Plant21

It’s been a “roller-coaster” growing season for Illinois corn. Brad Mason, Pioneer field agronomist, said there’s a lot of variability in corn across his region that’s bordered by I-80 to the north through McDonough and Fulton counties in the south.

About eight inches of rain soaked the Kindred family farm over four days and Ron and Jay were preparing for mowing on Monday morning, June 28.

Hello from Graze-N-Grow. I feel blessed since our last rain, seven-tenths, because crops and pastures are doing great. I recently talked with a friend, an organic farmer, from extreme northern Iowa, who’s had all of 3.5 inches for the whole year and nothing so far in June.

As corn and soybean plants pop up across the state, don’t be too stressed out about uneven emergence, said Steve Gauck, field agronomist at Beck’s Hybrids.

It finally dried out enough for us to complete our corn planting and wheat chopping and have a good start to hay making. Unfortunately, it all happened at once. We will now turn our attention back to manure pumping on the harvested wheat acres and follow that with more corn planting.

Ron and Jay Kindred were setting the population on their four-row planter to prepare for replanting some corn upon arrival late Wednesday morning, May 26. “We’ll be replanting some corn when the ponds dry up after this next rain goes through. All of the corn is up enough that we can see where we need to plant-in,” Ron said.

The pressure was on Trivapro®, the Syngenta fungicide with three active ingredients, to prove itself straight out of the gate.

Whoopee! Grazing season is underway and all is grand. In the last two weeks, we have had an absolute forage explosion. It has exceeded anything I have experienced. We seemed to have gone from 4 to 6 inches to 10 to 14 inches almost overnight in some near-perfect — at least for cool-season grasses — conditions. It has been a sight to behold.

Spring is in full swing. Lots of green, green grass and baby calves everywhere. We have moved calving back further and further to avoid miserable weather and yet it still seems pretty darned chilly here in mid-May some mornings. Corn planting, manure hauling and feeding cattle are top priorities, but will very soon give way to chopping wheat and baling hay.

May is Mental Health Awareness Month. Wisconsin Farm Bureau and National Farm Medicine Center want rural residents to know that #FarmNeighborsCare.

Wisconsin farmers say spring planting is ahead of schedule this year.

The Kindreds were making one last push to plant soybeans the day before snow was forecast in central Illinois.

As times get busier on the farm, with more moving parts, shortened timeframes and more things to do, it can be easy to wish there were more hours in the day. The farm’s leader, especially, can find that there’s an unlimited number of tasks to do.

Great Plains Manufacturing continues to offer innovative solutions to help producers, including additional features to the BD7600 box drill.

Granular and Pioneer Agronomy, both cornerstones of Corteva Agriscience, have joined forces to create a first-of-its-kind resource for U.S. farmers. Their proprietary digital planting guide brings together the best of Pioneer Agronomy expertise plus more than 5 million acres of anonymized Granular and Corteva data and insights.