I still can’t believe it has been over 2 years since my last post! I apologize for my absence and wanted to give you an update on what we have been up to since my last post in 2017. The 2018 & 2019 crop years have been crazy to say the least, but I guess that’s just part of farming. ?

First, I will start off by saying how excited I am to put the 2019 crop year behind us, and say hello to the brand new year full of hope and possibilities! 2019 will be a year we remember forever, and sadly not for good reasons. It will be remembered for the loss, the freezing temperatures, the excess precipitation during harvest, and the worst farm year we have ever experienced. ? 2018 wasn’t as bad, but it definitely had its difficulties. Here’s our 2018 crop year review:

2018

Overall, 2018 was a pretty good year for the crops. It could have been better had there not been a hailstorm that completely wiped out ? of our acres. Thankfully, we had crop insurance to help cover our losses. However, it’s still not easy seeing your hard work completely taken out in 5 minutes. ? I definitely shed a few tears after seeing our beautiful crops laying flat on the ground! Here are some photos before and after the storm:

Alfalfa Seed

Alfalfa seed field

Spring Wheat

The Big Storm

Alfalfa Seed after the storm 🙁

Spring wheat after the storm

Thankfully our farms are quite a few miles apart, so only one farm received damage from this storm. Here are some of the more cheerful photos from our 2018 crop year:

Flood field planted and ready to irrigate

Barley field

Clover Seed Field

My pictures for the year wouldn’t be complete without some bee photos! Check out why the bees are so beneficial to our farm here.

Honey bee on alfalfa

Leafcutter bee

Barley ready to harvest

Sugar Beet Harvest

Sugar Beets after being defoliated

2019

I don’t even know where to begin with our 2019 crop year.  I can’t even say it started out well, because it really didn’t! We had a very late winter and it felt like it took forever for it to warm up.  We were even receiving low temperature alerts from the pivots (they turn off to prevent them from freezing once it gets to a certain low temperature) in June. 

Since we had such a late spring, we were hoping we could make up some growing degree units and have a longer summer.  Sadly, that did not happen. We had our 1st damaging freeze/snow around the second week of October, followed by several more soon after.  Thankfully we had started harvesting sugar beets in September during early harvest, so we had some acres finished. We struggled to finish harvest (on allotment) for another month until the sugar beet company officially shut us down. We ended up not being able to harvest over 100 acres of our beets. There were many people in our area unable to deliver their beets as well. This made it so the sugar beet company did not have enough sugar to sell and pay for everything, which resulted in us receiving quite a bit less money for the beets we did deliver.  

The cold weather also affected our sunflowers and corn which both needed more growing degree units (measure of heat needed to reach maturity). We finally finished sunflower seed harvest a couple weeks ago and we will finish corn harvest next week.  In a typical year we would be finished with harvest around November, December being the very latest. We can’t wait to be done harvesting our 2019 crops so we can begin looking forward to the new year and new crops!

This was our 1st year growing sunflowers and we really enjoyed it.  We look forward to growing more next year and hope for a warmer year! Here are some of my favorite sunflower pictures from this year:

Sunflowers

Here are the highlights from our other crops in 2019:

Sugar Beets

Barley

And of course…bees! 

Finally, here are a few videos from 2019.

Early sugar beet harvest, before the bad weather:

A video my son put together for his YouTube channel of us repairing one of our center pivots after a gearbox broke off the tower:

Thank you so much for checking out our 2018 & 2019 crop years. I can’t wait to share with you the great year I know we are about to have!