I hope everyone had a fun and safe 4^th of July! This week has flown past, I’m pretty sure I missed a couple days somewhere. We are nearing the end of several activities on the farm. Hopefully things will slow down soon.

Today dad will make Y-drop nitrogen applications to the last 90 acres. We’ve still got a few issues to resolve with the Rogator (and the transition from dry to liquid), but for the most part it has run smoothly. Higher machine clearance has given us the longer window we needed for application. It is also much faster and does a lot less damage than the tractor-pulled cart we had used in the past. The worst thing we have fought is an electrical harness that was crushed in handling of the liquid system. That will have to be replaced before next year. Dad would also like to install a ground sensing boom leveling system.

I will also finish up corn drop re-spray applications - I hope! The acre-counter will end at nearly 2/3 of our corn acres. I wonder if conditions could have been better when we made the first in-crop application. I also think we are still fighting some leftovers from more than a decade of non-GMO cropping and a buildup in the soil weed bank.

We will have some more spraying in a couple of weeks as soybeans have been slow to close in and will require a second in-crop application there. We will also be looking at that R3 soybean plant health application. Corn plant health will be done at R1, all by airplane again this year.

Credit: Kyle Stackhouse

Wheat harvest wrapped up Thursday. It was better than expected, but I haven’t heard any neighboring yields, so I don’t know if it was actually any good. Remember, we considered tearing this field up the first week of June. Expectations were not very high. There are certainly some things I will change going forward if we continue with wheat. Making those decisions are for another day. I did sell the straw, hopefully they can come in and get it bailed, our goal is to get the soybeans planted by Saturday night.