250 acres in 11 minutes!

A new Guinness World Record was set in Winkler, Manitoba, Canada when 200 combines simultaneously harvested a single field. The combines took care of approximately 250 acres of wheat in 11 minutes. The event was held in an effort to raise money for children's camps.

Check out the website http://harvestforkids.com/ for more information.

Field shots

Just some pictures taken along the way this season...

Crop update

Depending on where I go in the state, the looks of the soybean crop can change quite dramatically. I would describe the majority of our program fields as good or excellent, while a couple are extremely dry (see below).





To view weekly crop reports, go here.

We've reached R4-R5 in most of our fields, with the double crop fields being around R2. Disease and insect pressure is noticeably lower than usual and is vastly different than what we saw last year, particularly with diseases. I've seen some SDS but you really have to look for it to find it. I'll be really interested to see what kind of effects we get from fungicides this year. We'll have several comparisons on.

Taylor County Extension Field Day

I want to send out a Thank You to Pat Hardesty and the rest of the folks at the Taylor County Extension office for having me out to speak about SoyMVP at their field day on July 20. They had an excellent turnout and I got to meet a lot of good people in an area of the state I don't get to often.

Farm subsidy debate could play major role in U.S. Senate race

From the Lexington Herald Leader

Much needed rain

While corn has been showing signs of being dry for the last week or two, soybeans in most of the areas I visit were just starting to show. Considering most of our full season beans are between R1 and R3 right now, this rain across much of the region is coming at a very important time. The replenished moisture will aid in pod set for those plants still flowering and will assist in early seed fill for those plants a little further along.

This rain event will also be a huge aid to those double crop beans that have been planted in the last three weeks. Dry soils in some areas were causing struggles in these late planted beans to get up and get going. This rain combined with the forecasted temperatures over the next few days should really make them take off.

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.