Deep Plowing

the Missouri River has been wreaking havoc across Northwest Missouri blowing out levees and dumping sand and debris across some of the richest farmland in the world even with waters receding many farmers are struggling to see a way forward this sounds all too familiar to farmers down river who saw the same thing happen to their fields 26 years ago bill Mizzou farms and the river bottoms east of Hermann well I still don't sleep in the thunderstorm it since 1993 I mean it it was it was just a devastating thing and it ran through here for a month over two months and at that point you're just you just don't hardly know what to do I mean it's just it's a depression that that is undescribable because you don't feel like there's anybody there that you can turn to for advice or are how do you explain this to your banker how do you how do you come up with a plan to put a crop back in they were working awful hard at taking land out of production and away from the farmers and and I personally grew up here lived here farmed this all my life and I really would like for my kids and my grandkids to be able to farm and I just refused to let somebody come and buy my land for nothing and turn it in to something unusable some local farmers thought that there must be other options to keep the farmland alive rather than give up on the river bottoms in 93 a lot of people plowed with deep plows six-foot plows some plowed with disk plows they'll you can you can turn over two foot of sand and maybe catch a little dirt and I a lot of my neighbors did some of that and I did a little that on some of my thinner sand and then we got to the point where we just couldn't do anything what's with this other land and and I was talking to a contractor friend of mine and he's he said well he had talked to an old guy one time and said the only way he had ever seen anybody save a piece of ground like that is with a track hoe and so we took $5,000 and let him dig till that $5,000 was up and then grew a crop on it and we were pretty satisfied with that but after that we bought a bigger track hoe with a bigger bucket because it just does a lot better job of mixing the dirt find the biggest bucket you can find because it does the best job of mixing and it goes the fastest you can get the most acres an hour with it and big equipment is cheaper than little equipment it just costs more to fix it but you know like at the end of the day you get way more acres done you get a way bigger job better job of mixing the dirt and sand and you'll end up with a with a lot higher quality field when you get after the original hole you can you go down to the bottom of the hole and you get into the black dirt and you dig the black dirt and you roll the bucket and the sand starts rolling off of the bucket immediately back into the end of the spot you just dug out of and or where you're going to put the dirt and then by the time you make that motion and turn the bucket back over it's mixed that good dirt and the sand together in that one motion so that makes it a lot faster whereas once you break eight feet then you get into more of a of a to dig situation and so your time gets long it takes more time and it's kind of coming it's going to vary but like I said if you can get six feet or less you can make you can do a lot of digging in a day's time and it doesn't seem like much until you've gone away for two days and come back and and look at what the man's done it's a lot back in 2016 Bill's track Oh didn't have a whole lot of work going on so he asked me if I would like to do some dirt work because he was right there in the area you know I never thought I'd be able to turn 11 to 15 feet of sand under and make it product and make the productive again but you can because I've seen it we we've had ground go from zero to 180 bushel corn eight feet are less sand on it it's going to cost somewhere between two and three thousand dollars an acre and that should if that's about what I think with my equipment and that low that high left a level it is costing us to put it back into production you know costs going to vary depends on what how you know what they charge you or what what kind of how fancy of equipment you buy and how many acres are going to do with it I mean we've like say we've done five hundred acres but these two pieces of equipment and the more I do the more excited I get about it I mean think about it if you have a piece of ground that can grow 15 bushel beans versus 70 bushel beans it doesn't take too long to get your 2500 back Plus once it's done unlike a pivot you don't have to put fuel and maintenance in it once it's done it's done take a look at it assess what you have and then kind of go from what you think you where you want to be in five years with it and where you want to be in 10 years with it it's it's gonna be it's not going to be an overnight process it's gonna take some time so I think what you need to do is kind of look at the future what you where you think you want to be and you want to bring this ground back in production and you have some kids or grandkids that want to farm well you know if you can bring that ground back in production that's great giving up is absolutely the wrong thing to do because there's no way out from that [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Missouri Farm Bureau

Views: 11,416

Rating: 4.8461537 out of 5

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Id: jNeY2SN1p9A

Length: 6min 17sec (377 seconds)

Published: Fri May 03 2019