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Monday, March 17, 2012 southeast of Tisdale

Good yield
Tisdale - Wednesday, September 19, 2012

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Monday afternoon I drove east then south of Tisdale to see how the harvest is progressing. I watched a John Deere combine get underway for the afternoon, it made one pass up and down a field then decided that it was to damp and off it went to another field.

In the general area there were only a couple of fields that were still in the field. One of those fields looked like wheat but the heads were very short and I wondered if it was buck wheat.

The afternoon sky was really spectacular and I pulled into a harvested field to snap a picture of the cloud formation and was surprised to hear the sound of a big tractor coming toward me. The tractor was pulling a deep tillage cultivator with single shave spike type blades. The farmer pulled to a stop and got down from the cab of the massive machine.


The farmer was Mr. McPhee who is no longer operating a farm but helps out his son by doing the cultivating. I asked him about the practice this year of ripping up the fields as soon as the crop has been removed. As I had observed and mentioned last week this seems to be the general practice this fall. Mr. McPhee explained that the fields are surprisingly hard this fall and need to be loosened up in preparation for applying the anhydrous fertilizer just before freeze up.

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He told me that almost all of the harvest in this area is done with just a few fields of wheat left. I asked him about the crop about a quart mile away that I thought might be buck wheat. Indeed it is just regular spring wheat and this year’s crop has very short heads. I mentioned that plants like that might have a very modest yield and he said that interestingly enough the wheat crop is coming off at about 50 bushel to an acre. That is what they got of the 200 acre field we were standing in.

It is not an easy task trying to figure out the mysteries of grain pricing. Farmers are used to using the bushel system and that is still the standard south of the border but the markets use number that really make my head spin. As near as I can figure hard spring red wheat is going for something between $8.50 and $9.50 a bushel but the prices are sometimes quoted after the farmer has paid for getting the grain to the Gulf of Mexico. But one way or another that 200 acre field should net more than $80,000. Looks to me that working it up this fall is not an excessive expense even with the price of diesel being over a dollar a litre.

Mr. McPhee got back up into the cab and off he went. It was close to three in the afternoon and he figured he would be able to finish up the field before supper.

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