Monday, August 2, 2010

Late July update from down on the farm

The past few weeks has found me finishing planting sunflowers after wheat and now keeping sprinkler irrigation systems running.

Sunflowers 1
Here is a field of sunflowers I planted in early July. I was surprised at how much they have grown the past few days.

sunflowers
Our early planted sunflowers in bloom. The blooms last for about a week and then the petals fall off as the seeds start developing. We will harvest them mid to late September. The seeds will go to a processing plant where oil will be extracted for a no to low trans fat cooking oil.

Grain Sorghum heading
The grain sorghum has pushed it's seed heads up. It seems early to me, but with nice rain and hot weather has sped up it's maturity. Grain Sorghum is a crop from Africa so it thrives on the hot weather and hot, humid nights that we're having now. Corn on the other hand thrives on cool nights.

Irrigation repair
This is not a sight that any farmer with irrigation wants to see when crops need irrigation. Lightning struck the electrical connections at the center and disassembly was required to get the replacement part in place. We then spent several hours the next couple of days diagnosing other problems with this system. It felt good to get it running right.

Watering soybeans
This was a great sight on a hot summer evening. After being out in the heat and the frustration of diagnosing an irrigation system that wasn't working it was refreshing to see this one putting water on soybeans. The soybeans are using just under a half inch of water a day, and we're applying 1 inches every 2 to 3 days.

3 comments:

Convicted in life said...

Hello american farmer =D
how are you ?
So, I am Brazilian and I also have a farm, but the technology here in Brazil is not like yours I think we have modern machines but not everyone can buy, it's like to farm in a country as technology? on the Internet for example only has beautiful reaping machines, that's right or not?
Thank you for your attention and even more

Tom Tibbits said...

Thanks for the comment Convicted in life.

The technology available to farmers in the states is amazing. Not all of our equipment is the latest and greatest, our combines are between 15 and 20 years old. We haven't made the move to variable rate fertilizer yet or some off the other technology advances. I'm convinced that within 10 years tractors will drive themselves. New tractors can have the transmission programed to shift, run 2 hydraulic outlets, raise or lower the hitch. Combine this with auto steer, row shutoffs for planters, variable rate seed and fertilizer equipment. The future is going to be interesting.

Convicted in life said...

Thank you for your response Tom

But like you said, your harvesters teem between 15 and 20 years, something that is not rare to find here in Brazil, but from what I see their harvesters are very big and if you buy how much offset such a John Deere STS ?
In Brazil, our currency is very different from the dollar, so here is still very common to see you still combines with cylinder and bottle-straw on farms are very few farms that purchase a harvester axial, the axial are dominating the market here in USA, am I correct?