Thursday, June 10, 2021

Wednesday, June 9, 2021

Corn is Out of the Ground: Time to Focus on Repairs

 Three days after planting I did the first blind cultivation with the tine weeder. That went well, after some glitches, and the corn is about 3" tall. It's been a very dry year; hardly any rain in the spring, no rain the last 10 days and the forecast shows a 50% chance of getting a total of 0.25" of rain in the next 10 days.

We could use some rain.

It's been very hot, with highs in the mid 90s. I work early in the morning out in the shop to avoid as much heat as possible.

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I pressure washed the disc, planter, and 7140 tractor.







The original support stand was too short. It holds up the back of the tine weeder when it's off the tractor. Attaching the weeder "leaning back" causes three point hitch to bind up when taking the weeder off the tractor as well as putting a lot of pressure on the bottom tines. I welded a length of tube on the existing stand and still need to drill some holes in it. Ultimately I think I'll get a Gnuse hydraulic top link to make this all work better. In the meantime...

I think this will work. The stand is meant to slide into the vertical sleeve - the roughly 10" long red square tube just above the stand that has a hole through it.

I bought Calmer rolls to replace the ones on the new 693 Deere corn head (not here yet) I bought. Once the head gets here I'll install them.


The old shed is getting a little crowded. (The modified tine weeder stand is in the foreground on the little welding table.)

Saturday, June 5, 2021

Finished Planting Corn

It took me three days to plant the corn, Albert Lea Seeds "Viking" O45-88-P, on 100 acres. 

I planted 33,000 seeds/acre at a depth of 2.25 inches. There was moisture at this depth, and this will give me a few days to get the first tine weeding pass done. The soil above the seed, in the row of corn, will have a lot of tiny ungerminated weed seeds in it. In the next 3 days I'll go over the fields with the tine weeder set to about 1.25 inches deep and hopefully get rid of most of those potential weeds.

The planting went well. Dad did the final tillage pass with the disc the day before I planted. The weather and machinery cooperated and things look good.

A couple short video clips from the tractor.

 
 
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A view of the split computer screen in the tractor. On the left side is the path taken by the GPS to guide the tractor (I'll save the map so I can return to the same lines to row cultivate); on the right is a seed monitor for the planter. It shows the real time data of each row of seed as well as how close I am to my goal of 33,000 seeds/acre. "Doubles" means 2 seeds getting planted at once. "Singulation" is what you want - 1 seed placed.


Our Deere 7200 Planter. It lets me plant into the rough seedbed made by the last tillage pass of the disc. In doing so, I'm making its "No-till" design work in our production system.

The 7140 Case, our "workhorse" tractor, is attached to the disc. In the background, to the right, I've hooked up the tine weeder to the same tractor (Deere 8100) I used to pull the planter. As I mentioned above I'll use the GPS map/paths I created when planting to guide my (probably four) weeding passes.

I have some minor repairs to do to the planter and disk. They'll get pressure washed and put away for the year.