Drought vs Irrigation in Nebraska

A few weeks ago, I wrote a guest post on the Nebraska Farm Bureau blog about the importance of irrigation to Nebraska agriculture and how farmers are continually becoming more efficient with the use of groundwater. And even though it was pretty dry when I wrote about it, I didn't know yet that we were on the brink of the worst drought in at least two decades.

But the picture below really illustrates how important irrigation is to us. These two fields border each other, one completely dryland and the other completely irrigated. The field on top was being shredded today, and the stalks made it look like it was late October. The field on bottom looks fantastic, and should easily yield better than 200 bushels per acre.

Without the abundance of water provided by the Ogallala Aquifer and Nebraska's other irrigation sources, our mowers would be used a lot more than our combines this year. And with the drought tightening its grip across the rest of the Corn Belt (see CNN's coverage at Brian Scott's farm in Indiana), being able to irrigate our crops becomes a lot more important for the entire supply chain. 

Irrigating is a grind, but I'll take the stress of irrigation over the stress of watching crops burn up any day of the week.

Hail storm in southwest Nebraska

There's no technology that's going to save this corn. Hail was up to 2.75" in diameter with 70 mph winds. Story at http://ow.ly/5ZTLa (McCook Gazette).

Update: Just to clarify, this is a field near McCook, NE. Thankfully it isn't one of mine.

Autosteer 101

Since we're having a couple Indian Summer days in December, I'm able to get a couple more days of fieldwork in before our weather switches to deep freeze mode for the next few months and the ground freezes. Today I'm strip-tilling, which essentially means I'm preparing the seedbed for planting next spring by tilling up a narrow strip of soil. This operation allows us to reap the benefits of both a no-till system (reduced soil erosion, better moisture retention) and a conventional tillage system (easier planting, warmer soil in the spring). I'll explain those systems in greater detail in a future post.

How does this relate to technology? This operation is nearly impossible to use effectively without GPS autosteer. My tractor is driving itself on a line that is infinitely repeatable, meaning that all of my passes through the field are perfectly straight and parallel. It also means that the planter will be able to plant exactly in the narrow strip that I've tilled. Farmers are good at driving straight, but not as good as a computer being guided by a dozen satellites.

The tractor is able to follow the predetermined line with the use of an RTK (Real Time Kinetimatics) GPS signal. This signal means that we will be within an inch of where the tractor is supposed to be. By contrast, your gps navigation device uses a WAAS signal that is accurate to within a few meters. It's the difference between knowing which road you're on and knowing where the device is on the dashboard.

I'll post a video later of the strip-tilling in progress to give a better look at what it's like. And to show how the gps interface looks like a game of John Deere Light Cycle.

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Hello from Nebraska

This is my first post, mainly to see how well this works to post from my Droid X. I'm currently watching augers transfer corn between bins; on our farm no job possesses as high a combination of boredom + things that can go horribly wrong.

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