So... About That Wheat.

There are a lot of folks out there saying the wheat crop is finished, and in many cases, they may be right. But here are some things to consider...

Freeze Damage: It looks like lows across SW KS are in the 29+ range. Anything above 32 and you'll be fine. In general, the more advanced the wheat, the more susceptible it is to freeze damage. However, this was not a sudden drop in temperature. The wheat had two full days to get acclimated to the cold, and that does make a difference. I will be surprised if there is a lot of freeze damage to any wheat that has not flowered yet, especially if it is covered in snow...

Stem damage: I am more concerned about stem damage from heavy wet snow. Again, the later the wheat, the worse the damage. It is going to be very hard to tell the extent of the damage on pre-headed-out wheat. Is the stem broken, or just really really bent? Given the right filling conditions, wheat can still make some good grain with a somewhat damaged stem. Now it might all be laying flat on the ground at harvest, but luckily we all got some good practice cutting lodged wheat last summer. 😉

Cosmetic damage. It's gonna look pretty ugly. Luckily, all your neighbors wheat will also look ugly, so it shouldn't be all that embarrassing.

THE MOST IMPORTANT THING!!

Both freeze damage and stem damage are impossible to fully evaluate right now. Give it a good week, and then start looking. You can probably look in a few days if your wheat was headed out already. Luckily it will take a week for the fields to dry out enough to get back in there...

When you do get out in the fields, look at the heads:

Green and firm=call in a fungicide application (it's gonna need it).

White and smushy=call in the swather.

Both?... I don't know! If it was me, I'd probably take my chances, but I'm an eternal optimist when it comes to wheat. And if you have some magic (and legal) alternate crop that is somehow going to cash flow this year, I'd love to hear about it.

Give me a call or text if you have questions or want a second opinion on a particular field.

Good luck!

Rain Prep.

So everybody but everybody was out in the field on Monday trying to get some field work in before the rain.  Over the weekend the weather service was forecasting a half inch of moisture, with maybe a half inch of that being snow.  Both pre-emerge herbicide and topdressed nitrogen need some rainfall to do any good, and we'd all been waiting for some time.  

Problem is, on Monday morning they backed off the rain forecast to 0.15"  Not great, but better than nothing.

I chose to spend my day getting pre-emerge herbicide on my dryland acres.  I double checked the label to see just how much rain I needed in order to activate the chemical-- and the label said "adequate".  With that sub-adequate piece of information I decided it was now or never. We have had some incredibly warm weather, and my primary goal this time of year is to get pre-emerge in the ground before kochia starts to emerge.

Shots fired.

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In Which lobiwan Gets in Over His Head. (June 2012 1 of 2.)

Scales, scales, and an attack of the un-dead.

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A Look at the Wheat.

On the 13th, Mark and Dad and I ran Over East to look at the wheat, and at Phil's new well.

The outskirts of the circle looked pretty harsh.

But looked just fine once you got into it a little bit.

And here is another look at the difference in the corn stubble quality from last year. You can see the benefits of a hardier corn stalk on the left, where there is still snow cover. Again I will point out that the BT corn was on the right, non-BT on the left, if only to again mention my pet peeve of all the talk in Ag over the "tougher stalks from BT corn" which is pure nonsense. We have tougher stalks, yes, but this is a result of conventional breeding selecting for better stalk strength which correlates to better late season plant health and yield. The beauty of GM crops lies in the ability to introduce very specific traits WITHOUT affecting the other traits present in the crop. Referring to tougher stalks being a byproduct of the BT trait is like saying "this new highway sure gets a lot less potholes since they started using that new paint for the center stripes." Drives me crazy.

We then took a gander at the dryland Over East. It got burned back pretty bad by the super cold temperatures last month, but you can still see plenty of green too. The wheat palnt at this stage has its growing point underground, so the plant is still perfectly able to grow at this point. The killing off of the top growth at this point is #1 largely cosmetic, and #2 almost preferable to me in these uber-dry conditions. A plant that is green is a plant that is losing moisture or has the potential to lose moisture as far as I'm concerned.

It sure doesn't make for a pretty picture, though.

And here is the moisture that has accumulated in the rain gauge over the last couple of months. Which was actually quite surprising.

On Monday morning I picked up the tractor from the shop and drove it home.

I parked it next to the Puma so I could look at them side by side.

Because I like to look at tractors.

Dad and I went back over east later on Wednesday, as I was wondering if we shouldn't fire up the sprinkler with the 80 degree weather.


The moisture probe said no.

Then we went over to the Gray Havens, where the wheat had gotten some pretty good growth before the cold hit.

But it also looked like it would be just fine.
I tried the moisture probe in a few places, though I figured it was a lost cause. The trouble is what little moisture we have in the top soil is pretty shallow, which means you can't get the probe in the ground more than a few inches. Finally I spotted an ant hill and thought maybe, just maybe...
Yep. My little friends had burrowed below the dry layer far enough that I could get the probe past it. After that it went right in (remember the crazy wet fall of '09, all that moisture is still in the soil, waiting.) That is what has been so frustrating with this dryland wheat crop from the beginning. All we needed was a nice half inch, maybe three quarter inch rain soon enough in the fall to bring the soil moisture together, allowing the roots to reach that subsoil moisture, and we would have been looking at the potential for an outstanding wheat crop. We still have plenty of potential for a decent crop, but not for a great crop. And still we need a decent sized moisture event to go from potential to reality.

We stopped to look at some seed wheat Tom planted for us on the way back home. It looked really good.


Finally, on Monday the 21st, I took a gander out at the wheat at home.


Not much on the surface, but it doesn't take too much effort to find some baby plants.

Even if some of the baby plants are questionable.

You could even find some emerging going on in spots. See:

You kind of have to look pretty closely.

I finally remembered to bring a spade with me to do a little digging, which I keep forgetting to do when I head east.

I was pretty pleasantly surprised:

And it looks like we have a little bit of a moisture buffer here for a little bit.

But still the dry layer. It is deeper here, since we had less rain over the summer and didn't get a (halfway) decent rain on it until December. I could get the probe in a little deeper, but not much.

Luckily my friend Mr. Rabbit managed to dig below the dry zone for me.
So close. So close.

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.