View From the Cab

Littleton, Colo. (DTN) -- Hail no! Dan Lakey feels a bit battered this week after hail found his southeastern Idaho farm fields again. Yes, again. A bigger worry right now, though, is getting the white winter wheat harvested so it doesn't sprout.

Sprout susceptibility is a lot higher on soft white wheat than on hard red. "We have about four days left of cutting, but rainstorms have moisture sitting at 19% right now," said Lakey, on August 16. "We have to have it down to 13% to stick it in our bin or deliver to an elevator."

In Kentucky, Quint Pottinger continues to keep his fingers crossed that weather conditions keep the crop cooking along. Pottinger, who farms near New Haven, is seeing early planted corn edge toward black layer.

Pottinger and Lakey are volunteering to report on crop conditions through the 2024 growing season as part of DTN's View From the Cab feature.

This week we asked the farmers to respond to specific questions. Read on to learn more about what's happening in their fields and about some farm visitors and why they are special.

QUINT POTTINGER: NEW HAVEN, KENTUCKY

DTN: How does the crop look this week?

Pottinger: Crop is looking good. Black layer on the first planted and dent on the late planted for corn. Early beans are still filling out pods and late beans are blooming. I expect the next cool set of nights we have will turn the early planted beans off.

DTN: When does fall seeding start? What's the reason for the timing and what do those crops follow rotation? â??â??â??â??â??â??

Pottinger: We will start with wheat the second week of October and then move to rye winter crops and wrap up with seeding cover crops. The river bottoms are the priority for cover crops, those acres are also the later spring planted acres, so it is a natural transition to go from winter cash crop planting to cover crops as the combines start making it through the river bottoms by late October. Nothing about this year is normal so there is no reason to expect harvest to be.

DTN: You have had visitors touring the farm of late. How did that come about? Why do you enjoy that--is it important?

Pottinger: The whiskey industry brings in visitors for us. We will get three to four requests per year from either a distillery or a farm organization requesting a farm tour that is usually in conjunction with a whiskey tour or part of a group trip touring the bourbon industry. I really enjoy hosting these groups. For the same reason, I enjoy seeing farms on domestic or international trips. Farmers, regardless of where they are or what they grow, all seem to face the same issues. I enjoy listening to their stories on the tours. And I get to share our farm growth story. In a commodity driven world, it sometimes can be difficult to connect the dots for the consumer. The bourbon industry helps people grasp it from a more direct approach.

DTN: What's the good thing that happened this week?

Pottinger: We did our first farm crop tour this week and we showed our college intern how to make yield estimates. Also, we got our employee, Mike Barnes, back after a few weeks of being under the weather. It finally felt like we had the crew in full harvest prep mode, which is exciting.

DAN LAKEY: SODA SPRINGS, IDAHO

DTN: How does the crop look this week?

Lakey: The crop is starting to ripen; we will have both spring and winter wheat that will be ready for harvest as soon as our grain dries out. We received about an inch on Tuesday farm wide, as well as a little more yesterday, we could've sure used that rain back in mid-July. It would've made a big difference!

The big news this week is we got nailed with hail. It was pretty much farm wide with a few exceptions, but end-to-end from a couple different storms. It hurts on a drought year where the crop is already below average to get hit even more.

However, we are incredibly lucky. We had neighbors that border us that got absolutely devastated and the difference just being the storm path and the stage of the grain. They had barley that was almost ripe and probably five days away from harvest and we had spring wheat that was still green. Interestingly, enough, the worst of the storm hit our fields of spring wheat that had been devastated by frost earlier in the year. When that frost hit, it froze the leaves off and the wheat basically had to start over from the crown and start growing again. This set it about two weeks behind where it would've been. I think if that frost wouldn't have happened that the wheat would've been ripe enough that it would've got destroyed by the hail. You gotta look for the bright spots where you can find them!

DTN: When does fall seeding start? What's the reason for the timing and what do those crops follow rotation?

We have already planted about 300 acres of winter canola and winter rapeseed. The planting deadline is August 31 and it's an opportunistic crop to where if we have moisture, we will plant it and if not, we leave it in the bag. It's just too expensive and risky to plant into dry soils and hope for rain.

After the devastation of the hailstorms and the nice rain it brought with it, we put the tractor and drill in high gear and started planting. We will begin to seed winter wheat crops in about two weeks. This year we have soft white and hard red winter scheduled to be planted, we are planning on about 1500 acres of each if we can make it happen during harvest. We love to follow with winter wheat behind either peas, mustard, or canola. Planting behind barley works well also. We try not to follow any durum wheat or triticale crop with winter wheat just due to the similarities of the plants and the root diseases that it can cause. We have done it many times in the past, and if it rains a lot, we may look at it as an option, but we know that it will take probably 10% to 20% yield hit if we do that.

We have also found over the years that our yields decrease behind flax and that's a head scratcher, especially compared with this rotation in other areas where it works great.

DTN: Talk about the visitors you've had the farm recently.

Lakey: We had an Australian father and son duo tour our farm a couple weeks ago, I usually get several visitors from Twitter or conferences stopping by during the growing season at some point and I welcome it. I'm not near famous enough to have so many visitors that it would matter or distract us from our work!

About 10 years ago, I attended a conference in Wichita, Kansas, called "No-Till on the Plains." One of the guys I had dinner with one night was an Australian farmer and I got to know him well and we have kept in touch over the years. He recently called me out of the blue and said that he had a "mate" that was going to be coming down from Yellowstone through the area was interested in visiting farmers in our area. So, I gave them about a four-hour tour of our farm. I am always so interested to meet farmers from other areas of the world to see what their challenges and conditions are like, and more importantly it emphasizes how similar we really are, even though we are worlds apart.

DTN: What's the good thing that happened this week?

Lakey: One good thing this week is that we got an awesome rain that allowed us to get our canola and rapeseed planted. I've been holding off for several weeks because I was unsure that the seed would germinate in our nearly dry soil. Even though the rain brought some devastation with it, it watered some crops that were still green and gave us this good planting opportunity. As a dry farmer, even when we get hit hard with hail, we still try and look at the overall picture and realize that the moisture it brought with it, set us up better for next year and can still help finish up some of this year's crops.

Pamela Smith can be reached at pamela.smith@dtn.com

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