Planting completed

All of our full season beans have been planted. Our first field went in the ground in late April and our last on June 7. I'm excited about this because it's a very good representation of common planting practices in this part of the state. Last year we got a good grasp of late planted full season beans, but this year we'll get some data from soybean that would be considered somewhat early for Kentucky to those that are right at the back edge of 'normal' planting.

Those earliest planted beans have already reached R2 and are at full canopy, while the latest are yet to reach V1, with some still emerging. I set a plant population target of 100,000 plants per acre across all planting dates, so that should give us some good data compared to the adjacent fields with higher plant populations.

I've seen a lot of yellow soybean fields so far this season. I suspect that it relates to the amount of water we've had out there early in the season. My field that is at R2 was yellow early on but couldn't look better at this point. It simply takes a while (R3-R4 in this case) for nitrogen fixation to really take off and for that dark green coloration to come on. The high moisture levels can delay when this happens even further.

Some field shots

On this rainy June day, I thought it would be a good time to post some shots from the early part of the 2010 season.


Fighting through




Think these are seeded a little too heavy?


Very nice stand of beans in Henderson County.


We've had a lot of hard rain in the early part of this season.