Finished planting Sorghum

We finished planting the 400ha field of Sorghum late Wed night and then planted a barley trial the following morning, we had just changed over to wheat for some trials when the heavens opened and we had about 10mm of rain. This was mainly good as the whole of the commercial crop had been planted although I still have five or six hours of trials to plant, some paddock scale, one to a few hectares and some hand planted with material given to us by an NGO funded by the Gates foundation. One sorghum variety they gave us was only 800 seeds. I will try and plant them and the other trials today if it is dry enough.
As we are leading into what is called the long rains we have planted on a "solid" configuration of 75cm (30 inch) rows, I have also increased the plant population, I suspect that the temperatures lend themselves to a higher population to that which we have previously planted.
I also used a bit more fert at planting, 60kg of DAP and 25kg of SOP. I am considering flying some nitrogen on as well as I want to plug all the holes in the yield bucket I can.

Woops

Our night driver had a little accident, early this morning. No great harm, only to my heart.

Harvest Photos

 Top Photo,Our grain shed is not finished so we have had to use ground dumps, we load with the telehandler which has a large grain bucket.
Above photo, badly lodged sorghum with Lukenya in the background.

Some of the 150 people gleaning behind the harvester. The numbers keep growing.

Still Harvesting

We increased the number of people on the hand harvesting (Gleaning) crew last week, we have now 37 teams of three. They have picked up and hand threshed just about 50 ton to date, probably another 50 to go. My best estimate is that we are missing about 150 to 200kg per ha. The field is 600ha so wait and see I guess. One of our fellows drives around with the land cruiser and picks up the bags of sorghum, they then take the 10bags or so and the group leaders (about five per trip) they weight the bags then send them up the auger to add to the ground pile.
The machine harvesting should be complete in two or so days and then we will swap the auto steer into the tractor and plant the other 400ha field. There is good moisture under it and with the long rains just about here we will plant sorghum dry fairly shallow.

Gleaners at Work

We have at present, 48 people hand harvesting lost heads behind the machine harvester, we are paying piece work and the people are making about double the casual rate per day, good for us, good for them, they pick up the lost heads of sorghum and then thrash and clean it and then our fellow picks the bags up in the field, weighs it and take a ton at a time back to our grain heap where he puts it up the auger and it is added to the pile.
It works out that we get about 66% and the people 33%, good deal all round. The plan is to go to 100 people on Monday. The Gleaners are able to collect and clean about 300kg per team of three per day.
The Kenyan varieties lodge (fall over) really easily and so our losses are somewhere around 200kg ha.
The Kenyan presidential elections have been a big focus for the past week, lots of people talking about it. (click on the photo to enlarge)

Twiga in the Sorghum

I was harvesting yesterday and saw these five Giraffe (Twiga) walking across the field, they seem to enjoy Sorghum, I have seen them quite a lot lately enjoying a chew.

Beautiful Photo of Grace and John

Click to enlarge 

Good Decication Job

Our airial spraying operator took this photo of the decication job on some sorghum (done 8 days earlier), he has his plane set up with six micron airs with a 16m swath, we did this job at 10 liters of total volume as a bit of an experiment, droplet size of 250 to 300 micron. An Australian framer friend (Martin) always says that water is a contamination to round up. In Australia I could never get the quality of job that we seem to get time after time here in Kenya. I think using the small plane that fly's slower than the big turbins may have something to do with the good results, due to the pattern that seems very even..(plus a fussy pilot) You can click on the photo to get a better look