autumn is on the way

the genetically spliced soy beans are telegraphing the approach of autumn simply by chromatic signal...

the pods are changing color as well...

those spliced in genes may keep the herbicides from killing the beans...that pig weed out in that field tells me the "weeds" are evolving without laboratory help...or, perhaps, in response to the lab help the beans are getting...

there's volunteer corn out in the bean field too ( and let me say here i did not wade out into the field...i stayed on the grassy berm by the road...the volunteers were simply conveniently located at the field perimeter )...

it was fairly stunted in dense yellow #2 terms, however it did produce ears and, a first in my volunteer corn exoerience...i could feel kernels under the husks...not sterile...not hybrid? who knows...they're doing wonderful things in the lab these days...

everyone i could reach had ears...everyone i could touch had kernels...so something new learned from a bean field today...

here at home the wheat is booming along...many plants have a second leaf now...

and the berry greeter in the rye bed...

has found herself in tall company...

there are still some fat clusters of teosinte ears out there...

however most have begun to split open revealing the individual ears...

green seed is still the norm...

although some ears have finished up...i have harvested a small amount of seed...anticipating more...

beyond that, grapes continue to ripen...

and mooseberry is doing just fine thanks.

rain continues

the drought monitor indicated that "current conditions" would extend for the next thirty days...perhaps...

however the nearly two inches of rain in my yard over the last twenty-four hours has surely made some impact on that...it has certainly impacted local industrial fields...

there is standing water...

in the dense yellow #2 and beans...along with some hints of erosion..

and, in places...

it looks as if the plants may drown if the rains continue...and that is what forecasts call for though the weekend...no need to water anywhere around here.

different season

after eight inches of rain last month the climate has only delivered a tenth of that this month...so the fields are drying...

and the machinery is out in the fields...

many have already been worked and planted with what i am assuming is a late start on dense yellow #2 which was mostly missing last year around here...

there are still any number of fields that are unturned...usually juxtaposed across the road from the planted...i am, again assuming, thinking these will be beans directly since bean time is upon us...we will be looking around to see if i am correct in my assumptions or if i am completely at sea industrially...for now the industrial feed stock has begun to reach the fields...conagra is safe.

wet...fallow...late...eroded

this...call it fifteen hundredths of an inch...rain from the first of june brings my back yard total since may first to 10.55"...rather a lot actually...and there is a possibility of more rain later this week which is not especially good news for industrial farming hereabouts...

admittedly there are a number of farmers around here who have begun to use "no till" methods and it would be a bit difficult to tell just yet if they had been planted...however i have been watching these particular fields for a number of years and they have always been plowed in the past...

the field behind the big box stores ( which by the way are mostly closed now...i don't get out that way too much these days ) is fallow as well...then again there have been years when it was not planted and that didn't have anything to do with rain...perhaps a less reliable barometer of planting than the more rural fields...still we will be looking in on it until we are certain it is not going to be planted...

you can clearly see where water collected and sat before it dried...

and even more clearly where it still is collected...

all that collected water had to run off form somewhere and when it did it washed down topsoil and cut through berms which is another can of worms in the fields...the agronomists at purdue university say that "late planting" accounts for only a twelve to sixteen percent drop off in harvests...one supposes there must be a consensus definition of "late" but i do not seem able to find it...the usda seems less sanguine and according to index mundi the price of a metric tonne of dense yellow #2 on may thirty-first was $33.79 higher than it was on april thirtieth..a commodity price ( along with soy beans and soybean oil ) worth watching over the summer and into harvest.