It was a chilly field walking morning, but this is an important job for our farm!
This time of year as things start to really grow and plants start to set the crop for the upcoming summer harvest, we have to take time to walk all our fields and look for issues.
“Issues” right now in this growing stage usually means weeds. We are currently spraying our final (hopefully) application of weed spray. We use chemicals that are selective so they only target weeds that we see out in the field. It’s a great way to save money for us and save on putting more chemical where it’s not needed. For example we have a few fields that have a lot of groundsel, we will add an additional weed herbicide in to manage that so it doesn’t show up as a weed in our seed tests at the final stages of getting clean crops to sell. Also hoping that it doesn’t show up again next year as a continual problem.
Our weed spray is mixed with a carrier of fertilizer and water; which in turn saves us an application across the field to get our final amount of nitrogen to feed the crop. This efficiency increase saves us time, money, and fuel. But in order to makes this all happen we do have to walk around every single field to see what is out there.
This is a nice clean area of a tall fescue field.
Our farm works alongside field men who work for companies where we buy our fertilizer and chemicals. More boots on the ground means that we have a very good chance of not missing something. And if we do our jobs well; setting ourselves up to have clean seed fields that create a valuable product for us to sell.
Our kids have always wanted to be on the farming side of life. They constantly ask where they can work ground, plant their own fields, work on their own projects, etc. Last year the project that they took on was handmade straw bales. Together we made hundreds of hand-tied straw bales that were sold at markets, alongside the road, and by word of mouth. This year the kids wanted to add to their idea and thought “what about Indian corn?” Not sure how this venture will end….but it’s been a fun project so far with their papa.
Then one day they came to us to ask what we had planned to do with the wheat straw from the field across the road. They thought that maybe they could use a small baler, maybe they could ask the neighbor to help us out and make small bales for a porch size to sell this fall? Well being only 5, 7, and 9 years old, I wasn’t sure how much “help” they would be. I sort of figured it would look a lot like Matt and I doing all the work for “their project”. But we agreed to try it out this year, and lo and behold I was wrong.
In the span of time at the start of summer when the idea was pitched to when the baler showed up in the field for their first lesson from our very kind neighbor, Hoot and Auggie had learned how to drive quite a few things around the farm; a 4-wheeler, a combine, a tractor. So, they jumped right in on the chance to do the baling and they both did great. If one was in the tractor the other, along with Millie of course, was out with me making sales to other local businesses for wholesale and thinking of other ways we could sell to local customers.
When it was time to pick up all those bales from the field, we worked as a whole family. Matt and I loaded them on to the trailer edge, the boys stacked them up and Millie along with Booker kept the tractor down the center of the rows. It didn’t take long and we had all the bales in the barn for this year for the last step of this project…selling all these bales!
It’s great to have a business that we can share so closely with our kids. I love to see how their minds find ideas and ways to do things that I never would have ventured to do myself had it not been for them asking and also their willingness to work hard to get the job done. It’s satisfying as a parent to see that in your kids at such a young age and know that we had a hand in giving them that start. They have already learned some valuable business lessons as well; which I have no doubt will serve them in their years ahead.
If you’re interested in buying any of these small porch bales (about 18” cube size) from these young entrepreneurs feel free to contact me for more information!
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.
NuttyGrass 