29th

Nine months of the year have almost slipped by. Where did they go? It's true that the older you get the faster it flies. I can't beleive October is almost here.

Won't be long and we will have another new face in the family! It is just days away and this one will be a surprise. The parents chose not to know the sex of the baby until its birth. I think that is a neat way of saying we don't care if it is boy or girl, just so it is healthy.

The harvest moves on slowly and deliberately. Farmers are blessed to be taking off good yields here even though we had some of the craziest weather we ever saw. We planted in half way decent soils and conditions but it rained almost every day in May and was very cool. That is not the preferred way of getting a crop started but it worked. It is still amazing what these seed treatments do for good seed. Some fields were muddy the whole month of May but the crop survived and prospered right through many days of 90 degrees and above with little rain. Just enough rain to keep the crop alive and let it reach most of its potential.

Market lows were set around July and the market has taken off ever since when they realized there may not be quite enough crop to meet the huge demand for it. That is why I posted the Demand Market blog awhile back.

I hope my friends on the east coast were able to salvage most of their crops because many of them have over 10 inches of rain already on those storms going north up the east coast. That's why I couldn't farm like my friends do over there. Their conditions this year makes ours look like gravy.

Then you go to Illinois or Iowa and one field will make 140 bushels and the next one will make 190 bushels. The yields are all over the board compared to most of ours. What a variation in a mile to a few hundred miles.

I guess that is how 2010 will go down, a year of extremes.

You have to be pretty thicked skinned to farm. You have to be able to see the good coming when the not so good times are happening.

Farmers are resilient.

Ed