Shawn Feikema
speaker
152 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Oct 2024
last heard Oct 2024
Shawn Feikema’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Yes, yep. So we actually started covers the very first – Cover crops I tried were before we went strip-till because we did a couple of fields, and then I thought, oh, I'm going to go out and till it in the spring, right? What a train wreck that was. That was like I had tilled up a pasture. So that was not –
the greatest idea but you know you learn as you go and you figure things out and and now you know we plant green most almost all our corn is planted green which has worked fairly well up until this year um this year it didn't work i i was not super happy i'm not i shouldn't say it didn't work it just my corn looked like crap because we're in north in southern minnesota we're not supposed to be planting in three foot tall rye um that we don't have the equipment for that and and
Just because of the way the weather was, when the rye came out of dormancy the first of March, it just had so much time to grow. And when we planted the third week of April, it worked great. But then we got, like everybody else, we got all that rain and we didn't get back in for two and a half, three weeks. And by the time we got there, it was three feet tall. Some of it was over four feet tall.
And yeah, so that part I hope I never have to do again. But if I can plant green in foot tall or less, I love it.
Yeah, that's a big deal. You know, people ask me, like, how come you're willing to try all this stuff? I'm like, because if I screw up, I make my brother take it and feed it in the feed yard somehow. You know, do something. We can figure out some way to deal with it.
Yep. You know, so. Yep.
Goes into feed. Feed. Run it through the roller mill and feed it.
Yeah, I think there's a lot of people that don't, you know. Yeah, the people from the outside. So we get a lot of tour groups that come through and different things. And they're like, well, why don't you try different crops? Like, there's got to be a market, you know? I mean, it's hard to beat corn. Corn and soybeans have the markets. They do because they grow well where we grow them.
And so it's hard to find something that can compete with that, you know? Yeah. Which is unfortunate, but it's the reality of the world we live in.
the N unit or N row unit, they called it. We started with that because I was convinced I had to have a 24 row to match up with my 24 row planters, which turned out, you know, the machine worked fine, but we have since then
uh traded for a 16 row coulter machine which i i like for our situation a whole lot better um number one the rock um but uh also i just i like the strip it makes better i need a wide you know i need a nice 10 inch wide black berm here um and i felt that does it better than that mole knife did um but yeah we do most our strips in the fall
Um, we, we put down a little potassium in the strip, maybe like 50, 60 pounds. And that's about it. Um, we do not hardly buy any, uh, DAP or MAP or anything because of all the manure. So we have our feedlot manure, and then we have, um, relationships with a bunch of, uh, large swine producers. So we pump, we pump about 10 to 12 million gallons of swine manure as well. Wow.
So we don't, we don't buy hardly any PNK fertilizer other than a little bit of potassium in some strips here and there. Um, And so, yeah, we strip in the fall. Mainly we're just making a strip other than if we're putting down a little bit. Some of our cattle manure acres we'll put, we'll VRT them. So we grid sample and then, you know, how inconsistent cattle manure can be in a bedpack situation.
So we just fill in them holes with a little bit of P and K and, you know, just little low spots. But for the most part, we maybe put, you know, fertilizer on 10 to 15% of the acres of the field, you know, just to even it out. Um, and then, uh, and then, yeah, we just roll in, in the spring and plant our corn on corn acres. We do freshen if we didn't bail the stocks off of it.
So obviously we bailed a few acres of corn stocks for bedding and stuff. So we'll, uh, we'll, uh, yeah, so we'll have, when we do corn on corn air, we don't bail it. We don't run a freshener strip through, um, or trip, but, uh, if it isn't bailed off, then we'll, we'll freshen freshen that corn on corn strip in the spring.
Which machine do you have?
Yeah, it doesn't.
No, no. Hence the reason I have the Coulter machine, because that one don't plug. What we did when we had that machine, so we ran that machine for like four years, I think, chopping corn head, But the biggest problem was always on the end rows when you let that machine down and you almost have to stop on the end headlands, drop it down and then go because there was never...
the the the coulter comes out of the ground as you lift that machine before the knife does and then that knife just acts like a dump rake yep you know so that's that's you know we some of the things we learned was like literally you stop on the end rows like the you know like you used to do way back in the day with a planter you know so you didn't overlap that's how you had to do it to keep it from plugging yep i do that but then even then is it that's not even foolproof
Yeah. No, no, you're absolutely right. Yeah. All of a sudden you look back and you've got a Volkswagen plugged up underneath that thing, basically, you know, and you're dragging it along.
Showing 61–80 of 152 · page 4 of 8
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