So here it is November now, and we still have soybeans to harvest. Well we aren't the only ones. Several in the area were taking advantage of the nice sunny and warm day to try and finish the beans. But this was our last field, and it was different in that we had some field-long strip treatments that we wanted to get yields of. So we did.
The treatments were on certain gps tracks in the field, and Stephanie rides along with Phil to help follow the carefully constructed harvest plan.
Stephanie returns the favor by taking a picture of me taking a harvest sample and recording the strip weight. (See, I do stuff besides just take pictures.) After our treatment harvest, Phil finished harvesting the rest of the field and we bid farewell to soybeans for another year.
Sorry not to have shown what the specialty crop folks are doing for awhile. Well they are busy constructing a greenhouse by the new equipment building. It will have access to water and power here. They will use this greenhouse to get transplants going in the spring for setting into the field experiments. It will be better than the growth chamber (a.k.a. "the morgue") they use now. Here we see Tim checking Brian and the ground to make sure it's level. Uh....well good luck with that.
Below we see Ron running the chisel plow on Farm 7. Now we do save ground for no-till soybeans, but this was on Farm 7 which was tiled last year and needs some tillage to get it more level. Take it from one who rode over the tile tracks in the grain cart.
There was one more important task. What, you have never collected a dairy manure sample? We had some manure spread on one of our field plots today, and we collect a sample to test mainly for nitrogen content. As bad as this is, it's better than the poor lab person on the other end who has to open and run these all day. We saw that on our tour of Midwest Labs just about exactly a year ago. (Which was recorded in this blog.) Well there's something for everyone.
The treatments were on certain gps tracks in the field, and Stephanie rides along with Phil to help follow the carefully constructed harvest plan.
Stephanie returns the favor by taking a picture of me taking a harvest sample and recording the strip weight. (See, I do stuff besides just take pictures.) After our treatment harvest, Phil finished harvesting the rest of the field and we bid farewell to soybeans for another year.
Sorry not to have shown what the specialty crop folks are doing for awhile. Well they are busy constructing a greenhouse by the new equipment building. It will have access to water and power here. They will use this greenhouse to get transplants going in the spring for setting into the field experiments. It will be better than the growth chamber (a.k.a. "the morgue") they use now. Here we see Tim checking Brian and the ground to make sure it's level. Uh....well good luck with that. 
Below we see Ron running the chisel plow on Farm 7. Now we do save ground for no-till soybeans, but this was on Farm 7 which was tiled last year and needs some tillage to get it more level. Take it from one who rode over the tile tracks in the grain cart.
There was one more important task. What, you have never collected a dairy manure sample? We had some manure spread on one of our field plots today, and we collect a sample to test mainly for nitrogen content. As bad as this is, it's better than the poor lab person on the other end who has to open and run these all day. We saw that on our tour of Midwest Labs just about exactly a year ago. (Which was recorded in this blog.) Well there's something for everyone.
