From the Fields: ‘Sitting in a really good position’

We’ve got a couple hundred acres that we’re transitioning to organic this year. It’s a totally different scenario and methodology as to what I’m used to, and what’s kind of what kept me away from doing organic is the excessive amount of tillage that we have to do.

But I justify it by saying this gives me an opportunity to use manure, which I haven’t in the past, and get away from man-made fertilizers and things like that. I love manure. I’d use it on everything if I could afford to, but I can’t. But organic gives me that opportunity.

I farm with another family, the Wildermuths, and they have a company called Wild Organics. They do a really good job of weed control. They raised as good of corn as I did farming conventionally, and they did it organically.

I think one of the keys to it is still keeping living roots and a lot of the same principles involved. I love the idea of bringing wheat back into the rotation. We’re going to frost seed clover. So, we’re also going to have the nitrogen source, but it’s also a different type of root and putting carbon in the ground throughout the end of the summer. Then we’ll probably spread manure and till that clover underground. Then I’ll put like a late-season oats, radish, pea and diverse mix cover crop in there that’s going to winter kill and start rebuilding my soil that way.

We’re done with planting everything, but the organic as of May 18. Typically in organic production, you want the ground to be warmer. You want it up in five days. You want the weeds to get established so you can cultivate them out. We’re about to that point. Next week we’ll probably finish up organics. We planted little bit of organic corn last week and then it rained. That’ll get followed by the tined weeder about every four days to work on weed control.

We’re also post-spraying corn. Corn’s at V2 now and they want us to spray early. Otherwise, we try and be patient. I know some guys started planting soybeans around here in March. Some of them look really good and some of them got frosted off and that’s the chance take. A lot of corn went into the ground the end of April, and then we got some pounding rains. So, there’s a decent amount of replant that has to be done. That happened basically last week. But guys are sitting in a really good position right now. I think most everybody’s is either done or close to being done.

Once we got going, spring went really quick. We had a window there from mid-April to the end of April where a lot of guys went and then the last 10 days has just been hammer down and get her done. We’ve got any anywhere from V3 corn to corn that’s just sat in the ground. We’ll be putting on fungicide and foliar feed on wheat with the drone.