Making progress four rows at a time

When last I wrote, all of our "hill ground" had been sprayed and fertilized and ten acres had been strip-tilled. Not only have we planted that field within the past week, but we've also stripped and planted an additional 40 acres. That leaves us with 60 more acres of hill ground to plant, and I'm hopeful we'll have that in within the next week and a half. We plan to strip-till 25 of those acres while using full conventional tillage (chisel plow, disk, section harrow) on the remainder.

We'll turn our attention to our bottomland in mid-May and decide what tillage method to use based upon the moisture levels.

I sometimes catch myself feeling jealous of all the big-time flatland farmers who have the equipment to plant in an afternoon what takes me 3-4 weeks, but it is what it is. If we can get favorable weather and minimize mechanical downtime, we'll have it all planted before too much longer. The name of the game is to keep making progress, which in our case is made four rows at a time.

strip-tilling allows us to minimize erosion while preparing a good seedbed for our silage corn

all but the bottom four rows have been planted in this photo