Crops Look Good!!
June 2015 Farm Report
Trent Brandenburg is happy with the early performance of his corn and soybean crops this year. The corn is a vigorous dark green color and well beyond the old “knee-high-by-Fourth-Of-July” benchmark. Trent thinks the recent rains have helped the soybeans get going.
“The beans now have some color,” Trend said. Trent now is mowing the rapidly-growing grass. He’s waiting for the soil to get dry enough sohe can get into the fields to spray his soybeans with weed control chemicals.
Trent is not planning to use any insecticide or fungicide on his corn and soybeans this year. He doesn’t see that the increased yield will cover the application cost, due to the low market prices. The input costs have not followed the markets down. “We don’t need another big crop to depress the markets,” he said. Trent looks for larger yields than last year anyway, because this year the production will not be lost from many drowned-out field areas which were non-productive last year.
More from The Field Report
Wild And Windy Winter Weekend
Trent Brandenburg and family endured a near miss yesterday as a tornado touched down a few miles from their home place. Tornadoes are a rare occurrence in December, but a "bomb cyclone" ripped through central Illinois yesterday. Houses were unroofed [...]
Dry Weather Speeds Harvest
Trent Brandenburg is trying to get his field work done "before it rains". Much of the area Trent farms is in "extreme drought" according to the Illinois Drought Monitor https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/CurrentMap/StateDroughtMonitor.aspx?IL map, which is updated every Thursday. The very dry soil [...]
In a Drought, but Corn is Too Wet to Harvest
The current Illinois drought map (11 September) shows severe drought in the northern 40% of Piatt County and moderate drought in the rest of Piatt and adjacent areas of neighboring counties. Trent Brandenburg has barely started harvesting because his corn [...]