Decisions, Decisions!

It's a good thing we have been talking about how we make decisions this week. Here it is Thursday already, spring is here, spring has sprung, and the decisions never end! We have tied or broken every temperature record for our location in history which is better than breaking all the precipitation records last year!

It caught us all a little off guard. We thought, this heat will end and spring couldn't possibly be here yet. We were wrong and the calendar was right for once! It is more like May here than March.

We tried to rip some compacted soil areas yesterday and that never got finished. The volunteer wheat and planted rye is growing faster than we are getting it sprayed. The tractor got hot, the sprayer started leaking oil out of the plug where the pyrometer gauge screws into the block and various other problems popped up.

What do you do? You go to fixing them one at a time. You quickly learn where your preventive maintenance program is lacking. A farmer in Georgia couldn't keep his planter in the ground so I offered some tips to him this morning. Inability to maintain planting depth can be worse than my tractor problems because I set my maximum yield the day I plant. I want to do it right.

I was going to put some urea and ammonium sulfate down ahead of my corn but the price shot up to $625 per ton for urea and that puts a unit of nitrogen over 70 cents a pound a breaks my budget. 28% urea ammonium nitrate is still $330 a ton so that is over ten cents a unit savings. That adds up with a final goal of 160 or so pounds of nitrogen.

I would rather have some dry fertilizer down but that's too much for me so I will go to plan B, put it down with my herbicide and then side dress the rest. I don't like putting off tomorrow what I can do today.

I did get the garden plowed and tilled and it just fell apart. We also got some sweet corn and onions planted with more today and tomorrow if we can get it done.

Don't let decisions get you down, I am trying hard not to!

Ed