Air support called in for South Dakota wheat

LEE LUBBERS – GREGORY, SOUTH DAKOTA

Lee Lubbers of Gregory, South Dakota, grew up in the farming tradition, and remembers well using leftover scholarship money as the down payment for his first tractor and rent for 200 acres. Today, he farms more than 17,000 acres of dryland soybeans, corn, and wheat. Lubbers says one of the most important things to him is to always be learning and challenging himself to build an operation and a legacy that the next generation can be proud of.

We are in the home stretch. We were deathly dry and cold up until late April, then we received two good rains. We are extremely blessed to get what we did, but it made for a later start. For the last two-plus weeks, we've been running flat-out planting, spraying, and seeding.

It's been a super hard push and luckily, we are getting close to the end of planting corn and seeding soybeans. We're hoping to beat the rain this weekend. We have also needed to run more planes this year to get our wheat sprayed due to having too many windy days and the rain from earlier this month. To stay on track, we decided to hit our first pass on winter wheat from the air.

We had the opportunity to trial a new Fendt Momentum planter this week and ran several of comparisons against our current planters. Tune in to XtremeAg.farm this season as we will be talking about the planter and the results of our trials.

• WATCH MORE: A closer look at the Fendt Momentum planter

We've also been delivering a large corn contract to an ethanol plant and will start delivering soybeans to a processor next week. Looking forward to having crops in the ground and spending some time with family. Stay safe everyone.

CHAD HENDERSON – MADISON, ALABAMA

Chad Henderson is part of a fifth-generation farming operation in Madison, Alabama. Henderson Farms operates over 8,000 acres of dryland and irrigated corn, dryland soybeans, wheat, and dryland and irrigated double-crop soybeans. When not farming, Chad can be found carrying on another proud family tradition as a drag racer for Henderson Racing.

Two weeks ago, I would have said we were extremely dry. The irrigation schedule was running two weeks ahead of usual, and our corn was showing signs of heat stress. Then a week ago we received 6 inches of rain during the week. Now we're very wet again.

Our wheat would have been ready to cut this week if we had missed the rain, but the moisture set us back 5-7 days. We hope to start cutting wheat later this week if the weather cooperates.

Our planters are parked again waiting for the fields to dry up so we can finish bean planting. Now that we have good moisture, when the ground allows us to get on it, we'll have them knocked out quickly.

Our corn is anywhere from V3-V8 right now and our corn top dress is halfway done.

XtremeAg.farm is a team of the nation's top producers who have come together to share their experience, expertise, knowledge, and farming practices with other farmers. Members get access to exclusive content from the team as well as one-on-one support for their own farming operation. Visit XtremeAg.farm for more information.