Will Fall Tillage Be On Hold Until Spring?
Going out to the farm over the weekend I did see a couple farmers harvesting corn. There is not a lot of corn still in the field and even though it was cold farmers were going after the corn. A little snow on the ground will not cause a problem unless you get too much in the combine and it melts and plugs up the sieves. A lot of tillage has been done but there is still a lot left, plus, manure and fertilizer applications. However, the ground is now frozen
Driving back from Kansas City on Friday it seemed more like Christmas than a couple weeks from Thanksgiving. Temperatures were in the twenties, the wind was blowing from the northwest and it was snowing! It did not take long for two or three inches of frost to move into the ground with night time temperatures around 10 degrees.
Tom Hoverstad who is a scientist at the Southern Research and Outreach Center at Waseca said it would be very unusual to see the ground freeze up until spring this early in November. In fact we saw the same weather early last November. The ground froze too hard for tillage early in November and later in November and early December we enjoyed much warmer temperatures than normal,. Last fall we did get all the fall tillage, manure and fertilizer applications done!