The first day of spring is Thursday, and area farmers are in the early stages of getting ready for spring planting.
This is Iowa State University Extension and Outreach Field Agronomist Angie Rieck-Hinz.
“First we want to think about any spring tillage we got to do. And we did fall tillage last year and there was a lot of fall tillage done. We may not need to come in and do any spring tillage this year, but in some cases we may need to come out and make a finishing pass to sort of level it off, move it out a little bit. We need to think about what those soil conditions are at the time we do that. We don’t want it too wet. We just ball everything up and then we have big clumps out in the field and then our planter does not work efficiently. So we want to make sure we have good soil conditions when we go in to tillage. And then consequently, when we come back to plants, we also want good conditions, right? We don’t want excessively wet that maybe we’re compacting those sidewalls when we run that planter through that we have germination issues. We have rooting depth issues over the course of the season.”
Rieck-Hinz says there is information available to help farmers from Iowa State.
“I would encourage everybody to go Google this from Iowa State. Google digital ag planting at Iowa State. You will come up with a webpage that will give you a bunch of videos for planter resources. There’s a little picture of a planter and you can click on that and take you to a whole bunch of videos on planter metrics for crop scouting, checking your closing wheel alignment, using blocks to check your planter depth study all the things and then setting planter down for. So all the things we can do in advance of planning that we can actually do right in our shop.”
Rieck-Hinz covers several counties including Wright, Franklin, Hardin and Cerro Gordo.
