This week started with the sprayer and lands me back in the sprayer this morning. It’s the in-between where real progress happened. But not on planting.

Our planting progress now stands at a whopping 1%! Our ‘normal’ timeframe to start planting is between April 15 and 25.^. Recent years more often than not have not seen any major planting progress until May 1. With that in mind, I’m not sure what all the noise is on social media about switching corn acres to soybeans or shortening up corn maturities. We’re still in a ‘normal’ timeframe.

Monday was another spray day until the winds picked up after lunch. With morning temperatures forecast to be in the low 30s a couple of times later in the week we weren’t too excited about planting but we did want to get the bean planter field-tested. We did that Monday afternoon and evening. Relatively few issues there. We had to make some minor adjustments, change a cable drive (it seems one breaks every winter), and get the fertilizer rate tuned in.

Working around the rain

Tuesday morning it looked as though the rain was going to stay south. We were preparing to field test the corn planter when rain extended north over our area. Work quickly moved to inside projects. Nothing real exciting there, so I took a little break from farm operations and gave our much-neglected mailbox some new fasteners and some fresh paint and straightened up the post it’s mounted on. Sometimes you just need a change of pace!

Wednesday pretty much turned into a cleanup day. I loaded scrap siding and other materials left from the building project and then grabbed some other steel scrap laying around to make it worthwhile to make the trip to the salvage yard. We also straightened up around the barn lot and put away some things that were placed in ‘convenient’ spots during winter months. Matt took the backhoe and began picking up rocks brought up by the inline ripper last fall. I won’t make the mistake of ripping that farm again anytime soon! That project rolled into Thursday!

Thursday, we got the corn planter out. We did some testing in the driveway and that is where it sits as we have some technology issues to tackle today. Hopefully we can get those resolved, put some seed and fertilizer in and get the field test done before another round of rain rolls in this afternoon. This morning, however, started in the sprayer as I need to respray one of the wheat fields where the applicator forgot to include micronutrients in the mix. After two weeks, some of the winter annuals are still holding on so I’ll throw a little something in for that, too.

Be safe out there! Remain patient!