Saturday, November 12, 2011

Some Week Here

So last week was pretty busy. I was on a fertilizer mission Monday through Wednesday. Stephanie, Phil and Doug harvested sugarbeets on Monday. Below we see Phil topping the beets prior to lifting them out of the ground. Here is the 4-row beet lifter used for the harvest of each plot. Then the beets are dumped into a wagon with a weigh scale. It has been a pretty good system for several years here at the North Central Research Station.

Remember the new plot Hagie sprayer that we got? Well it took a little longer to get ready for field action this year due to all the new construction projects. But Doug has it all prepared now. And Friday was my first day at the controls as we have a treatment on wheat where the fertilizers are applied after emergence. We have had good yield response to this in the past. It is quite an advancement from the old Hagie, which I have used for so many years. But this is set up so that we can put different fertilizers in different tanks and apply them at different rates in a single application. So in this application we applied different rates of Pro-Germinator, Sure-K and Micro 500 with water as a carrier. It was pretty cool to run.

Photo credit to Stephanie who clicked this picture during the minute that the sun was out. Next year it will be ready to make all of the plot fertilizer applications.