Spring Planting 2018

My dad and I don't farm that many acres, a little over 300, but we're very diverse in what we raise.  The reason is that there are never "home runs" in farming for very long.  Farmers, as any good entrepreneur must be, will always eventually find what they can make any money on, saturate that market, then move onto the next thing that they stand a chance to make a few bucks. 

We are diverse so we can weather market saturation and other commodity fluctuations that even the best commodity traders can't anticipate.  Diversity has one great cost though: time and machinery. 

It costs us more time because we have to harvest many different things over the summer, and often, the things we harvest require us to feed them to animals, which keeps us busy through the winter.  

It costs us more machinery because diverse crops require diverse machinery.  And then it costs us more time because that machinery requires more maintenance.  As I'm writing this, I am questioning the wisdom in diversity.   Oh, right, because it keeps us farming.  

One side of diversity is that you have to plant several different crops that have different seeding rates, fertilizer rates, seeding depths, and seeding timing (largely soil temperature for germination drives timing).  It's a bit crazy at times. 

Add in cover crop planning and spraying, and another few dimensions get added into the complexity.  You have to time what you're going to spray, and when, and at what rate, and how many acres, etc.

And then you need to figure out what cover crops you want to plant after your cash crops.  Will what you sprayed the cash crop with affect the cover crop?   Will the cover crop terminate with winter or will we have to terminate it ourselves in the spring?   How much organic matter will we have in the spring?   Do we need to manage it or will we be able to plant right into it?   

Needless to say, there's a lot that goes on with spring planting.  Farmers almost always have to make the best guess they can (based on soil samples, previous lessons learned, etc.), and develop a fervent prayer life for timely rains, equipment running well, and a good selling price. 

We're mostly planted for spring of 2018.  We installed an autosteer on our planting tractor this year.  The first field was pretty messy, but the subsequent fields look pretty darn good.  Most of the stuff we've planted has already germinated save the dill and the alfalfa.   

Now, we begin maintenance and praying.  😊 

This is leftovers from last year's forage mix that made it through winter: red clover!  I wanted to keep it, but we ended up terminating it then planting spring wheat.