2017 Crops

Now that the crop year is nearly complete, I am FINALLY going to do a post about our 2017 crops! 🙂 Every year I am amazed at how quickly the time goes by! It feels like we were just planting the crops last week, yet here we are almost done with harvest! This year we grew alfalfa seed, sugar beets, malt barley, clover seed, and spring wheat. We are in the middle of sugar beet harvest and that will be the final crop of the year. Here are some highlights from this year:

Field Prep and Planting

We start our crop year off by getting the fields ready to plant. This is usually very minimal since we no-till and strip-till as much as possible. The only fields we have to do additional work in are the fields that had sugar beets grown in them the previous year. During sugar beet harvest, the trucks run in the field which causes ruts and compaction. This makes it necessary to till the field to smooth it out and help with the compaction. Then it is time to plant!

Planting sugar beets

Sometimes, we also run a field cultivator over the established alfalfa seed fields to kill any volunteer alfalfa and to thin the stand if it is too thick.

Water, water, water

After the crops are planted, it is time to irrigate! Because we get so little precipitation in our area, the crops would not survive without irrigating them. Most of our ground is also pretty sandy, so we have to irrigate a lot! We do this mostly through pivot irrigation, but do have a couple small fields of flood irrigation.

Irrigating barley

We really like these bubbler nozzles for irrigating the alfalfa seed.

Irrigating alfalfa seed

Crop Pollination

The other important aspect for optimal crop production is pollination! Both our alfalfa seed and clover seed require bees to pollinate them. The alfalfa seed is mostly pollinated by leaf cutter bees, while the clover seed is mostly pollinated by honey bees. Both also get a little help from the bumble bees in the area. This is one of my favorite parts about raising these crops! I could hang out in the field and watch the bees work all day!

Notice the flowers are tripped in the photo above of the alfalfa seed being pollinated by a leaf cutter bee. The flower in the photo below with the honey bee is not tripped. If the flower is not tripped, then it will not make seed. This is why we use mostly cutter bees for pollinating the alfalfa seed.

2017 Crop Pictures

Here are some of my favorite pictures of the 2017 crops:

Sugar Beets

Clover Seed

Alfalfa Seed

Malt Barley

 

Harvest

Harvest is my favorite time of year and the final stage for our 2017 crops. The harvest season started with barley and wheat, then we went to alfalfa seed harvest. We are now doing sugar beet harvest and also finishing up our clover seed. Here are some of our harvest pictures:

On a more personal note, we are also growing our family this year! ? Our newest future farmer will be here shortly after Thanksgiving. We couldn’t be more excited!!
Please check back shortly for some harvest videos! Wishing you all a safe harvest and happy fall!!