Busy?

Farmer to wife: What are you doing today?

Wife: Raising your children. Why?

(Wrong answer.  The correct answer would have been "I'm busy.  Very, very busy.")  Just kidding!  For those of you who don't know me well, I was an agronomy major in college so I always enjoy being involved with the farm work.

As I mentioned in a previous post, we had a few fields grid sampled this year.  However, we wanted to get an idea of the soil fertility on some of our other fields, too, so Quentin and I went out yesterday to get a few samples on the rest of our fields going to corn next year.  It's not as extensive as grid sampling, but it should give us a pretty good idea of what is happening in a particular field.

For those of you who might not be familiar with soil sampling, it is WORK!  We will be sending in only 2-3 samples per field, but to get one soil sample, 25 probes are taken from all over the sample area.  Each probe is taken to a depth of 6 inches.  Mix all the soil together from the 25 probes and you have a sample.

 



One probe down, 400+ to go.

We based our sampling areas off the yield maps to get an idea of "good" and "poor" areas of the field.  This will allow us to compare the fertility to help pinpoint why some areas do better than others.  It is amazing what you see when you get out there.  Without even looking at the map, I could usually tell whether we were in a good or poor area based on the probe.  Many of the poorer areas had a very shallow topsoil, and it was nearly impossible to get the probe down to the 6 inch depth before hitting a hard pan.  The poor areas also tended to be drier with less soil structure.  The good areas were relatively easy to probe and had good moisture.  Sometimes they were darker soils, which probably indicates they have more organic matter (a very good thing).  We will be interested to see what the results say when we get them back.