It has been a busy fall. Nice weather and little rain has given us good condition to get things done. We had a little rain last night, 0.17, so thought I would give a quick update. Bean harvest went well. I will crunch numbers as soon as we finish corn, but so far looks like where the beans were good, they were great. Where the ground was too wet, not so good. Most years there is very little difference in the soybean yields between plots. That was definitely not the case this year. A little experiment we did looked like it worked. Where I had volunteer winter wheat from 2013 that was going to beans this year, I just let the wheat grow. Looks like it was a good move. As I say, have not crunched numbers yet, but just visually it looked good.
We just got started on the corn. I think it is going to be OK, actually better than I expected. I felt we were way short on nitrogen this year, mostly because of the cold start, deep frost, and the month of June was too wet. I did a stalk test on an irrigated field, lots of nitrogen applied and a low test.
We got a nice catch on the new alfalfa, and a good kill on the old. Cover crops are very interesting on the farm this year. We were looking at how they perform in saline ground. Pretty predictable, if EC is higher than mid 3’s, not much growth. Also looks like they responded very well to nitrogen, actually a huge response. I have thoughts of putting down large amounts of n in our bio-strip. To make a very long story short, a research paper was done on our farm that shows some very wide C-N ratios in our residues. I am curious to see what a highly fertilized radish cover crop would do to OM, C-N ratios, and ultimately yields long term.
Lots of things to think about this winter.