Summer Crop Update.

It's hard to believe the kids are back in school and the summer is almost over.  Soon the days will be getting noticeably shorter and hopefully cooler!  I've had a lot of questions about the crop conditions with all the rain we had in July.  July was one of the wettest on record.  In some of our locations we received close to 20 inches of rain during one of the normally driest months of the year!  We expect the corn harvest to be one of the better in recent history.  We have to remember the wet conditions in which we planted much of the corn.  I don't think it will be the best crop we have ever had.  That being said we are looking forward to a better than average crop.  The tobacco crop looks good.  Generally a wet weather crop doesn't weigh what it seems like it should.  It's big and heavy going in.  Maybe it will weigh good coming out this winter.  The soybeans need a few more showers yet.  The double crop soybeans are flowering and setting pods.    

During the hottest days of the past couple of weeks we watered corn under pivots to help cool the plants down and encourage the kernels to grow as large as possible.  Overall mother nature provided most of the water needed for our corn crop.  What a blessing!

We have a few single crop soybeans scattered around and they are filling pods with beans.  The recent showers have really helped them along and they look great.  The wet conditions have caused a few spots of "Sudden Death Syndrome" in some fields but not enough to get excited about.  We have sprayed all the soybeans with weed herbicide and are beginning to spray fungicide to promote pod fill.  Clean beans are happy beans!

We have been scouting corn fields and yield checks look really good in most fields.  The ears pictured above came from an irrigated field that had extra fertilizer applied through the pivot.  These are early estimates.  Yields are usually all over the place depending on the field and specific variety in each field.  Very few ears are exactly the same so estimating yield is quite difficult, but it's fun to get out and look at a great crop in the field.

Tobacco cutting is underway in the whole area.  We began cutting last week.  Tobacco is still a very labor intensive crop.  We have a great group of men that come help us get the tobacco in through the H2A Visa Program.  Each plant is cut by hand and put on a stick with a spike by hand.  There are about 800 sticks per acre.  Each stick is then loaded on a wagon and hauled to the barn where it is unloaded and handed up by hand into the barn to be hung on the tiers in the barn where it will cure.  It's tiring just thinking about the whole process.  All of this happens in 90 - 100 degree heat!

Two proud young farmers.  They love to come to the field.  They had a contest to find the biggest leaf the other day.  Tobacco farmers take great pride in their crop.  We sell the leaves and try to handle the tobacco as easily as possible to make it to the barn with the leaves on the stalks.  A few are inevitably broken off during the process.  Tobacco from our area is exported all over the world.  Much of it is used domestically for smokeless tobacco products.

Be sure to watch for farmers on the road during the coming months.  They are trying to get their work done.  They're not out joy riding on the tractor. There will be hundreds of tobacco wagons on the road in our area over the next few weeks.  PLEASE be alert and try to be patient if you get behind one. We know fall is just around the corner when the barns start smoking in Robertson and Simpson Counties!