Camp Blue Sky

Gracie and Maddie (visiting from Australia) spent 6 days at a summer camp called Camp Blue Sky, they had the best time, I wished I had been able to go. There was about 170 young people there and is run very well. Grace said she will be there next year for sure.

Boys, Sorghum and Maize

John, Wiz and I picked some green maize this afternoon, Wiz unwrapped them as John and I drove home.

Another Field Day

No photo's as I just forgot to take any, we had a group of extension Ag officers who work with smallholders from a few hundred km away come and I gave them the 101 on black soils in low rainfall situations,ect.

I decided to make this field day a bit interactive and so we had one crew dig a soil pit, only 600mm deep to have a look at how much water is left in the top 600mm as well as root growth ect.
The others cut and harvested Barley and Sorghum side by side (adjacent rows planted same day)

We measured the green material and if my math's is correct there is 24,000kg per ha of material (cut 100mm from ground level) in the sorghum and 20,400kg in the barley.
My gut feel is that both the sorghum and Barley would be between 30% to 40% dry matter and that the dry grain yield should be about 60% of that dry matter.

Stuart's Quick Math (I borrowed this term from my friend Steve)

Sorghum 24,000kg ha (wet weight) * 35% = 8400kg of Dry matter * 60% = 5040kg ha grain ha

Barley 20,400kg ha (wet weight) * 35% = 7140kg of Dry matter * 60% = 4284kg ha grain yield

The next stage of this trial will be to hand harvest when the grain is dry the rows beside the green harvested ones and check what the relationship is between the wet (silage) weight and final grain yield. It will also be very interesting to see the comparison between the Barley and Sorghum that were planted the same day side by side.

As the Sorghum is only starting to grain fill and the Barley is a full grain, just starting to dry down I suspect that the barley is at the peak of its dry matter accumulation, the Sorghum is only at early grain fill and I would think may gain more dry matter. If I have time I will measure the sorghum at complete grain fill to see if this is correct.

I invite any and all comments/corrections to the above and would value peoples thoughts.

 

The Aphids Have to Die

We sprayed the Sorghum earlier this week for aphids, they were moving from lower in the crop canopy into the heads and I think would have caused us a lot of trouble at harvest with honey dew, Honey dew is the plant sugars that the aphids release and can be a real problem come harvest. It basically sticks the heads together and can be very painful to harvest and handle if bad enough.