59°F
After an usually cool spring (Blizzard on April 30!?) the crops were begging for some sunshine and warmth. Wow, has it helped! The last couple weeks have been back to normal temperatures with good sunshine. The corn has gotten good color back and is starting to shoot up.
Fortunately the heat has not been too high and night time temps have been low enough too keep the wheat filling nicely. At this point, we believe harvest should start in about 3 weeks…..somewhere around June 20-24.
With all the Spring moisture we have decided to plant the more acres of dryland corn this year than ever before. Saturday 5/27 wrapped up our corn planting as we finished putting over 1,000 acres of corn in the ground for ourselves and over 500 acres of corn for other neighbors. Planting conditions were on the verge of being too wet and were delayed multiple times due to rain. That is certainly a good thing!! All the rain has helped produce great stands on almost every field thus far. Let’s hope the good conditions continue as we transition to planting milo.
Winter wheat is an amazing plant. Its ability to recover from injury and utilize all available moisture quickly continues to amaze me. A week after the blizzard that dropped about a foot of snow on the fields, the wheat has bounced back much better than we could have imagined. It is hard to describe what we found yesterday as we scouted all our fields, but hopefully the attached pictures will help.
Originally we thought we were looking at 80-95% losses, but yesterday we discovered that almost all of the wheat is recovering and current losses are estimated to be less than 15%. As you can imagine, the snow pelted the wheat flat on the ground and kinked the stems. What we are now finding is that the wheat is adapting by now growing parallel to the ground until the first join, then it has rotated and is growing vertical. In many cases, the change in direction of the stem is almost 90 degrees!!
So it looks like there WILL be a wheat harvest. For now. But please realize that the plants are weekend and are using a lot of energy to recover. So, if we get a severe wind or rain event or possibly some hail, the wheat might go back down fairly easily. It is currently heading out so harvest is projected to start around June 20 which is about our average.
After months of waiting Mother Nature has blessed Western Kansas with good rain. Since wheat was planted in September and October, very little moisture had fallen. In January, there was a rain/ice storm that brought about 1″ of rain. Finally now on the last week of March most of the area has received over 2.5″ of rain spread out over multiple days. This is just what we needed!!
In most cases, the wheat crop will benefit greatly from this rain. It should also replenish the top foot of soil moisture which sets everything up for corn and milo planting this Spring. Praise God!!
Winter wheat drilling season is in full swing. We have covered about 75% of our acres and are drilling wheat as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, the lack of rain over the last three weeks is really starting to hurt as we have run out of moisture in most fields. Please pray for rain!!
Fall harvest is under way. This looks to be another record harvest and would mark the forth harvest in a row of record yields. We thank the good Lord for all our bountiful blessings.
At this point corn yeilds have been from 96 to 117 and milo yields have been from 101 to 131bu/acre. On Oct. 8 we passed the half way point on harvest. Now, we just need the milo to continue to dry down so we can finish cutting.