I can’t believe how fast this internship has flown by! It was only yesterday I was learning about irrigation management and how to identify different forage species. Although my internship is coming to an end, I can’t thank my co-workers and advisors enough for the great memories and the abundance of knowledge I will be able to take with me as I start my junior year in college. Not only that, but I will be able to walk away with some extra guidance and professional experience as I look forward to continue my education and get my masters in teaching.

As for my concluding up date for my internship, this week we have been catching up and getting everything finalized. We finally were able to finish harvesting our plots and now have all the samples in the dryer and are waiting for the results on those. In addition to harvesting, we have finished putting all the T posts up in the field, we have cut everything down in the field, and are working on final internship things. The biggest accomplishment that has happened this week was getting harvesting done and awaiting results. Hopefully when I present in Corvallis I will be able to display my findings with late season planting under a common irrigation regime.

Below you will find some final pictures I took along this week that I thought would be worth sharing. Thanks again for all who followed my blog and hope you learned lots!

Well ladies and gentlemen we are finally harvesting our plots! After many days of waiting, this is the day I have been looking forward to the longest. Before we started harvesting today, we spent some time waiting for the plants to not be too wet to cut. So in the mean time we continued to build our very tall fence and got halfway done with the field.

Once we felt that the plants were dry enough to harvest, we began to cut the plots on irrigation line two. But cutting wasn’t the only thing we needed to for each plots. First we visually analyzed the each plot area and determined weed percentage. Next, we measured the height of the plant and harvested that plot. After we harvested that plot, we then put the samples in black bags and measure the weight of the plot area. Finally, once we had weighed the bag, we lined them in sections so we could take handfuls of the plant and dry it in a paper bag for further analysis.

With as many steps that we had to accomplish, we were only able to finish one section of the four. But within that section was 20 annual plants that we had to repeat these steps with. As you can tell we were pretty busy. However, we plan on finishing this process tomorrow and have your ranch manager harvest and lay the rest of the field down so it can be bailed.

The ultimate goal in this harvesting process is to figure out which crop to plant in late season seeding, in a abnormal weather year. How I plan on determining that answer is by calculating the per tonnage and using my analysis and observation of the plant over the summer to determine the best. In addition,  I will also determine which plants are economically the best and suggestions as to which crop to plant for a variety of different situations.

But enough about the technical stuff, throughout this post and towards the bottom you will find tons of pictures that I took today that summarizes harvesting.

During this week we have put a majority of our effort into putting our 8-foot-tall fence that will soon surround our field. Which, may I add, is way taller than me. In addition, due to the fences height it requires me to jump, stand on my toes, and help wrestle 14-foot wood posts into the ground that much more difficult. But other than the struggles of a short person, we all have discovered how much effort it takes to put in 14-foot wood posts. Not only that, but the art of slamming down 10-foot T posts into the ground. All in all, we can lift our heads and say that we have out almost half of the fence up! Here is an idea as to how tall our fence is:

Along with Irrigation, we have been able to play with irrigation! For this week’s irrigation we decided to crank the pump up to 57 PSI to see what kind of pressure we would get at our sprinkler heads and if we would get rid of our rain shadow. With much analysis we got three lines up to 26 PSI and we finally got the rain shadow to disappear! Furthermore, we also concluded that we need to create a swing pipe for each valve opener to also decrease length, increase PSI pressure, and to increase efficiency.

We were reassured by this idea, when we turned off 2 sprinklers on one side and tested the PSI. Alone with just 2 sprinklers off, we were able to increase the PSI by 2! Can you imagine if we took away 19 sprinkler heads and eliminated that extra length? Our system would benefit hugely and we wouldn’t have to irrigate for as long!

Although this week has consisted of mostly hard labor, it’s been so much fun working with my co-workers and getting motivation from them in all their corky ways. I can’t believe that in two weeks I will be done, but hey we still got harvesting to do! Till next week!

This week we have dove in head first into the fencing phase of our internship. Due to our hungry four legged creatures that like to play in our fields, it was time to take action. Our plan originally was  to start building our 8 foot high fence this week, but it wouldn’t be interesting if things went to plan.

So instead of starting to build our new fence, we started pulling the old to put in the new. For the past 50 plus years there was a hog wire and barbwire fence that stood 4 feet high. This fence had conveniently stood next to the ditched and slowly became apart of the bank due to lack of matiness. Our task was to removed this old fence, T post, wire clips, and all. However, it didn’t just stop there.

Once we got all the fencing material removed, with assistance of heavy machinery and hard labor, we needed to use our sickle bar mower to clear the area so we can see where we would like to put the fence. But weeds, rose bushes, and all sorts of grasses wasn’t all what we uncovered. When we had got the ditch looking nice, we found an area that needed improvement pronto! With the help with other employee on the station, we were able to make the improvements needed and get the water flowing better.

All in all this week I have shed a lot of sweat and some drops of blood here and there. However, with all the sweat and blood, I can say I have by far made an impact on the station that is outside my internship, and I can’t complain about that. But the big thing I want to stress, is it is important to maintain fences and ditches. Although its not the greatest job, nor the finest, it can impact your operation significantly and can help you avoid situations with neighboring farmers.

This week we have learned a lot about our irrigation. One, we are not getting 37 PSI at our sprinkler heads and two, in order to get 37 PSI at our sprinkler heads we need to crank up the PSI and hertz at the pump and only keep a couple of the stations irrigation lines on. But before I get into how we need to fix it, let me first tell you how we got to this conclusion.

Throughout the summer we have been trying to figure out why our sprinkler heads have not been shooting out as far as they need to be. We had many hypothesis and observations, but never actually knew what our PSI was at our sprinkler heads. So what we decided to do is make a pressure gauge so we could see what we were shooting out of our sprinklers. After testing 10 sprinklers of each row, we concluded that we were only getting 15-20 PSI while operating. That is 17-22 PSI below what we should be at.

But why is this? Well there is a couple reasons why. One from the pump to our sprinkler heads, the water makes eight 90 degree turns till it gets to our sprinkler heads. Second, we condense down from a 6 inch aluminum pipe to a 3 inch aluminum pipe. That alone can loose 3-5 PSI from condensing. This doesn’t also add that each of our lines have 38 sprinkler heads and produce 0.618 GPM per line.

So what do we do? Well first off we need to increase the PSI and hertz at the pump. Second we need to be hogs and turn off some other lines on the station. However, that isn’t realistic in a non-experiment situation, so ideally what we will have to do is increase the PSI and pressure as much as we can and irrigate in two days. Hopefully then we will get the water pressure we need and the results we are hoping for.

Growing is just an understatement of what are plants are doing. They are sky rocketing! All of our annuals are doing amazing! Most of them grew up 4-5 inches in just a week. Thanks to our early week rain and hot weekend.

Although annuals are doing awesome, our perennials aren’t doing the best, however this was to be expected. All of our perennials have growth, but none are even above five inches tall. The plants that are doing the worst are perennial cool-season grasses, which was surprising. All in all, I was reassured that this is very typical for first year perennials and that next year they will be growing victoriously!

Exciting news to add, we are starting to harvest next week! Our annual brassicas are starting to bulb out, so we hoping to get one more irrigation set on them before the weekend and look forward to harvesting them to calculate tonnage.

Along with identifying our plants during our monitoring state, it was hard to not avoid looking at all the weeds that were in the field. Previous to our experiment, the ground was made up of prostrate pig weed, red root pig weed, and lamb’s quarters. So for this week our main task is to spray like crazy and go on a mass killing spree of weeds. Since a good majority of our plants are grasses, we are able to spray with 2-4-D. 2-4-D is a spray chemical that kills all broad leaf plants, such as our weeds, and does not kill our grasses. However, the difficult part about spraying with 2-4-D is we need to avoid all our brassicas and plants that are broad leaf. Instead of spraying 2-4-D on brassicas and broad leaf plants, we need to go through and hand weed instead so we don’t kill the plant. There are sprays that just take care of grasses in brassicas and broad leaf’s, but most of our weeds are broad leaf plants. Here’s a couple of pictures of what we have had to deal with and all the weeds in our field.

As you can see we have a weed problem. However, from what I have been told and found, is this is pretty typical for a field that use to be made up of weeds and has not been touched. Most of the weeds, if they go to seed, can produce 1,000 of seeds per plant! No wonder they are hard to get rid of! Also, multiple applications are much necessary for these type of situations, but make sure you switch around with chemicals, that way the weeds don’t get immune to them. This will be our third time spraying these weeds and we probably won’t kill them all!

Weeding is just as important as the planting of the seeds. The biggest lesson I have learn this week is weeding should not be neglected and always put a cover crop down if you aren’t using a field, that way you don’t have weeds that take over. Here is some of us after shots of the dead weeds we killer this week.

Man our plants have been growing a ton since we first planted them. On Tuesday we were able to walk around the plots in between irrigation and measure and take pictures of what our plants are looking like. A majority of our annuals, such as wheat and barley, are past a foot tall! However, as for our perennials, they are moving slow in the growing process. Most of the perennials were below six inches, but on the bright side, all of our plants germinated and are at some length. One of the things that really surprised me was how weak and spotty blue bunch grass, Idaho fescue, and timothy were doing. Why this surprised me, because in a past internship I analyzed these forages and saw them ravishing even in the heat of summer and no water. Another thing that surprised me was how well the peas and triticale were doing compared to all the other plants. These two plants alone triple the height as to what other plants in our plot were. One thing is for sure though, is it is very important to seed on time and know what conditions and climates plants need.

As most of you know, calculating water head can be measured all sorts of ways. However, for our case I was able to learn how our experiment station measures water head. At the head gate we have a measuring device that has two sides to it with a gate that is set at two and a half or five at all times. On either sides of the gate are two measurement sticks in a tenth of an inch that you can refer to as how high the water is. In order to calculate water head, you take both those numbers and refer to table where you will follow down to where both numbers meet. At that meeting point is what your CFS is currently in the ditch. Benefits to using submerged orifice measuring device in your ditch, allows you to run specifics as to how much water you are using, makes neighboring water rights users happier, and gives you the ability to be specific with calculations when the water master asks what you are pulling down your ditch and why you may need water of drought years.

I just wanted to throw out a quick reminder how important it is to check your pump during irrigation and make sure it is taken care of properly. Today we had the packing come completely out to the pump and we had to do an emergency shut down till we could make repairs. We were shut down for four hours of irrigation, which can be a lot in the long and short term. The packing on our pump allows for water not to gush out of the pump, but it also self-cools it. This means that it is important to have a little water coming out to cool the pump, but too much and have serious damage on the pump and can put you out of irrigation for the whole season. So make sure you maintain your pump and know the specifics as to what it needs and what are red flags.