I made my way to Winchester today to sample in the Illinois River Bottoms. Harvest progress is about 90% on corn and 80% on soybeans. Soil was dry. Usually chisel plowed land is less than ideal to sample, but today it was kind of welcome because at least I could probe it without a hammer.
One field was planted to wheat. I wanted to take a picture, but I think it would have been difficult to see the what. Emergence was pretty good for as dry as it is. The are where I was working looked like it had around a quarter inch of rain in the last few days.
One time we had a weedeater fixed with an auger. It went through a bucket attaced at the end. The auger would pull the soil up into the bucket. It worked pretty well on super hard ground. But it was heavy, noisy, dirty, and got old quick on large acreage grid sampling. It was a last resort.
ReplyDelete