We finished planting Monday. In all the planting season for us lasted three weeks. It took two weeks each for soybeans corn, so one week overlapped. This is one of our earliest finishes.
I know a lot of areas have been delayed by excess moisture. I have friends to the south of us that aren’t even half done. It’s still relatively early, but it will be interesting to see how the final planting numbers turn out. We pushed a 50/50 field from soybeans to corn but other than that everything went in the ground as planned.
We still have plenty on our to-do list.
Irrigation prep. Servicing and testing irrigation pivots and wells is currently at the top of the list. Mark has checked the oil levels on most of the drivelines. He has also been checking air pressure in the tires and greasing where necessary.
We have identified several gearboxes that need to be changed. Dad and Mark have been changing a few each day.
I have been testing wells when I am near the fields. Unfortunately, I had one well motor short circuit on startup. We have already pulled the hollow shaft motor off and sent it to the motor shop.
I’ve also been fixing some tile blow-outs that we found during planting.
Fieldwork. We will begin to roll fields next week as the beans hit the first trifoliate. Hopefully, residual chemistry on both corn and soybean fields holds for a little while and spraying won’t have to happen for a few more weeks. We would also like to get rock picking started as soon as we can gather enough kids. I think most schools are out at the end of next week.
The downside of early planting? It will limit how much time we have to pick rocks. A few folks won’t be unhappy about that.