My personal history shows that all this test does is prove that the sugar beet crop is made in August and September.  It also shows if there are any disease issues in the crop.  And even if there are issues, there is nothing you can do about it except pray that they recover.

This year our crop is a little all over the board.  As our spring went, some of the beets were planted in good conditions, others were planted in muddy conditions.  Some fields were planted early, some were planted a little later than we would like.

This is a healthy beet. It has large leaves; as bigger than my glove. Sometimes big leaves don't mean there is a big root underneath. But a big leaf is the factory we need for photosynthesis to take place.

Overall, the field that was planted last and looks the weakest proved to be just that.  The beets are small, ten feet only weighed 3 pounds, and showed signs of disease.  These beets are healing over.  If the disease is active, the beets will be actively have brown spots on them that are oozing juice.  What we thought was our best field is now in the middle of the road.  In this field, the leaves look tremendous but the roots supporting them aren’t overly large.  A field with average foliage is currently the best.  Our earliest planted field, and therefore you would think, one of the best, had the most foliage but average beets, and it also had beets showing signs of disease.

This is a beet that has been infected with a disease. It has brown spots that are no longer oozing beet juice. If the field dries out this beet will be fine come harvest.

What this means is we need to stay dry.  The fields have ample moisture to produce a good crop.  The beets themselves have the infrastructure (big leaves) to convert sunshine into sugar.  Beets like heat and sunshine so lets hope and pray that’s what they get.

As the wheat plant matures and pushes the head out of the stalk, it is succeptible to fusarium head blight, commonly called scab.  The fungus basically takes a healthy kernel and robs it of its moisture.  Therefore, a healthy looking plant can have kernels that are shriveled.

Scab came about in the early 90s.  We would have wonderful looking fields, but when you threshed out the heads, there was nothing there.  Sixty or seventy bushel straw would have 10 bushels of wheat in some cases.  I remember a few years where we burned just about every field we had.  Over time, the nations wheat growing groups funded research into this fungus found varieties that were resistant to the fungus and found a fungicide, that, if applied at the right time would protect the plant from the scab fungus.

The key to this is applying it at the right time.  You need as many plants as possible headed out and for 10-15% to have started to flower.  When the weather is nice, this can happen in a few hours.

The picture on the left shows wheat that is in the process of heading.  This wheat will probably look more like the picture on the right in a few hours.  The picture on the right is ready to be sprayed.  The yellow flakes on the head are the pollen.  They are yellow when they first come out and fade in the sunlight.  Since these are yellow, they more than likely emerged just a few hours ago.

Forecast also has to be factored in.  Last Friday we had 1000 acres of wheat that would be ready over the weekend.  Ideally, we would scout the fields in the morning and spray what was ready as soon as the dew evaporated.  However, the forecast for Saturday was for an inch of rain.  The experts say it is better to be a little early than a lot late so we sprayed everything on Friday.  it was a long day, we started at noon and didn’t finish until 10 at night, but we got it done, and sure enough, it rained early Saturday morning.

As with everything in farming, timing is critical.  In a greenhouse or a controlled environment this would be a simple task.  But our inventory is all outside and suffers at the blessings of Mother Nature.  And she sure does keep us on our toes.

The frequency of spraying meant an incredible amount of luck had to be involved.  Besides the normal challenges of wind direction and humidity during spray season, we had to miss the showers for the fields to be dry enough to travel in.  At the same time, we also had to have enough rain to keep the beets growing.  If things didn’t work out we would have to hire airplanes to spray the fields.  Besides added expense of hiring someone to do your job, the planes didn’t always work the best.  For example, they may not get to the field in time, after all, if you need a plane, everyone else in the county probably needs one too.  Oh, and I almost forgot to mention, if the plane didn’t get the  job done, we’d hire migrant labor to hoe the weeds in the field.

The past few years we have been able to utilize Round Up Ready technology.  With Round Up, we spray twice a year.  We have a bigger window in how big the weeds can be before they get out of control so timing isn’t as critical.  This means if the field is to wet we can wait a few days and let it dry out before going in with a sprayer, and we don’t have to hire an airplane to do the job for us.  Also, the Round Up doesn’t affect the sugarbeet plant at all.   The micro rates affected everything it touched.  The beets would be stunted a day or two after an application.  This setback would cost a week or so of growth and negatively effect yield potential of the crop.

While this type of technology has its detractors, the reality is it saves fuel, saves headache, adds to the yield potential and quality of the crop grown, and does a better job all around than the old way of doing things.

But perhaps the more important day is the last day of seeding.  Once the crop is in the ground you have opportunity.   If everything goes right, you will have the opportunity to harvest a crop and the opportunity to sell it for a worthwhile price.  If my seed remains in the bin and not in the ground, I have no opportunity.  I will have black dirt that has weeds growing on it and that is all.

I’ve seen many news stories this year about the high prices farmers are getting for their crops.  It seems to me that many people think we throw the seed out in the ground, it grows, we harvest it, and then sell it for a record price.

What isn’t reported is the roll mother nature plays in farming.  This year our challenge has been a wet, cool spring.  The fields really never did dry out to an acceptable level to be planted.  We planted a lot of our crop in marginal conditions this year.  Everything is going to have go right to have a decent crop this year.  We will have to have enough sunlight and heat to get the plants up and moving, we will have to see moderate rainfall to coax roots from poorly planted seeds to go down in the soil to get the nutrients the plant needs.  We will have to have a late fall to allow us to harvest the crop in a decent matter, and if we are lucky we will get the fields in good enough shape to plant a crop next year.

As you can see, there are a lot of ifs involved and a lot of things that will have to go right.  Most importantly, the seed is in the ground and that is what will give us opportunity.

We started the last week with a weather forecast that suggested we’d be seeing a couple of inches of rain over the week.  So we started the tractor and went for it.  A lot of this year’s crop went in extremely marginal conditions.  A lot of seed can be seen laying on top of the ground as mud stuck to the press wheels and flipped the seed from being snug in the soil to laying on top of it for all the world to see.

But when the weather man says there is a chance for rain over the next week what do you do?  You know the seed won’t grow if it’s in the bin.  You know that crop insurance only really works if the crop is in the ground.  So you go out and you do the best you can and hope for the best.

Some of the land in our neighborhood did get a harrow over the top of it after being seeded.  This will put a little soil on top of the seed so that if it does rain, there is some dirt on top of the seed for it to latch onto and put forth a sprout.

Not an uncommon scene from this year. Not a pretty sight but it is planted.

But we are going to need to see the rain.  Hot and dry will not foster any growth.  so while the crop is in it is going to need a lot of help to amount to much of anything.  Let’s hope for the best.

There lies the end of the mudding around for this year, the water can sit there as long as it wants.  I’ve been stuck to many times and walked to many miles through our heavy gumbo mud to really care.

On the bright side, the market has started to take notice.  Last week Minneapolis wheat rallied considerably as buyers tried to convince growers to plant at all costs.  This week the market has started lower as the Russians have announced they will be back in the export market.  That’s fine and good but this country, and the world, is going to need high quality wheat that comes from this country.  If we don’t get planted, the world will be short of this quality wheat.  We’ll see what the market has to say as the growing season goes on.  Hopefully, we’ll be able to get something planted to take advantage of the high price everyone is talking about.

Once we get the sunshine and hopefully some wind, drying out doesn’t take a real long time.  Hopefully we’ll try to cultivate something tomorrow and maybe seed something on Thursday.  It’ll be slow going to start as we will have to be patient for fields to dry out, but once they do we’ll run whatever hours it takes to get done.  If we run non-stop it would take us about 4 days to finish.  So it won’t take long, we just need to get started and stay dry.

A lot has happened in the past six weeks, at the same time, not much has happened in the last six weeks.  Our perfect spring has turned cold.  The water came up and is slowly going down.  For the most part its been a frustrating time though I can think of ways that it could have been worse.

The flood that I knew was coming did come.  It will rank in the top 4 all time.  We put a device called a tube dike on top of our dike.   A tube dike is a big plastic tube that you fill with water.  The weight of the water seals the tube to the ground and holds water back.  See the picture below.  We were able to hold the water out.  It came to the top of the dike and fortunately didn’t go much higher.  In 2009 it was about 6 inches higher.  The 1979 flood was a couple inches higher, the 1997 flood was the all time record, it was about 18 inches higher than what we had this year.

The water came to the top of the dike around the farmyard this year.

While the focal point of any flood is what happens at the farmyard.  Most of our land also goes under water.  For the land that doesn’t go under, its also been to cold and damp to get much field work done.  We did start seeding sugar beets last week.  Hopefully, the forecast we have is for a week of sunshine and we will be able to really go to town in the field.  We need a good week., while we are not late yet, we are very close to the time when we will see yield reductions due to the late spring.

The three miles in this picture will be wheat this summer.

We need about 4 or 5 days to seed our sugar beet crop and the same for our soybeans.  For wheat it would be 10 but we might work around the clock.  In that case it would be about 6 days before we are done.  Of course, all this depends on the weather.

as snowmelt enters the river in the south and encounters ice as it moves north.  This slows the flow of the river, as well, the there is a multiplier effect as the ice in the north melts at about the same rate as the water flowing into it and we end up with more and more water piled up in the river.

Last week, weather forecasters had us pegged for a snowstorm they thought would leave 15-20 inches of snow on top of us.  Fortunately, they were wrong.  We didn’t get a flake in the north and I don’t think the totals in the south were near as bad as expected.

We’ve also had pretty good temperatures.  Pretty good being for a manageable melt I mean, not pretty good as in lets go golfing.  Our daytime highs have been in around freezing and nighttime lows have been well below freezing.  So snow melts during the day and moves a litttle bit, then freezes at night and stays still.  This is really the only way we can effectively meter the water that enters the river system.

The last factor in making this a good spring so far is that we didn’t have a lot of frost in the ground through winter.  As the snow has melted water has been able to go down into the ground, not run over the top of frozen ground into the river system.

Looking ahead to next week, our cool temperatures will continue but we are in line for two storms.  Hopefully we’ll miss these as well and our perfect spring will continue.