Will Spring Ever Come?

It has been a while since our last update and post.  As are most, we can not wait for the weather to make the change towards spring so we can get busy outside.  This winter has brought about many challenges and changes.  The cold and snow have made it difficult to catch up on any off season outdoor chores and most of the time has been spent in the office or attending meetings and seminars.  We were able to attend the National Farm Machinery Show in Louisville, AgriSolutions Software training, Illinois Soybean Association Summit and many other events this winter to further our education on both production and business management.

2013 Snow
2013 Snow

 

Hopefully in the next few weeks it will start to dry out enough to think about going to the field.  This year we will hopefully be able to further leverage our sprayer by applying our own pre-plant nitrogen.  We have made some upgrades to the sprayer to reduce drift and overlap.  These upgrades were part of a improved production practice recognized by the NRCS Conservation and Stewardship Program we became involved with last summer.  Today we also received the results from our Adapt-N Nitrogen Management test plot from Cornell.  Our current nitrogen management techniques using in season soil sampling and variable rate application out earned the Adapt-N computer model method by $92.05 per acre in our 40 acre on farm study last year.  We will continue to work with Cornell on this in the upcoming year, as today we learned that N regulation is much closer than we thought.