Monday, June 13, 2016

Corn Comparison

Many of you probably know that we grow our own Non-GMO corn to make feed for the pigs and chickens.  Most of our work involves raising livestock, so growing the corn gives us a chance to till the soil and grow a crop. It's a little bit of a change of pace, and we do enjoy it. Not to mention, It's hard to find Non-GMO corn otherwise, so it's kind of a necessity. I took a picture last week (June 7) of the corn crop, and then out of curiosity I scrolled back to last years pics to do a comparison. I actually had a picture that was only one day different (June 6) from the previous year. So in this picture you can see that this years crop, at this point, is further ahead than we were last year.  This is primarily because we got the crop in a couple weeks earlier than last year.  This is important with corn, because by planting earlier you have less pest pressure.  It looks great now, but there is still a long way to go.  Corn needs rain, but more importantly it needs rain at the right time. In a couple of weeks it will start setting an ear. When that happens we need to have plenty of rain so all those little corn plants can be happy and healthy.

In case you are wondering we normally plant 50-60 acres of corn, but we lost some rented acres this year so we are down to 40 acres. That's another reason we need a good crop. We planted approximately 26,000 seeds per acre.  So, theoretically we have just over 1 million corn plants. Hopefully this fall each of them will have one or two nice large ears ready to be harvested.