Corn Planting 2011

First if you missed the post about the tornado that hit Joplin, Missouri I made a link to it on the side bar.

So I was planning on doing some explaining of all we do during corn planting, but I did most of that in my 2010 Corn Planting Post so this year I am going to let the pictures tell the story instead.

Ok I will still add some different tidbits in here and there, but I'm not going to get really in-depth.

But as always feel free to ask as many questions as you would like and I will do my best to answer them.

This year we put in about 1,700 acres of corn, so we were hopping when we were going.

This is was my ride when I was doing field work. The tractor has a harrow hooked to it.

The harrow is used to level out the soil and make the seed be nice and smooth and ready for planting.

Before Caleb fills the planter he will grab his planter note book and will write down what variety of corn he is putting in each box.

Since I am "knocked up" I was not allowed to help load the planter cause each bag of seed corn weighs at least 50 lbs and some will weigh up to 65 lbs. 

So instead of hauling the bags to the planter I was taking pictures...

And opening the bags for for the guys and having them ready to haul to the planter.

During planting season there is a lot of time spent on the phone trying to get things ironed out.

Seriously, what would we do without cell phones...

Everyday, before he would start planting Caleb would go through and grease the entire planter to make sure that all the parts would run smoothly so we can keep going.

Occasionally Caleb would get some help hauling bags to the planter.

Well it is spring time around here so we had a few days where the wind would blow like crazy.

To make sure the planter is doing what it says it's doing Caleb will stop and do a check with his pliers.

He will dig up a row and find the seeds and then measure the distance between each seed.

No he's not working on the planter, he's just greasing it once again.

So last fall we got this new beast for the farm, and one of the up sides to getting it was that it had auto-steer on it...

Well that's true, but it's no good if the auto-steer doesn't work...

We had the guys from the dealership out a number of times to try and figure it out...

Caleb had to use the row marker most of the planting season because of this problem.

So with about 300 - 400 acres to go we finally got the auto-steer working...

But if you notice there is still a row marker mark there in front of the tractor, that is because Caleb didn't fully trust the the auto-steer system so he would make sure it was working by putting his marker down.

He was trying to pretend here that he didn't use the marker...

There now it looks like he's fully using auto-steer.

So we made it through almost all the acres without any problems...

That was till we got to the last 150 acres.

We were still needing to put anhydrous on these acres...

and where we normally get our anhydrous was always out of it.

To add insult to injury when we finally got some anhydrous our 4-wheel drive that we were going to use to pull it with had some problems and went down.

Now I know there are some of you out there that will say it was because it had red paint on it, but our green planter also caused us some problems and slowed us down too.

Once again all of this happened on the last 150 acres that we need to get planted.

So with the new tractor hooked back up we were able to get the last few acres of anhydrous put on.

While adding seed or changing out anyhyrous tanks we would fill the tractor back up with fuel.

This was another one of my jobs.

Giving directions one where to back the tractor up to hook up the new tank.

Today was dress like your dad day at work.

Thank you to Sales Brothers Seed for making sure guys always have something to wear.

If it wasn't for all the seed dealers out there, there would be a lot of farmers who would have nothing to wear!

Some times you would need to get off the tractor and move the corn around to even out the seed boxes so you can go longer before you have to fill up again.

This was our last fill up and boy were we happy to see it!

About 24 hours after getting the last of the corn planted we got about 1/2 - 3/4 inch of rain in about a 20 minute period...

That's never good...

So Caleb was out checking the seed to see how it was doing...

And we were happy to see that the seeds were doing fine.

The first corn we planted was popping out of the ground after about 6 days.

And it didn't look back!

Ok so I lied...

I wrote a lot more than I had planned but that's just what I do.

So there ya go there is my 2011 Corn Planting Post.

If you have any questions feel free to shoot them my way.

Laters,

Janet