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Northern Idaho | Here are some pics and info about the crops grown here in northern Idaho. I also threw in some scenery ones to show what my area looks like about 40 miles ESE of Moscow, ID 30 inches of rainfall at 3,000ft elevation.
Most farming around here is based around winter wheat (mostly soft white but a little hard red is grown) with two or three year rotations involving spring crops mostly legumes like lentils, peas, and garbanzo beans (chickpeas) and spring cereals soft white spring wheat a little DNS wheat along with barley. A few farmers also grow canola but its not a money crop, just a weed and disease control. We put in a little bit this spring, about 115 acres on some CRP going back into production. The typical rotation on our farm is winter wheat, spring wheat, then broadleaf (mostly lentils). We plant winter crops in September to get up a few inches tall before winter sets in and plant spring crops just as soon as we can get in the fields in the spring, anywhere from March to June.
First two pics are current showing the canola out of the ground and the lentils just emerging. Our spring wheat ranges from a few inches to almost a foot tall due to planting dates from March until late April and different elevations. Our winter wheat is looking to be a poor crop- probably 65-75 bu and wont be heading out for about a month yet. It didnt get a good start in the fall because of a dry September and then got hit by subzero weather with no snowcover in December, we have also had multiple frosts in the past week which are not helping speed growth up.
spring wheat
winter wheat going into winter two years ago
100% of the spring planted legumes and cereals from here stretching 40 miles NW are on ground that has had tillage because of various reasons mainly because of our cold wet springs
many farmers also do conventional tillage for winter wheat but we try not to, too much erosion potential over winter. Right now we are no-tilling almost all fall seeded crops which are half our acreage.
austrian winter peas variety "commons" last july, these did 2,200lb/a and had 6ft vines, we have done up to 3,000lb/a with these old black peas
harvesting with a pea bar on the combine
pea seed
large kabuli garbanzo beans in july, variety "sierra" we average about 1,100lb/a
lentils, our spring lentils are "pardina" spanish browns and the winter lentils are "mortons" small turkish reds. Our pardinas average 1400lb/a and mortons 1,700lb/a the pardinas did 2,300lb/a one year.
they ripen unevenly
very difficult to control weeds in, the white blooms in the draw are from dogfennel.
our ground is fairly rocky is spots, we hand pick the rocks after planting and we get truck loads of baseball to basketball sized basalt. This pic was taken AFTER hand picking, we then roll the legumes to smash these small rocks into the ground. The rock traps on the combines still pick up multiple rocks a day in harvest.
winter wheat nearing harvest in early August, we grow mostly Lambert and Tubbs SWW but have started doing some clearfield ORCF 102 in a few areas that have a little jointed goat grass. pictured is "Lambert" which has done well for us year after year since about 1998 when we replaced Madsen with it. We have had multiple 100+ bu crops of Lambert and our 10 year average was 85bu with it until the last two heavy snow years brought our farms average down. (the county average is 56 bu.)
spring wheat last july, all our spring wheat is the variety Nick which is a soft white spring yields about 55bu/a on average for us.
spring barley, we grew "baroness" for years but switched to spring wheat when the newer wet weather tolerant wheats came out a few years ago. just shy of 2 tons/acre is normal for spring barley here.
canola
it blooms bright yellow for those that dont know
ready for harvest, this field did 900lb/a which wasnt enough to cover the cost of expenses, we used to grow winter rapeseed planted onto summerfallow in late July and harvest the following July, it would do up to 2,500lb/a and be up to 7ft high
bluegrass seed is grown around here, it grows for 6-8 years in a row burned every fall, swathed and harvested in July before the annual crops. The bottom fell out of the grass seed market with the housing crisis.
now for some random pics and scenery ones
this first one was back in 2005 on one of our fields, 149 acres did 103bu/a Lambert winter wheat
We get lots of snow here locally, much more than the palouse and camas prairie. It varies alot by elevation but our home place at 3,100ft had 128 consecutive days of snowcover on the level with a total of 123 inches of snowfall in 07-08 and 126 consecutive days of snowcover on the level with 109 inches of snowfall in 08-09. This past winter was really mild due to el nino and only had a maximum snow depth of 10 inches on the fields for a few weeks.
not much drifting here, this is about as much drifting there is
enjoy! more pics of this years spring work coming soon in the machinery section
I would be happy to answer any questions or post more pics on request.
Edited by NIF 5/26/2010 21:12
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Crop and scenery PICS north Idaho
