From the Barns: Rest easy, Dad

My children and grandchildren have been blessed to have always had all their grandparents involved in their lives. It’s rare for folks to have all their grandparents around when they themselves are in their 40s, but that has been the case for my kids.

My dad, Harry, has struggled with his health the last couple of years, mostly due to pneumonia and his old body just getting weak. The darned COVID-19 bug snuck into their home despite everybody’s best effort to keep it out and Dad got infected. He went to the hospital and did great there. He beat COVID-19 so successfully they discharged him after just a couple of days and sent him back home. Unfortunately, he was weakened enough that he got double pneumonia shortly after returning home and wound up back in the hospital a second time, but couldn’t rally enough strength to win the fight, so the Lord called him home. He was just three months short of 90 years old.

Dad never really farmed. He was a plumber by trade. His farming centered around making it possible for my brother, Stan, and I to pursue our passion for farming, and he did just about everything imaginable to make that happen. His hearing was shot and several strokes had made speech an issue, so talking on the phone was nearly impossible, so Mom has been the interpreter for a while now. Dad’s interest in the farm and what his kids were doing there became a daily ritual. How many calves today? How much corn did you chop? What are the kids up to? He never lost interest and I will miss his daily inquiry. Rest easy, Dad. We got this.

Cow work is all caught up until after harvest, and moving cows to better pasture is about all we need to be doing on that front. Cattle markets have settled at over a dollar, but could use some help. Feeders are a little better, but there’s a lot of interest in retaining calves through the finishing phase and thus putting off marketing until we see some improvement in prices. The feedlot will get even fuller going into fall.

When the weather turns hot and dry this time of year corn harvest comes on quickly, more so if you make all your crop into cattle feed. The race to retain moisture so our corn silage and earlage will ensile properly is totally weather-dependent. Waiting for 50% starch layer for corn silage and black layer in the case of earlage is hard when you see the plants start to fire up and leaves getting brown due to the lack of water. That’s been the case for the month of August, and now we are full on with corn harvest. We will finish chopping silage this week, depending on much-needed rain in the forecast.

A little rain every few days is cherished as it helps keep the dust down on our farm roads. Lack of visibility is an issue with the trucks pounding back and forth, especially when the wind lies in the evening and the cloud quits blowing away. Corn yields have been variable due to the wet conditions at planting. The wet spots have corn, but noticeably reduced tonnage.

We chopped some of our sorghum-sudangrass hybrid for the first time, but may graze out the rest if pasture conditions don’t improve soon. It’s nice to have that option. We mowed the sorghum-sudangrass 45 days after planting, and it was 5 to 6 feet tall. We expected a lot of tillering from the regrowth and have not been disappointed. Five or six plants have emerged from each original plant, and it is growing like crazy and is so much thicker than the original stand — interesting stuff to experiment with.

Astoria, Ill.