McGrew Brothers Farm Journal 2013

I'll try to update this journal every Sunday night. I would welcome any comments, suggestions, or general information you might wish to send.

Thank you, Steve McGrew  Email us

-- Click on the blue hyperlink each week to see the picture. --

5/19/13: We got the corn planted and they started on the soybeans. It is raining today. I have a few days left to spray the corn stalks . You can see a picture of the sprayer being filled here.

5/12/13: More rain this week and it is considered later than normal to be planting corn. We are just starting now. We have a little more corn ground to spray and then I need to spray the corn stalks going to soybeans with Authority XL, Touchdown, and 2,4-D. We helped some guys burn our filter strips along the pond. The native grasses are 12 years old and should have been burned before now. It helps the grass and kills some of the young thorny locust trees. You can see a picture here.

5/5/13: We got a few days of spraying in before it rained and snowed a few inches. I blew a hydraulic steering hose, but we got it fixed and back to the farm before the storm. It is still muddy out. The rain will help our dry conditions that we were concerned about. You can see the meter in our wind turbine here. It is supposed to be rated at 66 KW, but it can gust up to the 86 KW for a few seconds like shown.

4/28/13: I was able to spray herbicide today on ground going to corn. I am spraying Bullet and will come back later with Halex. We bought some used dual tractor tires to put on the sprayer. We will have to take them off when the crop comes up because they will be too wide. You can see them here. It seems to ride better especially over ditches.

4/21/13: It rained 1.8” more this week and is starting to rain tonight and tomorrow also. We are getting ready to spray and plant when it dries up. You can see our wheat cover crop here. The cereal rye that people planted earlier last fall is much taller.

4/14/13: It has been rainy and cold out this week and maybe next also. We cleaned some fines out of the high amylose corn here. You can see the wagon on the left where we auger wagon the corn into. The fines go into the wagon on the right. The clean corn goes up the belt tube in the middle to our truck.

4/7/13: It is starting to get warmer and dryer out. There has been some fieldwork in the area. A few people planted some corn before the rain coming tonight and the next few days. It would still be considered early. We finished spreading the lime. You can see the end loader loading the spreader here.

3/31/13: I will put a picture of a market in Manila here. This is a table of fresh fish. There are also grocery stores, but many people buy direct from the markets. They have fish, meat, vegetables, and fruit. It is trying to warm up here some days and then we get some snow or rain. We may get some tonight.

3/24/13: We hosted Genie as a Philippine foreign exchange student for the school year seven years ago. Nancy and I had the chance to go visit her recently. We were gone for 12 days. We landed in Manila and toured the country where we visited her village near Banaue. The country is a beautiful developing tropical nation. The people are friendly and generous. We saw many places where the people don't seem to have or need much. I was very interested in the rice terraces in the valleys in the mountains. You can see a picture of some near her village here. We spent several days in Manila on tour with her adviser and neighbors. It was a fascinating trip.

3/3/13: You can see a picture here of the crane putting up the leg last year. The snow is somewhat melted now.

2/24/13: We got over 6” of snow Thursday and Friday. You can see a picture out my back yard here. We can spread some dry fertilizer when some of the snow melts.

2/17/13: Mike Paulsen finished wiring the electrical panel on the bin for the unloading augers. You can see it here. We loaded some trucks with the high amylose corn, but we need to dry it some more and run it through the cleaner.

2/10/13: It has been pretty muddy out this week. We may get to send some high amylose corn to Kansas City this next week. Click here to see a short 10 second video of our wind turbine. It actually runs about a constant 58 RPM. If your browser asks which program to open it with, I used Quick Time Player. You could probably use Windows Media Player also.

2/3/13: A few days were cold, but we are back above freezing during the day usually. Practical Farmers of Iowa has a farminar (webinar) every few weeks here. If you go down to January 22, you can hear another farmer and myself showing some slides about cover crops. You will have to excuse my first several minutes of being kind of slow. It runs about 45 minutes plus another 45 minutes of answering questions. You can now go to the Farminar Archives near the top right to see this.

1/27/13: It is rainy and wet out today. It is also foggy and a little above freezing. You can see where a beaver cut down a small tree by a pond and carried it away here.

1/20/13: We finished hauling the soybeans. It may get down to 7 degrees F tonight. They were working to get the new bin to unload into the grain leg also this week. They set up the unloading spout to the trucks. You can see some work around the leg dump before harvest here.

1/13/13: We have been hauling soybeans to the Bunge plant in Council Bluffs. There is an unusually good positive 35 cent basis (above Chicago) now. You can see the truck loading here. It has been pretty muddy out, but is now frozen.

1/06/13: It has been getting colder out. Here is a picture of the bulldozer building terraces a few weeks ago. The ground has been frozen too much lately to work on them. Maybe it will thaw out before the winter gets colder.Unable to create directory: Permission denied