2024, animals, Farming Update, Gatherings, Uncategorized

Corn Sweat

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Today’s Farming Update comes from Ben

We’ve certainly gained some Growing Degree Units lately. The Pioneer Seed website shows 2450 GDU’s to date for Rochester. 2288 would be normal. Not as hot as last summer, and higher than 2022.
Sure, blame it on corn sweat…

From an article in USA Today, they state: “During the growing season, an acre of corn sweats off about 3,000 to 4,000 gallons of water a day, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
In Iowa, corn pumps out “a staggering 49 to 56 billion gallons of water into the atmosphere each day” throughout the state, the National Weather Service said. That can add 5 to 10 degrees to the dew point, a measure of the humidity in the air, on a hot summer day.”
Farming always gets the rap.

This year’s crop is pretty much what it is now; outside of weather conditions, not much we can do to either kill it or improve it, but we still need to manage what’s there, and continue to hope for the best, and plan for next year’s crop.

The corn and soybeans honestly look pretty good, and some scouting shows a decent crop, knock-on-wood. Hail or an early frost can still put a kink in that. And the prices are the lowest they’ve been in several years. So the best we can hope for is quantity. Which, of course, makes a surplus and drives the price down.

I went to turn on the chickens fan last week, and it ran for 4 seconds and quit. I banged on it and jiggled all the cords and it wouldn’t go. Dragged out the old barn fan that I used to use, and it ran for 4 seconds and quit. A minute later it would run for 4 seconds and quit again and that’s how that went. Neither of those really was much help then. I found an old box fan under the seats at a theater the next day and hung that up for the chickens.

The last couple nights I’ve been out digging up the oat fields. I wanted it done before it rained again. (We got an inch of rain Thursday night.) The grasses have gotten ahead of me and it didn’t work up as well as it might have had I done this two weeks ago. Foxtail mostly, comes on fast and thick and it doesn’t flow through the digger too well.


Kelly came with me one night. This tractor has the ‘buddy seat’. Kelly was my buddy for a change.


Man, so many bugs! I hate turning the lights on…sure glad I’m inside the cab!


I put the alternator put back on the swather, got it running again, and mowed the weeds along the road and over at the edge of some fields. I’ve backed it into the shed and will worry about it next July I guess. I got the generator put back on the ‘C’, but haven’t got it started again yet.
One day I had to drive to St. Charles, about 20 miles East of Rochester. I had lunch at Del’s Café and sat at the counter and had soup and a cheeseburger.


From St. Charles, I was head to Plainview about 20 miles to the North. I didn’t want to take the old, boring route up to Plainview, so I went through Whitewater State Park to Elba, and then that great gravel road through Whitewater’s lowlands, to Hwy 30, and through Beaver to Plainview. I had the road to myself, and I sighed contentedly several times. It was a great drive.


Back when I was ‘only’ farming, this was a good time of the year to take some day trips. Oats and straw are done. We’d be between hay crops, the crops are growing, and we’d drive to Wanamingo and look through the machinery dealerships or something fun like that. (machinery dealership lots; the farmers friend) Then we’d find lunch in a diner someplace.
We attended another wedding on Saturday. Kelly’s cousin. Second wedding for each, and they’ve been together 13 years, with 6 kids between the two of them. From Junior in high school to finishing college. The kids have pretty much grown up together, and they’re such a fun family and all get along, and it was a happy, fun, beautiful wedding. Bride and Groom read vows to each other, the kids read vows to both of them, and they gave all the kids their own rings. Everyone cried. It was a great time.


Here’s a photo of Luna trying to encourage a rooster to play more. They did chase each other back and forth a few times before Bailey, the peacekeeper, would break them up.



I’ve been listening to jazz lately. I have a subscription to Jazzradio.com, and Modern Big Band is my go-to.
https://youtu.be/hNbsnBZOwqE?si=IiyHaWbD2oDMslRY

HOW QUICK ARE YOU WITH THE CAR HORN?

29 thoughts on “Corn Sweat”

  3. i honk at asses who drive in the lane that dissapears or exits as they cut off the dim bulbs who let them in at the last second after they hold up the lane. they accused are always ready with the finger for me so they know they are in the wrong but dont like having it pointed out. i know it gets my blood boiling and i could choose to chill, but someone needs to say its wrong buddy and rhats my job
    that and a tap if youre caught looking at your phone while stopped when the light turns green
    not to quick in traffic but i drive so much that it does come up

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  4. I tried to use my horn one day recently – it really was dangerous what the idiot did – and couldn’t get it to beep – may have been in the wrong spot.

    Generally I think the idiot know what they did. I like to think most drivers are like me, and when I do something stupid, I didn’t really mean to. If someone doesn’t honk at me for it and they should have, I feel a bit guilty. If they honk, then I feel a little justified, like they deserved it. A little warped, maybe, but there you are.

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  5. I’m tempted to lay it on much more than I actually do. Like others, I often miss the exact spot which activates the horn, or don’t press it hard enough. Back in the day, it seemed like horns were much easier to operate. Maybe it’s good that it’s harder to honk them now. But on any typical 5-10 minute drive around town, I’ll see several driver incidents that could be considered honkworthy. Don’t even get me started about how bad drivers have become on the freeways in the Twin Cities! Sheesh! It’s as bad as Chicago was back in the ’90s.

    Chris in Owatonna

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  6. Mankato is a mess of road construction in many parts of town. This town is famous for its bad driving. If you used your horn, you would wear it out. The latest thing here is to not stay in your lane. Center left turn lanes are a mystery to a large percentage of the population. They seem to think it’s for weaving your left wheels in and out of. Driving over a car was in the left turn lane at an intersection signaling a left turn, but then right in front of me and a car in the right turn lane cut across us to make a right turn. A normal day driving over to see Sandra.

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  7. Rise and Shine, Baboons,

    I am in the Chris camp–I try to use the horn for only the most “honkworthy.” Several times when I have used it , it prevented a serious accident. It can be easy to want to use it as revenge and tell them “what for.”

    Lou’s caregiver drives him around now. Lou tells me that she is not a patient driver and swears at “driving perpetrators” quite often. She uses the horn, too.

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  8. I personally think if you drive defensively enough, which means leaving plenty of space around your car and anticipating what nearby drivers are likely to do means that most of the irregular maneuvers you see are distant enough that no horn is relevant.

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  9. I’ve driven around Manhattan and Brooklyn a few times and never honked my horn. I don’t believe an out of state license plated vehicle would have motivated anyone to get out of my way.

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  10. I’ve honked my horn exactly twice in all the years I’ve owned this car. The first time was about ten years ago. I was stopped at a traffic light, in the left turn lane on South Robert Street. When the left-turn-only, green arrow came on, the driver in front of me wasn’t paying attention and just sat there. I wanted to give him a gentle beep to alert him, but my horn stuck and blared a long continuous honk that must have lasted a full five seconds. I was mortified; this was clearly not what I had intended, but the damn thing wouldn’t stop.

    The second time was after I had asked my mechanic to fix it. I just wanted to test it to see if it was in fact fixed. Turns out it wasn’t, but this time I knew I could stop it manually.

    I agree, there are lots of bad drivers out there. Some are just clueless, nervous, or don’t know where they are going; others are distracted or inattentive. Then there are the aggressive assholes who have no regard for anyone else on the road, and seem to think that the rules of the road don’t apply to them. There’s another kind of bad driver, and my spouse falls in this category, who seem to think one of their jobs on the road is to police everyone else. Drives me nuts.

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  11. I love the photos in today’s blog a lot, Ben, especially the wedding photo, the one of you and Kelly in the tractor, and the one of Luna and the rooster.

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    1. Gosh, thanks- I can see we are both from Minnesota. 🙂
      Last night we attended ‘Wait Wait’. The Friday show will be used for bits when they’re on vacation. When he mentioned the VP nominee the crowd cheered for a solid minute or two. Mary Theisen-Lappen,
      Women’s Olympic weightlifting champion, was the guest.

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  14. I’ve gotten into the Minnesota habit of beeping the horn twice at Kelly when I leave home.

    In traffic I generally only do it if someone’s not paying attention at a light. I have done it a few times when I thought there was a possible accident, and once when I was actually in an accident. I was honking the horn, but it didn’t do any good, the guy still ran into me.

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  15. If I’m behind someone at a stoplight and they don’t notice it’s changed, I generally just let it pass. Maybe they just need to space out for a couple of minutes. I can deal with that.

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    3. Yes. The beginning of World War Two on September 1, 1939 from a German propaganda perspective as if Poland invaded Germany. I subscribe to a channel that gives English translation of this propaganda throughout the war.
      Many segments are titled Die Deutsche Wochenschau.
      “We were only defending ourselves!”
      It seems to me, little has changed in 85 years as to the remarkable willingness of humans to accept lying propaganda.

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