We got chicks!
And 3 little ducklings… We got 3 bard rocks, 3 Rhode Island reds, 2 comets, and 2 mystery chicks that our neighbor threw in. They are all adorable and I’m excited to raise them so they make eggs and eat bugs!
Sidedressing
Putting 60 lbs of N on a field today. The idea is to give the plant what it needs when it needs it versus giving it all the nutrients at once in the fall when the possibility that spring rains will wash much of it away into our streams, rivers, and eventually the ocean. The […]
No-till corn
We had some prevent planting acres that we seeded to an oat and tillage radish cover crop last summer. In a previous post, we debated on what we should do with the cover crop acres. On one section we ran it over with a soil finisher and stopped because it was plugging up and making […]
Going organic
The field I am transitioning to organic has oats underseeded with alfalfa. I cannot spray chemicals on it including my fencerows. So I thought I’d take a roto tiller to it to help control some of the giant ragweed starting to flourish along the edge rows. It doesn’t work the best. I have to go […]
My deer friend
I visited a neighbor farm to learn about chicken and duck raising. The young man who taught me what I need to know about bird raising had the state champion chicken at the Iowa State Fair last summer. This farm raises deer also. They bottle feed the females so they are easier to handle. The […]
To till or not to till, that is the question
We have 80 acres of prevented planting acres we planted oats and tillage radish on last summer. We didn’t get our corn planted timely enough last spring in this field because it is very wet. It is not tiled very well. The oats and tillage radish did their job beautifully. They winter killed and the […]
Oats
On April 19, my dad asked me, “ready to plant oats?”. I was thrilled but freaked out! Thrilled because I’ve been bugging him all winter to give me the opportunity to add a different crop into our rotation and to plant some oats. It also meant that he was giving me the green light to […]