Wheat Harvest

Wheat harvest is over half over. Yesterday when I visited the buyer, our grain milling plant, I had the highest test weight in the pile of slips the manager showed me. That makes you feel good when something turned out right.

I tried to do everything right from the day I decided to plant wheat on those erodible, rolling hills. The planting date was a week or two later than I would have preferred but farmers planted the lowest amount of wheat dating back to 1953 and even 1913. I remember the lines of wheat going to market past our farm in Sardinia.

The wheat line was short at Jeffersonville but they are set up to unload semi's fast. Much more grain goes through in an hour than 1953. And who would have imagined two combines with 30 foot plus heads cutting wheat for me and a 1100 bushel grain cart catching it?

The 36 foot air drill is planting double crop soybeans right behind those combines record early too. Since you only cut wheat with the sunshine out it is easy for it to keep up. I think the year is two weeks ahead of schedule for the date but I won't find out until this fall. At least all my ground will be planted and almost all of it had a good cover crop all winter.

All of my seed should have had T-22 on it. Some didn't. Those acres suffered and I had to kill some of the worst stands and plant back to beans last month. I know it added test weight and yield as it usually does. I average about 12 more bushel of wheat with it, 7 bu of corn and two or three bushels of soybeans.

The new form of it has been released and is called SabrEx. I got some to put on my corn and it looks excellent. These trichaderma fungi colonize on the roots and eat the pythium, fusarium and other diseases that hurt the crop roots. I want that on all my seed and plantings just like I have with T-22 since it came out in 1996.

The crew is tired and I am wore out. We need a break and I hope we can all take one next week but there is so much to do. I can't even keep my yard mowed.

Ed