So last Friday morning I went out to the NCRS to see what was happening. I mean it is a "happening place" after all. The field crop crew had harvested the last of the sugarbeets on Thursday evening, and here is Phil getting the ground worked the next morning. You have to work sugarbeet ground after harvest because of all the big and heavy harvest equipment and the traffic hauling them off. It's a good thing he did because it rained quite a bit over the weekend.
Do you know what caused this sugarbeet to be hollowed out? It was from a deer feeding on it. Beets are a delicacy to deer. Although it may have been a last supper with the opening of deer season on Friday. But it seems that there are always plenty of survivors that will be eating our soybeans again next year.
Here is the pile of plot beets along the road. A machine called a Maus will suck them up and dump them into a truck. I showed it in action in the November 4, 2010 blog posting if you are curious. We had several of these piles around the farm this year. The beet yields were very good here on dryland Farm 7 with yields over 30 tons per acre. Look for the results in the upcoming Research Report.
Here is a close-up of the pile. Most people have not seen sugarbeets before. I'm not sure how they go from this to granulated sugar. But I presume somebody does.
Here are some of the corn stalks from a plot on Farm 7. I am still very pleased with the performance of the Calmers stalk choppers that were put on our combine before harvest last year. Again we see even stalk height and no leftover long stalks on the ground to cause no-till planting issues next spring.
I can't believe I haven't said anything about the NCRS video being up for viewing on our website. It's been there for a few weeks already. I showed several instances of making the video over the past season. So see for yourself how it turned out. I, of course, thought it was splendid. Thanks again to our friend Mick and his crew at Creative Services for the nice production. (You can also revisit the RFD Live show from the NCRS last August.)
Well you think I would stay put for awhile, but there is yet another fertilizer mission this week. It is a company business meeting, so not sure if there will be anything exciting to report. But if there is.....
