Good timing, bad timing

We got nearly half an inch of rain from a thunderstorm that came through about 2:00am. That's good news for the hayfield I sprayed with N-sol yesterday, as it will put the nitrogen into the ground without "burning" the grass. That's bad news for our bottomland corn fields because we needed another 24 hours of dry weather to finish breaking the ground.

Warm Weekend

Temps this weekend will be touching 90 degrees, with a lot of humidity in the air. It looks like summertime is just about here.

This past week has been fairly productive. We've "cleaned up" a couple of our hayfields and got a pretty fair crop of mature ryegrass/early bermudagrass hay. Thanks to favorable weather conditions, I was able to apply about 75,000 gallons of cow-generated liquid fertilizer to those fields to give them a kick-start. I'll hopefully be able to apply N-sol (32-0-0 liquid nitrogen fertilizer) to the bermudagrass on Monday or Tuesday to give it the rest of the nitrogen it needs.

Our window for planting silage corn is getting pretty small, and the bottom land where we've planned to grow it has still been too wet to work. We'll have to tear the ground to have any chance at all of drying it out enough to plant corn, and hopefully we can begin with that on Monday as well.+

Spreading Slurry

I finally pumped some stored up agri-byproduct out of the SlurryStore and field applied it to some wheat and oats. In about three hours time, I made 11 trips with the honeywagon and spread probably around 36,000 gallons. I've gotten just over half the field across from the farm covered, and hope to get it finished up this afternoon. Being able to spread the slurry has allowed me to cut back on the amount of N-sol (32-0-0) needed to adequately fertilize it.

Grazing is Good

We've been able to graze our cows on wheat and oats the last few mornings thanks to the favorable weather. This has allowed us to drop the peanut hay and alfalfa from their daily feeding. We've been able to lower our feed costs a little that way, and the cows are actually moving up in production. That's good on both ends of the checking account.

I have a little less than 20 acres remaining to apply N-sol to, that is until the cows finish grazing the 30 acres they are working on right now. I can already tell a difference on the ryegrass I applied the fertilizer to when I first started. Hopefully we'll have a crop ready to harvest before we run out of corn silage, but I'm afraid it's going to be very, very close.

Speaking of corn silage, we haven't bought anything yet for the approx. 70 acres we'll plant this year. It looks like we have enough Roundup on hand saved from last year to do the job, and our other chemical needs will be dependent on whether or not we break the ground or no-till plant it. We're still probably a month away from planting it, though, so we've got time.

A busy two weeks

The last couple of weeks have been busy, for sure. From applying liquid nitrogen fertilizer to our ryegrass crop to making a trip to Washington, DC last week (press release), there's certainly been no shortage of things that needed to be done...and that's on top of all the daily milking and feeding.

Now that time has changed I'll probably be working a little later into the evenings. There's no point in wasting daylight!

Applying fertilizer? Not so fast!

Yesterday I hooked up our sprayer wagon with the thoughts of applying some liquid nitrogen fertilizer to some of our spring forages. I thought I could cover somewhere between 40-50 acres before the rain moves in today.

Wrong answer.

It turns out that our pto roller pump has deteriorated to some degree and won't deliver the pressure needed to spray out the N-sol at the correct rate. So, we're stuck until a new one arrives sometime next week.

Meanwhile, we weighed our cows' milk yesterday and should get preliminary results back today. I'm going to guess that our average (of only those milking) was around 67 pounds each.

StormWatch '08: Round III

This afternoon, we face what could prove to be the third storm system of the new year that has the potential to be classified as "severe". The previous two spawned tornadoes, though I don't think this one will be quite so bad.

With rain coming today and then probably again during the weekend, it will probably be next Wednesday before we can start spraying fertilizer onto our wheat, oats, and ryegrass. Provided we can get the nitrogen on it before too much longer and we continue to get regular rainfall, our cows should have a lot of high-quality baleage this coming spring.

Bring on the rain

We've baled up all the hay we cut earlier in the week, and I've started spraying the N-sol fertilizer on our hay ground and pastures. We are supposed to have a good chance of rain over the next four days, which will help put the fertilizer to work (not to mention help our recently planted corn).