Looks like the ripper needs a house call from the dentist.







Bundled up pretty good on a cold & windy spring afternoon.

Getting along pretty good.





Once Chris is done pushing the top off of the diversion, a pass or two along it's length to even things out a bit.



When he was done, I came along with a disk behind the 65A to put a better finish on the project. Got my co-pilot with me......keeping the seat warm here.

98J You seem to be leveling out on a contour ? are you doing this to improve levels for harvesting or do you have erosion problems on your type of terain.cheers Atlas

"Atlas" wrote:

Hi guys Iron Appraiser how many trees per acre do you plant for walnuts and years before full production. Rotation eelworm can Almonds hoste the same eelworm as Walnuts.cheers Atlas

We plant 120 trees per acre which is 18ft x 20ft. I am not familiar with eelworms but we have nematodes which can affect the almonds and walnuts both. Fumigation has been severely limited here in California by the tree hugging crowd.

Okay time for some more pics guys. Even though this spring started early it hasnt been ending early for us. Our weather pattern this whole month has been rain and snow followed by a couple of nice sunny days that cant be utilized due to mud and then 2-3 warm, cloudy, windy days followed by more rain. So the weather wasnt that great for pics because I dont feel my pics turn out well when it is cloudy out but the sun poked through occasionally.

Finished up spring wheat seeding last week and planted all the disked up CRP to canola before being rained out last night. Still have spring lentils to plant and all the winter wheat will need spraying soon as well.

Notice the residue pretty much disappeared in this spot after one pass with the wil-rich cultivator. Residue management has been very unpredictable for us as we moved to less tillage and in this same field some places the straw is so heavy it is balling up. This 30ft krause cultivator with sweeps is good at working weeds and volunteer up and smooths ground well but does not go through straw as well as the wil-rich, with less tillage we have had problems with a couple of grasses resistant to roundup that shallow tillage wont kill so I was bordering this field with the a deep cultivation to kill the grasses.

The hill the cat is approaching gets very steep for a short amount of time and is actually one of the steepest hills we farm but is not a big deal to harvest because a couple passes across with the combine eats it up fast. This hill takes 2nd gear for both the D4D and D6B to pull the krause up.

I would say this combo of cat and cultivator is probably one my favorite to drive.

Time to fold out the drills and seed some spring wheat. Seeded everything to the soft white variety "Nick" which has outstanding yields but has tougher straw than any winter wheat we grow.

The D6C plays with the krause but is used when one of the smaller cats is away someplace else.

The D6B really struggled to pull the wil-rich around on the canola ground but it was already there so there was no need to run the D6C up there for only making one pass.

Putting fertilizer on the canola ground, just like with the winter wheat it is a mixture of urea and ammonium sulfate only a lighter rate-aimed for 50lb N and 20lb S for this crop and also a little bit of granular boron mixed in with the dry fert.

And for when it is raining outside there is still work to do in the shop with one more combine needing readied for harvest.

enjoy

Great pictures.....getting to feel like I know the place.

Here are some pics of the fields.

Winter lentils looking fair. This low elevation ground is always hard to grow spring crops but grows fall planted crops well so we will see how these lentils do.

This is winter wheat on the 24th of April, not looking good in this field. We have one field that looks outstanding and the rest is looking like this field-pretty poor. Our one really good looking field is our lowest elevation one. My theory is that the late start and December cold hurt the wheat more than most people realized. This is typically what happens with freeze damaged wheat, it slowly looks worse as the spring moves on. The first picture shows no-tilled wheat and the second one was seeded the same day, same variety onto disked ground and looks about the same.

If you recall we planted some lower elevation spring wheat in March, this is what it looks like now. Looking very very promising and catching up with the winter wheat fast.

Spring wheat planted here up on top and just germinated. We would typically like more residue on the surface than this but the winter wheat in this field snowmolded last year and only did 50bu and the straw disappeared with one pass of a chisel plow in the fall and a couple cultivations in the spring (we did not roll the stubble first either like we normally would) . Low residue like this makes me understand how some of you guys feel that are in low yield areas. You must think it crazy that anyone would ever need a moldboard plow.

And interestingly enough a 55bu spring wheat crop nearby produced this mess of straw that we still dont know what to do with before seeding lentils. The picture doesnt show it very well but there is a big chunk of acres that have straw and dirt piles a couple feet in diameter and 6 inches high. Our drill will seed through stuff like this fairly well but this field will be lentils and we need to cut them at harvest at ground level. Although spring wheat produces less volume of straw this variety breaks down slower and does not grind up like winter wheat straw. Part of the problem is that we dont get enough dry weather to handle the tough straw in a way that complies with the government CSP program. A harrow will spread it out if it gets dry enough. We would normally lightly disk something like this and then cultivate to spread the remaining straw out and smooth the ground up. But the disk is a bad word with the CSP program so we will try to do without.

Great pictures
Thanks for sharing!

Hi North Idaho Farmer You have some great pictures and scenery. Like most farmers we never stop learning and seeing your straw handling systems must be quite difficult especially under wet conditions lots blockages of culyivators etc? thanks Atlas

Atlas- yes for decades straw management has been an unpredictable challenge for us. We have found some methods to work on some years, other years with different weather and crop conditions things act completely differently. Our older equipment such as the krause cultivator and a danish tine melroe cultivator which we used to use to incorporate chemicals with would plug easily in some conditions, usually we would just raise up and dump straw piles and then go around and burn them or try to harrow and spread them out. Now with our Wil-rich cultivator it will often go through very high residue without plugging but it will leave the straw in bunches and small piles behind it.

Our goal is basically to leave lots of residue on the surface while having very smooth ground for lentils. One or two guys here have quit using field cultivators and use only harrows to work the ground in the spring. We have tried this but cannot get the chisel plow ridges completely smooth with a flex harrow due to our clay soil remaining hard.

Here are a couple pics showing the wil-rich going through high residue and not plugging or balling straw. If we could count on it working like this every year that would be great, but that is not the case many times.

Shown is the old glencoe chisel plow which we used a little bit a couple years ago in an experiment doing shallower and faster chiseling.

It will plug when the straw gets wet as seen here.

We have had over 3 inches of rain here the past 5 days with 4 inches of snow on Wednesday. 2:00 in the afternoon today it was 36º and dumping slushy snow. Definitely a bit chilly for the first of May. Fields are fully saturated and drain tiles are running. I went out and cleaned out some of the tile line outlets today.