Category: Challenges

In Between the Last Crop & the Next

Fall is always busy, we are at the beginning of what looks a lot like triage everyday of what needs to be done. We have one more crop to harvest, filberts, and then we will be done with the 2023 crop and be able to fully focus on the 2024 crop. Planting, cultivating, spraying, fertilizing, working ground, etc.

Which means that while we aren’t harvesting at this very moment we have time (especially with 2023 seed harvest being so early) to go out and get some projects done. Mine earlier in the week (after dropping ALL THREE of my kids off at school! Woo hoo!!!) was spot spraying thistle patches that had come up in ground that we had already worked a few weeks ago.

These patches are easy to see this way without any other crop growing currently. They also allow us to spot treat instead of spraying the whole field to get control of these nasty weeds. Our plan for this field specifically is to plant tall fescue this spring. This will allow for a lot of weeds to sprout between now and then giving us a great opportunity to clean this soil up of weeds before planting.

Because we grow so many seed crops on our farm, keeping weeds controlled is of very large importance to what we do. This may seem like a small insignificant job, but in the long run, it’s important to stay on top of weeds at each opportunity.

I mentioned before that I dropped off our three of our kids at school for the first time ever, don’t worry about me being lonely though, I have another sidekick that was right with me the whole time.

We can just get it done later – Crimson Clover’s Story of 2023

This is one thing that I have to continually explain to folks. Farmers rarely have the opportunity when it comes to crop care to say, “we can just get it done later.” In a year like this when the weather isn’t cooperating to allow us to get out and care for our crops, windows are opening and closing every day.

Our crimson clover has a few of these issues going on this year. Weed control and size of the plant.

Unfortunately with our inability to access and get on the field with our sprayer (we don’t like getting stuck in the mud), we were unable to spray our usual weed control on the clover. So as the clover wakes up after being dormant so have the weeds. The window has closed to spray our normal weed control for broadleaves and we are now having to wait longer for the crop to get bigger before we apply our plan b for weed control. This isn’t ideal because the plan b herbicides aren’t as good as the ones we originally planned to use. They are also more expensive and while we wait the weeds are growing which means they will be harder to kill and control.

The clover is also really small for this time of year. It’s a crop that is usually gets planted and established in the fall and then by spring it shoots to life. Once we hit a certain amount of daylight the crop goes into reproductive mode shooting beautiful blooms up. These blooms mature after bee pollination and produce the seeds that we harvest.

We really don’t want those beautiful flowers to bloom while the stem is only a few inches high because that would mean basically little to no seed to harvest with it not having the root and stem structure to handle feeding the crop until harvest and maturity.

Crimson is a crop that actually puts nitrogen back into the soil so it’s a tough (and expensive) pill to swallow to put out more outputs (aka fertilizer) for a crop that you hadn’t planned on. But you don’t always have the perfect choice of what to do and a plan that can be followed 100% of the time. With a little fertilizer we are hoping to keep the plant growing and not blooming just a little longer to grow a better crop.

I wrote the beginning of this post quite awhile ago; today we are at a much different place in the crop cycle. The good news is that the crimson did grow taller and more lush with the fertilizer application. The bad news is that so did the weeds and we weren’t able to even use plan B for weed control. The plants are done blooming now, the bees have done all they can pollenating. and now we are just a few days from cutting it, letting it mature to the fullest in the windrow and combine it. Until it’s in the truck we won’t know what the decisions we made or were forced to make did or didn’t do for our yield.

That’s about the best way to sum up farming. Do all you can with what you’ve been given, and then pray the decisions made were the right ones to produce a good crop for the year. Then rinse and repeat year after year, always projecting as best you can, always pivoting when needed and Lord knows, always praying.

Weed Spraying by Backpack – It’s Not Efficient, But It’s Important

A common theme on this blog has been that farmers always try to do more with less; which is just another way of saying that in most ways possible we try to be as efficient as possible. That can be quantified in time, labor, use of tools such as chemicals, water management, etc. All of it comes down to doing more with less. But sometimes there are jobs on the farm that are really inefficient by nature and…they are really annoying.

One in particular is one that we do almost every spring, spraying some of the very hard to kill weeds that we have around our farm, sometimes in the field and sometimes on the headland of our fields. Three that quickly come to mind and are on my radar today are blackberries, wild carrots and Canadian thistle.

Blackberries growing along one of our orchards and the roadway.

There seems to be a well accepted myth that pesticides including herbicides kill all living things, in truth that just isn’t the case. When managing weeds in and around our fields we have to take into account the growth stage of the weed, the timing of the year, the temperature of the air, and choice of herbicides, what is labeled, and rates on the label. Also will the herbicide kill it? Will it suppress it? Will it just hold us over until something better can be used at another time of year?

The timing windows on herbicides and weed control are very important. A good example of this is that until a few years ago we didn’t have good control of blackberries in the spring when they are actively growing and starting to take over. We were not able to spray crossbow because it can easily volatilize with the heat this time of year and hurt the surrounding plants, which is not a good thing. Now we have an herbicide that is safe to use even when it gets into warmer temperatures during the spring. Adding a completely new timing window to safely and effectively control blackberries. Unfortunately however, that tool doesn’t kill or control thistles or wild carrots.

Here is a prime example of an area on the edge of one of our fields that has all three weed issues.

And here is where we hit this whole efficiency problem. Today I’m out spraying with a backpack along our borders. I’m getting areas that have blackberries first with my backpack filled with a mix of PastureGard. I’ll come back later with another backpack mixed to control thistles. And then for third time, rinse and repeat, with a backpack to kill the wild carrots.

This job is annoying because it takes 1000 years to do. But it’s also very important to keep weeds suppressed before they become an issue in the actual crop land and can quickly become a much larger, and a much bigger efficiency problem than just me with a backpack. So one could argue that by doing this annoying job, I’m actually making things more efficient for the future….I mean it doesn’t feel like that to me, but one could argue.