Neighbors

The Jarvisons stunned everyone by pulling their new sixteen(16) row central fill planter up and planting the circle caddy-corner to us on April 9th, a time when the accepted logic was that the soil temperature was WAY to low to plant, and by WAY I mean 10+ degrees too cold. Add to this that the Jarvison's just started farming this quarter, which is owned by a farmer who is still farming, and that the Jarvison's had previously never even farmed in this county, and you can imagine the confusion in the neighborhood.

And here is a shot taken cross-row of a field of corn stubble strip tilled for continuous corn. Pretty much everyone is strip tilling these days. I don't like how stripping a field (previously planted at the same row spacing) at an angle creates these bands through the field, it just seems like the field is super-not-uniform. Of course I also think that strip-tilling continuos corn has all of the problems of tillage (high horsepower requirements, drying out of the soil) with all of the problems of no-till (increased disease pressure, specialized equipment) while actually magnifying the chief disadvantages to continuos corn (insect pressure, weed resistance created by using the same chemistries year after year,) and the added disadvantage of requiring RTK auto-steer (an added $20,000 to the price of each tractor used, plus a $800+ yearly subscription) to do it right.