  I farm all dryland and mostly sand so my yeilds aren't ever that great anyway but this year beans were about 30 and corn 100-110 bu/acre.  My heavy ground was all corn, think it did somewhere around 140.  Most irrigated in this area was beans 60-70 and corn around 180, we really needed a few late rains also.

[Paul_H]

what is the tile that you guys speak of? sorry if thats a stupid question but i am sorta new at farming.

Here's a good link to a older thread

Tiling

[Faron]

http://www.soilmax.com/media.php

That is a link to a company that makes tile plows.  They explain the idea pretty well.  We get better return on our dollar with tile than about anything else.
Kansas, we plant rye and then cut it for hay when it is in the boot stage.  It grows taller than wheat, and makes quite a bit more per acre.  That way we cut a hay crop,and then plant that field in soybeans.  Since we don't have a dedicated hay field, it stretches our limited acres.  Not all that much rye around here otherwise, except as a cover crop. The only time we combine rye is to save for seed.

[Patty]

So I am assuming you use Round-Up ready soy beans and then just spray the field after to soy beans are up to kill off the rye?

Folks try that around here when they are returning a field to beans after alfalfa has out grown its good. They will try to get the first cutting off the alfalfa, then plant to beans and spray with Round-Up. They really have a tough time with that process though, and end up having to spray several times. So now, many guys are just burning off the alfalfa in the fall with round-up and then plant it in the spring. This seems to work better up here.

As far as harvest, we finished in record time this year, covering over 100 acres a day. It was amazing. We started in late September, and finished mid October. We were extremely fortunate in yields, the best this farm has ever produced.

[Faron]

Patty, we treat it just like our regular no till beans.  Ideally we burn down with Roundup generally spiked with some other chemical to control mares tail, which is usually present.  We will come back with Roundup, usually spiked also, again in 3 weeks or so.  If we are lucky, that will be it for spraying.

[Randy88]

Ely, tile is put in the ground to help drain the water out, its either plowed in or trenched in, usually in wet areas or else pattern tiled the entire farm on around 60 foot on center the entire way across the farm and those lines are all hooked up to a main at the end which drains either into another tile downhill or dumped in a ditch. its usually put in any where from 30 inches to five feet deep depending on terrain and soil type and it helps prevent ponding of water on top of the ground,  simply put its like pulling the drain plug on your bathtub and lets the water out.  The areas that receive a lot of rain and heavy wet soils need draining or else they are basically just a giant marshy pond area with bogs all over in it if it wasn't for tile.    The need for pattern tiling has kicked into high gear again the last few years due to yield monitors in combines and farmers figured out that by watching the monitor they could tell that yields increased over the tile lines and it pays to have tile put in and working, to the point of tens of thousands of feet are put in per day or hundreds of thousands of feet per farm will increase yields enough to pay for it in a few years and from then on the benefit is basically free and the rush is on to tile the entire area farm after farm after farm, millions of feet are put in daily in my area by hundreds of crews working before freezeup in the fall and after thaw and before planting every spring, there are decades of tiling to be done and has been like that for over a hundred years now and it'll never end.    The life expextancy of tile is about 30-40 years and it'll need to be redone, either new ideas or technology will emerge and it'll start all over again, the first tile was made of wood, then onto clay and cement and now plastic which has been around since the late 1960's and the first stuff wasn't tested long enough and its starting to go bad and needs to be redone, cement lasts about 60 years and collapses, clay was never made to any perticular standard and every clay manufactuer did things differently and thus some isn't as good as others and now needs to be replaced and as they say, such is life and it never ends.    Some crews put in millions of feet a year while others only do a few hundred thousand feet per year depending on what kind of equipment they have and how long a season they operate in and what the conditions are.   Hope I helped explain it somewhat and they have provided websites to help see what its about.   

[Faron]

I might add that until recently, most tile was installed by contractors.  You got your name on the list, and got your tile installed.... sometime.  Many farmers now own their own tile plows and associated equipment, such as a backhoe, tile stringer cart, and laser or gps equipment to install the tile on the proper grade.  At times it may take two big tractors to pull the plow.  We hated to spend the $12000 or so for a laser system when we bought our plow, because it only gets used a few days or weeks a year.  We added a seat and hydraulic valve to our plow, so the plow is controlled from there instead of in the tractor cab.  We bought a good contractor's laser with adjustable grade.  We set the laser on grade, and place the laser receiver on a mast on the plow.  My brother drives the tractor, and I ride the plow, read the receiver, and adjust the plow depth.  In essence, I am replacing the automatic hydraulic equipment that would read the receiver and adjust the plow.  It does take an extra man, but works well for us.

[SwampDonkey]

Most of the tiling in recent years is done by farmers that contract out. There were a couple construction contractors doing it some years ago, maybe there still are. You'd pretty much have to make a business of it to afford all that heavy equipment. Dad tiled the farm here years ago and had some new land tiled about 15 years ago.

[HOGFARMER]

Finished harvest yesterday.  Just an average crop nothing terrible but definetly nothing to  get excited about.  Tomarrow I will have to clean the combine and get things put away for winter.  At leasst prices have been better than in some years.  Haven't checked the markets yet I know was limit down on both corn and beans.

[Handy Andy]

  Hogfarmer, have to ditto what you said.  Only in Kansas.  My best beans made 46 bpa, some double crop made as low as 15. Some of the beans stayed green and refused to dry down, just patches in fields, slowed down harvest and couldn't get wheat planted till I got the green patches cut.  Finished the beans Tuesday, wheat on Wednesday, spred a pile of manure on Thursday, then got a nice rain on Thursday nite and Friday.  Wound up with about 3 ". Life is good.