Soil amendment and the fidgety farmer 

Spring is in the air? 

The prairie dogs are awake and making their presence known. As I drive to work, I look out to the field and see them standing on their back legs giving me a chin scratch as if to say, “Have a great day, we’ll work on multiplying ourselves and digging more holes in the fields”. 

It is amazing that we are barely coming into the month of March and it looks so much like spring already. The air is warming up and it feels like snow might be done for the year. There was a good amount of snowfall in the mountains. I’m hoping it will be a slow warming year and the runoff will be steady and extend well into the summer. 

The Pine River Indian Irrigation Project is expecting a late April water turn on. Hopefully this means that we aren’t just letting a bunch of water run downstream that could have been turned into the laterals. If the year warms up earlier, perhaps the expected turn-on date should be amended to capture much of melting snow and get a jump on agriculture productivity … just my thoughts. 

My past few years of working the farm has given me a lot of data to develop best practices, while zeroing in on dates of when to execute tasks. Metrics are important. For me, it helps to have a soil analysis done each year to gauge changes in the ground from the previous year’s activities. Having this done also helps to dial in an effective fertilizer mix for the current year. 

The winter thaw usually has an impact on the soil and it is a good idea to know what you are dealing with at the start of the year. Aeration may be necessary to break up hard pan, tough ground, and give the roots some room. “Piercing” or “Punching” the ground also creates small cups that could help hold onto water and fertilizer and prevents both from just running down the field and into the discharge ditches. 

 A book can be your best friend 

The one thing I recommend for the 2024 season, if you don’t have one, is keep a small book of highlights for your operation this year. I use a small book to be the centralized place to summarize what I do on a regular basis. This can be as detailed as you want, but the idea is that it contains information to look back upon through the year and over the next few years. It is a source of reference. It should contain your contact information for many different types of people: suppliers, clients, customers, and people who help you in your operation. It should have basic information for orders, mixes, or compositions that you use on an annual basis (think fertilizers, seed mixes, etc.). It should have prices you paid for large items and prices you charge for your products and services. 

This book can be a running journal of weekly activity so that you can compare year to year to really dial in a cadence for doing things in the future. Tracking the information in this book over the past three years has really helped me out.  

Sko-Farm-Den 

It’s nice to see the sun come up a little earlier and stay up a little longer each day. Temperatures are also becoming tolerable for a fidgety farmer to want to linger around a little longer in the outdoors. It’s tempting to want to start throwing out seed and fertilizer. This is a good time to walk around the machinery and look at what needs maintenance. Tires will need air, oil will need some changing, and I’m hoping we can pinpoint that darn hydraulic leak on the Kubota sometime this year. 

Even the grass looks like it is already trying to free flow chlorophyll and start greening up. Not sure if this is a good thing or not. I know temperature-wise; the grass is not ready to start waking up, but this is the way it’s heading. 

My thoughts turn toward my fellow farmers. I hope that we all have a good strong harvest this year. I hope that the snow melts nice and slow and that the rivers fill steady with water through the year. I hope that the creator blesses us with hydration and rain through the spring and summer. I hope that we can help each other share knowledge and learned practices. I hope that we all become a stronger farming and ranching community this year and that the entire community works together to find more ways to revitalize our agricultural practices. I especially hope that we find ways to keep our youth involved in wanting to follow in the tracks that we are trying to walk from our fathers and grandfathers. 

The farm season is about to start, and the anticipation of 2024 is already here.