May 2010, Part II.

May did not stay so nice. I stepped in a hole. It hurt.

A couple of days later, I noticed there was a little more dirt in the air than normal.

It was a little bit windy.

Our trees didn't help much.

See the sprinkler 350 yards away? Me neither.
Days like this make me glad I'm a no-till-er. It is nice to know that my precious soil is protected by a nice cover of residue. Imagine those poor baby corn plants out in the open on a day like this. I felt pretty happy knowing how much nice wheat stubble I had planted in to:

I went over to look, just the same.
Odd, I don't remember this ditch next to the field being full of wheat stubble:

Or the ditch across the road:

And then I saw the field:
It was pretty bad.

In some spots you could see the bottom of every trench made by the planter or the fertilizerer.
With nice stubble drifts in other spots.


If my field looked this bad, other peoples must look worse, right?

Not corn strip tilled into corn stalks:

Or corn strip tilled into wheat stubble:
In fact my field was the only field that looked bad at all.
(Sigh.)
So there were a few days of talking to my agronomists, doing stand counts, and getting second opinions while I tried to convince myself of what I already knew. The field would have to be disked up and replanted.

Of course the bigger question is why. What happened? This is certainly not the first windstorm I've seen in my ten years of farming, but is was by far the worst (or really the only significant) damage I've seen with a good amount of crop residue on the surface. I've seen things like corn husks and loose bits of straw and chaff blow off of a field, but ALL of the stubble down to bare soil? And here I was, all excited about my new fertilizer rig and the fact that I was finally able to do everything "right."
One thing I noticed is the definite pattern of where the stubble blew. I could stand at any spot in the field and find the tracks of every single tractor pass across the field:
With the most obvious tracks being those made when I was planting. There were also obvious compaction issues going on when you looked at the corn which hadn't emerged yet:
So what do we have?
A wet fall and winter followed by a cold and cloudy spring leaves the soil wet and cold, especially on no-till. Two successive passes, one with the fertilizerer and one with the planter slice the residue up in a nice diamond pattern (think of an ice scraper) while the extra heavy tractor (carrying fertilizer on both passes) damages the wheat stubble and soil in such a way as to make it vulnerable to the first apocalyptic strength straight line wind to come along. Guys running conventional-till or even strip-till (read "everyone else") were able to dry out their soils enough to avoid these problems.
Strip-till was developed in Illinois in order to allow producers to practice near no-till in a state where cold and wet soils in the spring is a common occurrence. It does a nice job of meeting the two goals of drying out the soil in the spring and leaving a fair amount of residue on the surface. And that is precisely why, every time I think seriously about switching to strip till over no-till, I stick with the no-till. It just doesn't make sense to me to actively dry out ground I am going to spend the next four months irrigating. Obviously this approach backfired in a big way this year.
How often are we going to have these kinds of conditions in late April in SWKS? Often enough justify the expense of switching to strip-till? It is a minimal cost for guys who run big tractors over a lot of acres every year, but is anything but minimal for me, running a majority of dryland acres with relatively small tractors. The cost for me go to strip-till is not simply the cost of the strip-till rig itself--I don't even own a tractor with the necessary horsepower to run a strip-till rig.
(Double sigh.)

Anyhoo, whatever I could've would've should've done, there was only one option left at this point: Disk it all under and start over. I couldn't do this until the crop insurance folks looked at the field and gave the green light to tear it all up. I decided to pull the disk Over East while I was waiting.

I didn't make it very far.

So while Dad took the tires in to get fixed, I went over to meet the insurance adjuster. It didn't take too long. If I remember right he determined I had something like a 20% stand left.

And so we started over.



I left Dad running the disk so I could run back home and pick up the planter. Luckily, they had delivered more fertilizer for my soybeans than what I needed, so I had some left to blend with water to use as starter. (When you apply all your P in a band beside the row like I do, you can use less than the recommended rate. Which means when you replant, you have to put some more P on in order to have enough.)

And then it was simply a race to get the corn in the ground ASAP.


I ended up shutting down for the night sometime around 12:30 AM.

Which caught me back up with Dad and the disk.
Anna came over for a little bit, it being Saturday and all.
And I once again--16 days later-- had it all in the ground.

I saw a badger on the way home.