Friday, May 3, 2013

$402 worth of sweet corn seed

 This sack contains 42,000 sweet corn seeds, at a cost of $402.  Which on one hand seems really, really expensive, but on the other hand about 9/10ths of a cent per ear of corn.  Around here sweet corn varies in price depending on the point in the season.  It usually gets down to around 10 ears for a dollar in the high season, but I've seen it for $0.50/ear.   At 10 cents an ear, and figuring on some loss, this is about $3500 retail value of corn, and about 2 acres worth.  
level after 15 hours of pumping
The manure pumping continues, day 2. Click on the pictures for a bigger view.  It takes 8-10 hours of pumping to lower the water level 6-8".    I'm figuring they've got another 30 hours of pumping at this rate.
before pumping

3 comments:

SmithGang said...

that's a far stretch from my little $1.00 brown taped sack I bring home from our seed store. I ordered some Cherokee Eagle corn this year to try my hand at. 15 seeds came up out of the packet of maybe 30 seeds so I'll definitely save some ears for next year's planting.good luck on your planting, I know last year was a hard corn year. may have missed it what kind of manure are you draining? I have a rabbit hutch we clean under to fertilize our garden but can't imagine what the lagoon is full of. BTW congrats on the new farm.

Bruce King said...

It's 3 million gallons of cow manure slurry. Enough to put a couple of inches on every foot of crop ground.

Robin J. said...

I don't know much about manure ponds. Are you draining it for a reason and are you planning to keep using it as a manure pond? Do you just drain it on the farm land or spray it?