Farm Show Season

This past week was farm show season. On Saturday Madison and I went to the 50 years of progress farm show in Rantoul, Il. It is really amazing!! There are (not exagerating) more than 1,000 tractors there-and many old ones running in the field. It was pretty neat to see some of the equipment I used to help my grandpa farm with when I was a kid.






The Farm Progress Show on Wed was an entirely different story. All the latest and greatest equipment was on display. The size (and cost) of this new stuff is staggering, but it sure is fun to watch. Below is a video of the newest largest Lexion combine shelling 16 rows of corn and unloading at the same time-the rate that is coming out of auger is amazing.







I posted a lot more pics of both shows on our website at: http://www.paul-julia.com/FarmShows2009.jsp

Seeing the old and new equipment has my blood boiling to get started here, but the cold weather is just causing the crops to take forever to mature. There won't be much done in Central, IL before Oct 1. I will probably start slowly sometime between Sept 20 and Sept 27, but probably won't hit it hard before the 5th or 6th of October.

Of course we need to keep an eye on the stalks and if they start to have standability issues we will have to go no matter what the moisture-but drying costs continue to be really high and I sure would like to let it dry in the field as much as possible.


Beans are looking much better, the rain we got this week should help finish them off. My South farm got 2.5" but the North one only got 1/2". I have no idea on harvest time for the beans, but I will say with the headline fungicide we sprayed (which delays maturity) these will undoubtely be the the latest beans I have ever had in my short farming career.


In the next couple days I will start posting bi-weekly moisture tests, when it gets under 20 we will start something...at least I hope we can wait that long.