From the Fields: Winning weed war

It’s still heating up outside, but things are cooling off around the farm. We can relax a little more and take time to “smell the roses” — it is a nice feeling to be done playing catch-up. We started off the week with mowing our alfalfa for the second cutting. It seemed to be about as thick as the first cutting, so we were relieved. We got it down and let it lay almost a whole day before round baling it and wet wrapping it for this winter. I had time to go check the sorghum-sudangrass and pearl millet crop I sowed back in early June. It’s really cranking along and was almost waist-high already, which should have me cutting it in about another 15 days. I sowed 30 pounds to the acre and I think every seed came up. It’s thick and should make great haylage. We got a few big square bales of straw from the crew that bales our wheat straw and finally had time to get that stacked up in the corner of the barn to be used for bedding this fall and winter.

The market is still so volatile and prices remain in the painful range. We were able to take advantage of a nice little rally and a nice positive basis at the ethanol plant last week. They bid up 25 cents for a day, so we just dropped everything and hauled five loads up on a contract. It’s going to get interesting very quickly because a lot of farms still have old corn sitting in the bins and even the local elevators still have a stockpile of corn. I know it’s painful to sell it cheap, but I’m afraid we’re either going to sell old crop at breakeven or little profit or really take a bath on this new crop.

I’ll admit I was pretty sure we’d see a rally with China buying a large amount of U.S. corn. The cards weren’t right because we didn’t see any market movement like we all hoped for. We need to start being more realistic on our breakeven prices and being prepared to sell some for fall if you can’t hold onto all of it. It’s always a gamble, but I personally don’t have bin space for all of my corn bushels, so I forward contract for fall to try and lock in profit right out of the field. That’s the balancing act that we all try to figure out year in and year out. It seems as if prices go up and down more quickly than in the past, which makes it harder to set that price you feel comfortable with. I remind myself to take the emotion out of selling and just use the numbers to lock some sort of profit into the equation.

We started back in on mowing road ditches and waterways again. Not everyone’s favorite job, but I’ll tell you why I feel it’s very important. We take weed prevention seriously around our farm. Weeds like waterhemp, Palmer, marestail and pigweeds — the list goes on and on — that are so hard to handle start in the road ditches and waterways. We keep our ditches mowed frequently and try and keep our waterways mowed down so weeds can’t take over and go to seed. When I was driving around scouting fields to spray for fungicide, I noticed we had some horseweeds starting to escape in a field of beans. In a few short weeks’ time it turned into an ugly mess. I was able to drive along the beans and spray what I could, but I ended up walking and pulling a huge amount of them by hand. Yes, you heard me right, a millennial walking and pulling weeds.

That field was fall sprayed, burnt down in the spring and even posted with dicamba and still these horse weeds were able to germinate later and outpace the beans. That’s why our herbicide programs have to be better in the future and we have to start using many modes of action instead of relying on what’s cheapest and easiest. We even spotted some waterhemp in a road ditch that boarders our field, so we sprayed the whole ditch with dicamba and pulled what waterhemp we could trying to make sure that it doesn’t seed and spread into our field for next year. Little things like that can save a lot of time and money down the road when we just take a few extra steps to help keep nasty weeds like that at bay.

We have some exciting news coming down the road I’ll tell you about soon. I am also getting excited about starting to sign some of our customers’ fields with seed signs. I like doing it to not only walk some of the field and talk with the grower about what he’s seeing, but also to represent our seed companies’ genetics and our seed business. It’s a great way to make a guy look and notice a nice field of corn or beans and put a brand to those products growing in their neighborhoods. It’s great to see a nice-looking crop on your customers’ ground and know you played a small part in that success.

I hope it cools off a little bit for everyone next week and let’s not forget to pray for some good rains soon. Seems like we could use and inch a week easily now with this heat. I hope everyone’s crops are coming along nicely now and in a few weeks we should start to see what pollination looks like on corn and be able to see some beans start to pod up. I still encourage you to get out and look at your fields, see what’s going on and try to see what your crops are telling you they need to finish out the year. Stay cool and stay safe everyone.

Hope, Ind.