The Season Doesn’t Start With Planting

Planting: sowing the seeds for this year’s crop. It seems like the growing season is just beginning, but planning started even before last year’s harvest began.

I’d like to introduce you to my new #FollowTheField series. We’re going to follow the field my dad (one of the farmers) labeled as “Schultz 55” in his data management program. I call it “the corn field by the round crib,” but I guess both will work. 🙂 #FollowTheField will be just that: I’m going to follow this field through the season and keep you updated on all of the management decisions that are made and the growth progress throughout the 2016 growing season. This is a learning process for me, too. I may be the Farm Kid here, but I’ve never been around the actual decision-making and reasoning behind it. We’re in this together.

 

So when did the 2016 growing season really begin? It’s hard to pinpoint exactly, but it probably started sometime last September or October, just before the harvest of last year’s crop began. Here’s what the farmers were thinking about:

Fall 2015

• Seed. Many farmers tend to have some brand loyalty, just like you or I do at the grocery store or electronics department or coffee shop (personally, I’m a Starbucks fan), so it was an easy decision knowing who the seed was coming from for 2016. The real question was what. Corn seeds aren’t all the same. Sure, they pretty much look the same in the field, but genetics and traits determine things like how tall or short the plant will be, the size of the ear, and what pests the plant can fend off and how well. It’s kind of like how we’re similar to other members of our families; hair color, height potential, etc. Except in crops, we call them varieties instead of families. There are two varieties of corn planted in this field and both are DEKALB brand. The varieties were selected just before or during last harvest, when the farmers were evaluating how well the varieties did in terms of yield. Many seed companies offer discounts on seed when farmers order and pay early, so there was a big incentive to make that decision in the fall.

• Seed treatments. I recently wrote a post about seed treatments in soybeans, but seed treatments are used in corn, too. The corn used in this field had a fungicide seed treatment, which protects the seed from diseases. It’s a no-brainer on our farm to use a fungicide seed treatment on corn, but it’s still *technically* a decision, so I’m putting it here on the timeline.

• Fertilizer. The three most important nutrients for crops on our farm are nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P), and potassium (K). The P and K was broadcast (sprinkled) over the field soon after harvest last fall. Not much was applied since the last soil test indicated that the field has ideal levels of P and K in the soil to support a crop, so “maintenance” levels of P and K were applied to keep those numbers in a good range. A little later in the fall, the first round of nitrogen was applied to this field in the form of anhydrous ammonia. To keep the nitrogen in place in the soil, the neighbor the farmers hired to apply it for them had to wait until the soil temperature 4 inches deep was less than 50 degrees Fahrenheit. This happened around the first or second week of November. The anhydrous was applied by injecting it into the soil in rows. The neighbor used auto-steer and gave the coordinates to the farmers to use with their auto-steer system in the spring so they could plant right on top of the nitrogen source.

January 2016

• Meeting with the landlord. This field isn’t owned by my family, but my family has been farming it for a very long time. The farmers have a good relationship with the landlord, in part because both parties are good about communicating with each other. Sometime around the first of the year, the farmers met with the landlord to talk about the lease agreement. [Tangent: Standard lease agreements run from October 1 to October 1, so the conversation to change a lease would happen in the summer or early fall (or even earlier). If the lease isn’t changed, it’s automatically renewed with the same terms on October 1. This lease was automatically renewed.] At this meeting, the farmers talk about what varieties they chose, their fertilizer plan, their herbicide plan, what they might do different this year, and what will stay the same. They’ll keep up the conversation throughout the year with updates on if they had to replant a field or if there’s hail damage from a big storm or if they think they need to apply a fungicide to treat a disease– things that aren’t planned.

• Herbicide plan. Weeds are a major nuisance if they’re not treated early. It’s easy to plan for weed control on our farm, so the farmers went ahead and booked their herbicide plan with the local company they use for fertilizer and pesticide applications. This gives the company a heads up on when they need to be in our fields and with what product.

• Bills, bills, bills. The first of the year is a busy time. The seed bill arrives, the herbicide bill arrives, and the fertilizer bill arrives. Farming has a lot of upfront costs.

• Operating loan. The farmers visit the local bank and take out an operating loan. Both farmers involved with our farm have a non-farming source of income, but farming expenses don’t come out of our families’ bank accounts. Besides, we’re talking tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, depending on how much everything costs that year. (I don’t know about you, but I sure don’t have that kind of cash on hand!) They’ll use most of this operating loan to pay the seed, fertilizer, and herbicide bills.

March 2016

• Crop insurance. The farmers just invested a lot of money in seed and things (fertilizer, herbicide) to help that seed grow into a good crop. But payday isn’t coming until next fall. That’s a good six months or so in the field and exposed to the elements. Yes, crops need rain and sunlight to grow, but too much of either isn’t necessarily a good thing. There are lots of things that that could happen that can’t be predicted: hail, drought, flood, devastating pests, high winds– anything could happen. Crop insurance also protects our farm from a sudden drop in crop prices, too. Our farm uses a type of crop insurance called revenue insurance. If you remember from economics, revenue = price x yield. The price in this equation is determined in February by the program administrators and is the same for all farmers who purchase this insurance. The exact price is the futures price for December corn delivery offered in February. There’s more to it, but basically a future is what the market predicts the crop price to be at that time of year (in this case, December). The yield part is determined by our farms actual production history (APH) over the last 10 years. So if our farm needed to claim crop insurance, we would only get the price that was locked in in February x the average corn yield of our farm over the last 10 years. But to make it more complicated, there are different levels of crop insurance sold and long story short, the most a farmer could possibly receive is 85% of the yield times price number. Our farm buys the 85% coverage, which we do have to pay for. Like homeowners insurance or car insurance, crop insurance is not free. The 85% figure is like a deductible. So our farm pays to have a low deductible. Like your likelihood to make a claim for car insurance or homeowners insurance, it’s not likely that our farm will make a claim on our crop insurance in any given year, but it is a nice safety net and provides some piece of mind. Hopefully I didn’t lose you there. 🙂

April 2016

• Herbicide application. It’s the week before planting! This field is strip-tilled (basically no-till, but with strips where the nitrogen was applied), so there are weeds. Part of the herbicide plan that was decided way back in January was a burndown or pre-plant herbicide (same thing). This goes on before the corn is planted and gets rid of the weedy competition for the emerging corn plants. This herbicide also has a “residual,” so it hangs around for a few weeks and prevents new weeds from growing until the corn can all emerge and start to grow. The farmers have also paid for a post-plant herbicide to go on in about 4 to 5 weeks, when the corn is about 8 inches tall. This will be the last of the herbicide used on this field during the 2016 growing season.

 

And this brings us from those pre-harvest decisions to planting. That’s six months of planning and decision-making before the corn is even in the ground! As you’ve probably seen on my social media, planting is already complete on our farm so stay tuned for the official #FollowTheField update on the blog. 🙂