Combines season outlook

The line between northwest_northcentral kansas it looks like Crap!! We had bald spots out in the continous crop fields all winter.....now spring moisture....and those little seeds germinated (lord only knows why they didn't rot up!) and now we have the nice lush green bushy stuff growing with the peakid, wimpy, one stem per kernal crap. The stuff that just germinated and taking off now won't amount to a darn because we didn't have any cold snap for it to tiller. If my lazy insurance agent get's off his butt by the end of the week I should be able to tell you how much I am going to no-till milo or soybeans into and how much we will have to cut. I know I'm not going to let that nitrogen I put on last fall out there go to waste. It's going to screw up my rotation but I suppose that's one of the key's to success.....Flexibility!! This is going to be an interesting harvest here this year. All of the summerfallowed acres look fine. There was plenty of moisture out there for the seed to germinate last fall. Two times of discing the stubble last summer in the continous crop just dried it out to much and we didn't get enough rainfall to make up for it. There is still no subsoil moisture to speak of here either yet. Deerebines

In east central Indiana, the red soft wheat looks good for now. However the subsoil is bone dry. If we don't get timely rains, the yields will be way down from the record 80 bpa last year. Not very many folks waste their time growing wheat in Indiana.

Deerebines, Did that freeze the weekend of the April 15and16 get any of the wheatIJIJ I talked to a farmer in Dighton, KS and he thought it did a lot of damage. It sounds like his insurance adjuster was similar to yours though. He has been waiting for him to come out and tell him what to do also. Grain down here is fair , there is alot of rust. We have all the milo up and are probably going to cultivate it within the week.

Our wheat looks great across the 4 different varieites we are in the soft dough and should have some ready by May 25th. We do have some rust but can control it and I think most of it is leaf rust. Our Milo is about 1 1_2 inches tall and we are cultivating it now. The area corn looks great because of the rains and warm temps.

The soft white winter wheat in the Pacific NW looks real good right now, but harvest is still 3 months away. Too bad it was only worth $2.35 a bushel at the local co-op yesterday.

WW To be completely honest about the freeze.....I don't know for sure but I'll be able to tell you more around harvest time. The summerfallowed wheat is still growing like heck and looks real good. I've yet to go out and cut a head out of the stem and see what it looks like. I might just do that tomorrow once and get back to you. We havn't even planted our milo yet. At least 3 weeks before we do that. Still trying to fix fence and get cows to grass. We don't cultivate anything around here. We no-till as much as we can and control what we can with chemical. There are some fields that the hybrid pigweeds take us over and the wild sunflowers and some of those stems get as big and heavy as a tree trunk.....no lie! I've cut some out with a corn knife to save the sickle on the combine before harvest and they had only about a half inch to go before the diameter of the stalk was the length of my pliers. Those fields that get like that we just continous crop to wheat for about 5 years. Chemical and rotation is how most of us do it in these parts. We just can't part with the moisture we have in the ground we are so limited. I think they told us we get around 23" rainfall avg here but last year was less than that. Some years we get it 18" in the spring and mud in the milo seed and then the rest of the summer it's dry as a fart. Kansas farming is for the birds some years. No rust here that we can tell yet.....everything still green and no heads popping up yet. Most of the variety's we plant anymore are not very susceptable to rust. like I said though we get limited moisture so I'm sure that helps us out alot. I'm going to cut into a stem of wheat tomorrow once and get back to you what it looks like. There's just got to be some on my route around the fence Deerebines

Deerebines, If the freeze did do much damage the market sure isn't showing it. I think it went down a couple of cents the Monday after that weekend. I suppose there is just such a big pile of wheat that a freeze even up there won't change much. I may just hold off on the cultivating, more and more people around here are trying to get away from cultivating if they can. We have pretty good moisture now , but we are following 2 years of extreme drought. What varieties of wheat do you growIJ We had some Jagger a couple of years ago and some Karl and Karl 2 even years before that. The hard wheat varieties usually don't do well down here. WW