From the Barns: Crops look pitiful

I know I sound like a broken record, but I cannot emphasize enough how wet it is in southern Illinois. Since my last writing, we have received a big quantity of rain, including about 4 inches this past week. There was one stint of seven to 10 days of no rain and the row crop guys were able to jump in and get some planting done, but may be wishing they hadn’t.

Hate to say it, but the crops look pitiful right now. Some people were able to get into the hayfield and get some bales rolled up, but that was limited to say the least. I am telling you these fields are absolutely saturated. Best we can remember, it hasn’t been this wet this far into spring since 1981.

AI breeding is still going on. The 140-plus heifers were synched, and using heat detection with the aid of HeatSiecker patches, 80% of them were bred in the first five days post-synch. Since then we have picked up another 10% that got bred. We still have them close by and if any heifers come back in heat they will get another round of AI.

As far as the cows go, we spent two days deworming, fly tagging and putting patches on 150-plus cows. Some of the cows we hit with a shot of prostaglandin and we are doing the heat detection plan on them, as well, and we seem to be breeding several cows every day. Unless something changes our plan, all the on-farm breeding will be strictly AI.

While we had the cow-calf pairs up, the calves got an intranasal respiratory vaccine, along with seven-way blackleg and an insecticide tag. Hopefully, getting them vaccinated at this age will go a long way in building up their immunity and give them a boost health-wise, not just through the summer, but their entire life.

Bull sales this spring have been steady and we are still getting calls for bulls even as breeding season in most cases is underway. We have a few more bulls to deliver this coming week and the bull inventory is getting low. Still have a few yearlings, but not many breeding-age bulls left. That is why we increased our bull production, and essentially doubled our bull numbers, counting the fall-born 2024 bulls. Brett and David have scheduled their first annual bull sale for next April and I hope to be able to write more about that as we get closer to time.

This coming week we have a group of 50 bull calves we bought straight off the cow several weeks ago and it is time for them to be revaccinated, as well as castrated. We deferred cutting them until now, watching the weather, as well as the sign of the Farmers’ Almanac. We are still old-fashioned in some respects.

We have a number of projects we need to be getting on, such as sowing sudangrass, building and fixing fences, putting up shade tarps, Environmental Quality Incentives Program practices, cleaning pens and hauling manure. I could name many other things we need to be doing. This weather and wet conditions has just handcuffed us so much, we have been unable to do many of these things. I hope we get relief soon and can get to tackling all these tasks.