I thought we would be getting a little bit of a break the last couple of weeks, but that hasn’t really happened. Even when it rains, it seems there is work to get caught up on. It doesn’t help that at least one of the kids has something going on every evening.

Keeping up with spraying is a full-time job right now. The soybeans needed to be sprayed early this year. I like to wait until 28-35 days after planting, but this year we are closer to 21 days.

Some of the products we use require the first trifoliate to be out before spraying, but we are barely getting there. The main reason for the early spray is some weeds that escaped the burndown or volunteer corn in fields that went down last fall.

Corn isn’t quite as pressing but we still prefer to get across fields earlier than later. From the road, some fields appear perfectly clean -- until you get out and look. Grass and broadleaf weeds have recently emerged so it is a great time to kill them and lay down the rest of the residual.

Other fields aren’t quite as clean. There are a few fields where we have had trouble with hemp dogbane since we’ve been growing non-GMO crops for so long. With the transition to traits this year, we have some different tools in our toolbox, so we hope to get those cleaned up.

Fixing our mistakes

Do you remember that story I told you last week about that last field of soybeans we planted? You know, the one we didn’t want to plant ahead of a heavy rain, where we waited all day then decided to go to the field at 3 p.m.?

Well, we ended up replanting it. We should have known better.

Rains were pounding us as we left the field. That’s a bad sign. Wednesday was the two-week mark. We checked it and found many of the soybeans had broke their necks trying to pish their way through the soil. A half inch rain Tuesday was too late to get them up. We ended up with about half a stand, an erratic 60-70,000 plants per acre.

We might have let it grow if the stand was more consistent.

Looks like summer is coming for us next week with some temperatures in the 90s. The corn will grow like a shot!

The opinions of the author are not necessarily those of Farm Futures or Farm Progress.