We have some neighbors on the east side of the county and they started cutting last week. We have beans that will go but we are not ready yet. We just finished filling a silo yesterday and we have one more to do in a week or so. We are hoping to be rolling by the end of the week harvesting the beans. We have some cattle to move the next couple of days.
We just finished up our last cutting of hay. Some of my dairy buddies are thinking about making one more cutting of alfalfa yet. It has been really dry. It has been over a month since we had a decent rain. The fields are rough. It is like concrete out there. There was some hay we left because it was a first year seeding and we were afraid to ruin it with its limited root system.
A neighbor at Canal Fulton cut some beans over the weekend and had a variety in the low 50s and a second variety was in the high 50s and low 60s. The top pods are there but there is nothing in them. I am afraid my double-crops are not going to amount to much as dry as we?ve been.
We have our wheat seed ordered and it should be coming in during the next few days. We are bumping our wheat acres back a little to plant 45 acres of barley. We are growing that to use for grain in the steer rations. Our nutritionist told us that feeding one-third of our ration of ground barley helps put a hard glazed top on the carcass and improves the grade a little. It saves us a little corn and lets us cut back on wheat and still get straw. The barley comes off a couple of weeks earlier than wheat and lets us get our double-crops in sooner. We?re going to try it and see if it works. I am hoping for some more heat units to dry this corn. We only have about 2.5 weeks worth of corn left to feed and then we are going to have to shell some.
