Summer Update: Spotty Showers and Mixed Crop Conditions.

What a difference a few weeks can make!  The picture on top was taken the week of July 4th.  The picture below was taken three weeks later.  We had cool weather for pollination and the crop looked great until hot dry conditions set in over our area after the 4th of July.  The extended drought period in our area has caused the corn to fire up from the bottom up.  Corn harvest is only about a month away at this point.  It's hard to say what yields will be like.  We are expecting some good and some not so good corn to be harvested.

When we started missing the rain showers we began irrigating our tobacco crop.  We use a tractor PTO Driven pump to pump water from the creek onto our tobacco crop.

We  lay pipe from the water source to the hard hose reel to spray the water onto the crop.

This little pump will move a lot of water a long way!

The suction pipe goes into the water source and the pump pulls it up and forces it through the hose to the field where the traveling gun is set up.

  Luckily, we planted 75% of our tobacco crop close enough to an ample water supply from Spring Creek in Simpson Co.  Our employees have gone above and beyond dragging pipe and hose around all hours of the day and night to keep the water pumping onto our tobacco crop.

Once the pump is primed and the pipes are filled the water ends up at the end of the hard hose at the gun and is sprayed across the field.  After a couple of passes with irrigation water the tobacco crop looks great and has excellent yield potential.


Soybeans are flowering and setting pods.  We are entering a critical period in the coming weeks to fill pods with beans.  Hopefully, we will catch a few showers as they set and fill pods.  The picture below on the left is a field of no-till double crop soybeans planted behind wheat in Mid-June.  The one on the right is a field of single crop soybeans planted in Late-May.

We started cutting tobacco yesterday.  The cutting and curing process will take a couple of months to complete.  Hopefully, the cooler weather will hold and make for an enjoyable harvest season.  Temperatures in the low to mid 80's are much better for working outdoors than upper 90's and the 100 degree mark we usually see during tobacco cutting.