Wednesday 18 December 2013

Beans are coming through.

It's been 10 days since the beans were planted, since the photo's were taken anyway, and I have to say I am a little disappointed with the consistency of the emergence . The problem was that we didn't plant the beans sooner, the way our planter is configured the planting depth control wheel had to run over the cane that is growing, so because the cane was starting to put on stalk this meant that the depth wheel rode over, bringing the seed out of the soil. However we had 35mm of rain just the other day so when we were looking we could see beans germinating in the moist trash.We had a visit from the people from University come and have a look , so the photo's were taken by Susanne Schmidt who is leading the project.Hopefully all is not lost and we will have enough population to have a recordable difference in the treatments.We have three different nitrogen treatments across the field and two different soy seeding rates along the paddock.

Saturday 7 December 2013

Planting our Inter crop of Soybean.

It has taken ten years lots of time and money a Nuffield Scholarship overseas research, a collaboration with the University of Queensland and we have finally planted another inter cropping trial, and I was not there.I was in Brisbane attending a company directors course to be able to have a better understanding of the business of farming, it was some pretty serious stuff I would have rather have been home planting the trial, but this is something that can have as much of an effect on our business as the operational stuff that I usually do. My brother planted the trial and we were very pleased with the way the planter performed as you can see from the picture there is a lot of residue to work through, hopefully next week we will see the beans emerging.We have had 120mm of rain since my last post and are just starting to irrigate again, this time of year is peak growing time so we have irrigate as necessary, makes it hard around Christmas time but when you consider that Cane can grow up to 35mm per day here, good moisture management really pays off in the long run.Have to say even though the week in Brisbane was quite full on it was good to meet new faces and catch up with the old friends.