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Side-Dressing Corn

It’s now been about six weeks since the corn was planted. Last weekend (May 21 and 22), the farmers side-dressed most of the corn on the farm (I say most because they had issues with a hydraulic line and had to repair that before they were able to finish last week 😉 ).…

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What’s A Refuge Crop?

Remember that post I wrote a few weeks ago about why we were planting pink soybean seeds? Here’s some of the “blue” corn we planted. The blue color simply comes from the seed treatment we use on our corn seed, which protects the seed from diseases for a short time, giving the seed enough time to germinate and get a good start.…

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What Happens During Planting?

Planting is one of the busiest and most important times of the year for a farmer. It’s the start to a new growing season and holds promise for a good year. Believe it or not, most of the decisions for a crop are made before and during planting, starting as early as before last year’s harvest. The yield potential for most crops is determined at planting (barring any significant weather or pest interference), so it’s really important that a farmer…

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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…

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Why Are Your Seeds Pink?

Don’t worry, your eyes aren’t tricking you. Those soybean seeds in the photo are really pink. Yes, pink. No, they didn’t come off of the soybean plant that way. And no, you’ll never eat any colored soybean seeds. In fact, there’s protocol in place so that treated seed can’t be sold for anything other than seed. So if we can’t sell pink soybeans, why are we planting them?…

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The Perfect Pumpkin Pie

Wow, Thanksgiving sure came up quickly this year! 2015 is quickly winding down and harvest is finished or coming to a close across the United States. Now comes the season that reminds us to appreciate and give thanks for everything we have. What better way to celebrate than by enjoying a family meal reflective of fall’s bountiful harvest?…

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Apple Cookies

November is here and with it comes fall baking. My parents had an abundance of apples this fall from the three apple trees in their orchard…which means I was sent home with a bag of apples nearly every time I visited. Apple pie, apple crisp, apple sauce, apples dipped in caramel, apple salad, apple cookies– you name it, and I probably made it. The internet is full of recipes for apple pies and crisps, but here’s a delicious, spicy, hand-me-down farm-wife…

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Rain, Rain, Go Away

If you live in the Midwest, you may have noticed that it’s been raining an awful lot this summer. Typically, we hear more complaints from farmers about not enough rain while obsessively checking the radar and tracking any green speck that may be moving into the region. While drought can be devastating, too much rain can be just as bad. It seems wrong to be complaining about the constant rain and pumping excess water out of basements and wells while…

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Why Do We Have Strawberries in the Winter?

I was really disappointed when I opened my daily news email theSkimm this morning. There’s always a feature at the end, which often defines a common acronym. GMO is a pretty commonly used acronym and many can’t explain what the letters stand for, so it was bound to come up some time.…

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Why Do Farmers Use Pesticides?

The term “acre” is said to have been derived from the amount of land one man was able to plow with his yoke of oxen in a single day. An acre measures out to be 43,560 square feet, or about the size of a football field. Times have changed since the word was first coined. Improvements in farm equipment, such as the steel plow in 1837, and eventually tractors and other machinery have increased the efficiency of a single farmer.…

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