Grade me. Pass/ Fail / Crazy SOB.

This year is not making me feel like a good farmer.

Situation: This field had cereal rye aerially applied last Sept in standing corn  for cover crop and had a pretty good stand. Thin in some areas, but pretty thick over the balance of the field. The "plan" was to spray my residuals for soybeans a week ahead of planting (check) to stunt the rye, plant into the rye green (check), and then terminate the rye as soon as I finished sidedressing the corn of the rest of the farm (fail).

Discussion sessions with my father have been "dynamic" to say the least.

With all the rain, I did not get finished with my NH3 and have been out of the fields for a couple weeks with the wet weather. During this time the rye started to mature. Yesterday I had a brief window to do something before an expected 2" of rain over night.

So I was going through my head what options I had.

1) leave the rye stand, let it mature and harvest for my own cover crop seed. An involuntary inter-cropping if you will, as the beans could be harvested later.  BUT! I will be gone for a wedding/ family vacation right when the rye would be ready to harvest. Plus, I don't have the storage with aeration for the seed.

2) leave the rye stand, spray it with glyphosate, and wait for harvest. BUT! My concern was if the rye does not break down, I would have trouble feeding all the fodder through at bean harvest. And I am not sure if there would be too much rye in the soybean samples.

3) run a 15' flail chopper through over the beans to chop the rye, and spray glyphosate in the afternoon. BUT! This field has some wet spots and running the chopper would add a lot of compaction / traffic.

4) roll the rye with my unverferth roller on a tractor set up on 120" which would follow my controlled traffic lines. Spray with glyphosate in the afternoon.

I ended up choosing option number four......for better or worse. I know I feel like a crazy SOB right now.

Am I?

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