Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Wheat Farmers?

Not much dairy here, wot a few mennonite operations, maybe all that liquid poo up there is the ticket, has to be. That being said, they guy I guy farms 18,000 acres of row crop. Be a lot of poo to rejuvenate his soils.

Different soils and difference practices, what it comes down to I suppose.

Still, If I had raised cattle all my life. I wouldn’t ask “hmmmm anyone know what goats eat” ?
Surely I would have ran across the answer just hanging at Co-Ops. 😃

Years ago I asked the head agronomist at our local Wilbur Ellis how many years in a row can you grow corn on the same ground.


He said you can grow it as many years as you can, until you can't....

Basically, it depends. And he said disease would be the end of it. That and I'm sure it's hard on the soil.


We've gone 4-5 years in a row with silage corn on a certain 40 acre field. And that is because everything else in the area was in alfalfa. We didn't have issues but did spread 300lbs of urea on it every spring. But I guess you'd do that regardless.



Dryland spring wheat farming is kind of a side gig to our cattle and we really should be rotating with a pulse crop but we don't have a big sprayer and we don't have a combine. And with some of the pulse crops you need to do a lot of spraying and when the crop is ready to cut you better be cutting it.


I actually mentioned to my dad yesterday that I have no interest in the paperwork side of the farm game and we should think about leasing out our wheat ground. That and we have plenty to do as it is.


And I've been around cows my entire life but have no idea about sheep or goats or chickens or pigs, etc..

I use canola oil in my propane cookers here. It’s about a third the price of peanut oil. Not unusual here on the weekends to have 4 cookers going. One for fish, 2 for French fries and one for onion rings and poppers and shrimp. I’ve never noticed a difference and nobody complains if the walleye are fresh.
If just a couple of us then lard in cast iron is the only way to go.

Heavy on the cow poo. They've got the cows in a barn all winter concrete floors eating sileage till they're about ready burst every day. The manure all goes in to big concrete lagoons. When the frost leaves they start spraying and I think they stop about Thanksgiving. LOL Luckily the closest huge show like this is about 50 miles, a moderate sized one closer. Cause man can the air be ripe around there for days on end.

Oh ya the other thing they do is till and plant fall rye when the silage corn comes off. It greens up and is maybe 10 inches high before winter comes. Then around April it starts to grow again and they cut it once for silage till again and plant corn. So that probably helps the monoculture issues some. They do this over and over for decades.

Interesting.


When I was working concrete we poured the floor for one of those lagoons.

That dairy game, they throw a lot of money around infrastructure up the kazoo, huge fancy barns. Zero small dairy to speak of around here any more all high tech big dollar deals..

I'm shocked at the low yields you guys are reporting for your areas. I just sprayed ours yesterday with a fungicide called miravis ace to suppress fusarium head blight. We plant anytime after the Hessian fly date in the fall either following corn silage or soybeans and can plant thru October depending on the year. Of course the later the date the higher the seeding rate. The goal is about 1.5 million plants per acre. I always broadcast some fertilizer at planti g and spray with an herbicide called finesse at planting time. In the spring I spread urea , split between 2 applications for a total of about 120 units nitrogen per acre. Then another spray pass of a growth regulator like Palisade to strengthen the stems to prevent lodging this pass is also a good time to add a copper fungicide like Badge to prevent powdery mildew, then this final pass of fusarium fungicide during flowering. Good wheat takes intensive management. But 100 by per acre is pretty standard and 120 isn't unheard of. One thing about using the Finesse in the fall , you can't follow with corn in the spring if you decide to terminate the crop. You'd have to follow with beans.

Different deal here.


Your input cost are way higher than ours but you have better dirt and get more rain.

I've always heard they changed the name because you can't get a suburban housewife to buy "rape oil"

Side note, Canola stands for Can - Canadian, O - Oil, LA - Low acid.

You can decide why they changed the name for yourself.

Dry land farming in semi arid country is way different than places with rain. Here in North Dakota we average 14 inches total precipitation which includes snow. Jim said they are at 12 to 13 inches. All the fertilizer in the world does no good without water. You seed and fertilize accordingly. This dry farming does result in the best quality small grains. Guys here are still trying to get last years crops off so they can seed this years crops. About half done here. Ed k