An Update: Kernza, Wheat, and Purple Top Turnips

I've been busy. Harvesting, planting, repairing, etc. Things are moving along, some good, some not so good. 

I haven't had the time or energy to write about this here, preferring instead to make short video clips and put them on our YouTube page.  It's just a lot easier, at least for me, though the fact that I don't edit the videos might make it harder on you!

Below are a few of the latest videos. The first two are about the swather, which is used to put the kernza into windrows, where it dries down for a few days prior to going through the combine. The grain on the head of the kernza is dry before the stems, and the green stems would plug up the combine. But --- we need the mass of material going through the combine to properly thresh the hard to shell kernza. The action of the combine rubs all that material together, in the process filtering out the grain from the chaff. We plan to harvest the kernza with the combine and pick up head on Sept 4th (tomorrow!). 

Before harvesting the wheat, we swathed, then combined it and put it in the bin to cool down and dry a little. The wheat should be ready to market/sell in another week or two. 

The last video/pic is of purple top turnip seeds which I'm drilling into the tilled wheat stubble as a cover crop. It'll grow some this fall, but I'm hopeful that it will come back next spring, before I'll mow it down ahead of next summer's soybeans.

Late summer of 2021 I drilled purple top turnips as part of a cover crop mix. This is what came back in the spring of 2022.

Swallows Following Me as I Mow

This field was drilled with forage peas, which offered the possibility of harvesting them around the 1st of August prior to drilling/planting Kernza soon after. Unfortunately the peas couldn't crowd out the weeds, mostly lambsquarters. The resulting mass of green material would be too much to put through the combine. If the weeds were dead/brown too, along with the dried peas, I think it would work.

Alternatively I could have tried swathing it all, hoping that everything would dry out in windrows, and then put it through the combine. A lot of things have to go right for that to work; ultimately I didn't think I could make that happen. So I'm mowing them down as a green manure.

The swallows are so graceful. They are a joy to watch. Too bad my camera didn't really pick them up.

 

"Geometric Analysis Reveals How Birds Mastered Flight"

Evolution has created a far more complicated flying device than we have ever been able to engineer,” said Samik Bhattacharya, an assistant professor in the experimental fluid mechanics lab at the University of Central Florida…. most birds can morph their wings mid-flight to flip back and forth between flying smoothly like a passenger plane and flying acrobatically like a fighter jet. Their work makes it clear that birds can completely alter both the aerodynamic characteristics that govern how air moves over their wings and the inertial characteristics of their bodies that determine how they tumble through the air to complete fast maneuvers.

Spring is Here (?)

I've still got snow here (and it was  -10º F a few nights ago) but its warming up which means we can start working on some farm projects.

A contractor has started excavating for the new grain bin pad, it'll be a 36' diameter by 35' foot to the peak bin holding 22,000 bushels. The concrete should get poured around mid April, the bin will go up the first part of May.

 

I wrote a little bit about the reasons why I decided to have this bin built, here.

 

 

I'm putting my new (to me) broadcast seeder to frost seed winter camelina on about 75 acres of corn stubble; the camelina is intended to be a green manure that'll be mowed then disced ahead of planting soybeans in the first part of June.

 

Winter camelina is a "new" seed. It is primarily used around here as a cover crop and is typically applied after the harvest in the fall. That didn't work for me. Instead I'm using its ability to grow in the cold to take advantage of the roughly 2 months of growing weather starting now and ending at the end of May. It will be an experiment in building soil biology. Other farmers have tried it with acceptable results. I'm interested in how I can use plants at a farm scale, even if they don't "make" me money.

[some background, possibly incomplete, on what I'd like the camelina to do below the ground.]

Plants need nutrients, many of them are already in the soil, just not in a form that the plant can digest. I have turkey litter applied for some of those nutrients, but I'd like to reduce my dependence on this input. By having something growing in the ground, once it decays/dies, beneficial microbes and fungi will eat the residue. What those small organisms excrete becomes, among other things, nutrients and minerals that are in a form that is digestible by future plants that are grown there. Instead of cows or sheep I'm raising microscopic critters.

Cover Crop After the Wheat: How Does it Look?

After combining the hard red spring wheat in mid-August we drilled in a cover crop of daikon radish, purple top turnips, winter peas, sorghum sudan, wheat, and sunflowers. In addition there were a lot of viable seeds blown out the back of the combine.

When I drilled the wheat in the spring I also underseeded it with "Frosty" berseem clover, with the idea that the clover would grow under the wheat and then take off once the wheat was harvested. The clover would be my cover crop, smothering weeds, fixing nitrogen, and be winter killed, saving tillage ahead of next years soybeans. Unfortunately the weather didn't cooperate. We got a little bit of moisture right after the wheat and clover were drilled, enough to germinate the clover which was essentially dropped onto and then pressed into the soil. We didn't get any rain for about 3 weeks and so most of the clover died out, allowing the preexisting foxtail to take over. The wheat was drilled about 1.5" deep, into moisture, so it grew well without any more rain.

That led me to drill in a cover crop as detailed above. 

We have a lot of compaction on these particular fields. The turnip and radish in the cover crop will put down a large tap root which should help to break the hard pan up.  With the same goal in mind we hired a neighbor to disc-rip the ground about 24" deep. We're hoping that both of these things will help break up the hard pan, a problem that leads to a lot of foxtail, which likes "wet" compacted soils.

 It looks ok; while it's growing nicely, and should continue to do so well beyond the first hard frost, the stand is really uneven. I have some ideas on why that is -

The grain drill isn't meant to put in a low seeding rate through the main box without putting in half speed gears. With these gears the drive shaft turns at half its regular speed, this lets you double the width of the seed cups, allowing for better seed flow through the drill. I bought a set, used, but turns out they were for a slightly different serial number. By the time I got the right part there wasn't enough time to spend on making a tool that would let me install the gears. 

Short version - tough to put a small amount of differently sized seeds through a small slit. End result - ok. Next time will be better.

Taking out the smaller of these two gears is difficult because there is a roll pin that is driven through the gear and shaft. Trying to get a punch perpendicular to the shaft while leaving enough room to swing a hammer is a challenge. I'm going to try to use an air hammer with a 1/4" punch, that might be the way to get it done.

The more I think about it I'm pretty sure the air hammer will do the trick. It won't get worked on until next spring, something to look forward to I guess.

Latest News from the Farm: Rocks, Cover Crops, and Kernza

 It's been a while since I've posted, mainly as I've been busy. A couple nights I got home around 2am after a long day in the tractor with no lunch or dinner (sad face). 

Before the "real work" could start I was repairing equipment so that we could harvest wheat, followed by... harvesting wheat; after that I decided to have the ground disc-ripped to break up a hardpan layer (responsible for much of my foxtail pressure), that process dug up a lot of big rocks (one shown below) that needed to be removed. We then disced that soil down to break up most of the residue after which I drilled a cover crop of winter peas, turnips, radish, sorghum sudan, wheat, and sunflowers. 

We brought the equipment home and I've been going over it - cleaning (How to Clean a Combine!) then repairing. The drill needs an overhaul; after that corn head needs the snap rolls put on it prior to using it later this fall.... you get the idea.

(Click on any picture to make it bigger.)

One of the many things that I need to fix, and part of the reason there haven't been any recent updates to this site, is my broken phone that I use to take pics and movies for the farm site (the above were taken by my Dad). The battery on it has failed, causing the screen to pop off. I have a replacement battery though still need the specialty screwdrivers ("precision pentalobe") that I need to get inside the case. 

In crop news, the cover crop I drilled is just coming up and the corn planted this past spring looks good -  nice big ears. We're making plans to get a 27 foot diameter 11,000 bushel grain bin built to hold/dry down the wheat, oats, and Kernza, a newly developed perennial grain, that we'll be growing.

Next year we'll add about 25 acres of Kernza, (field day info here), to what we're growing. In the spring there will be peas drilled, harvested in August, with the Kernza drilled into the residue. It will stay in Kernza for the next two years. 

Carmen Fernholz, my mentor, is in the video below talking about their experience growing Kernza.

 

We're joining a Kernza co-op to market the grain. As with any new ventures, there are problems along the way.