Sowing corn in Chinchón

Our follower and friend Miguel Ángel sent us some pictures about sowing corn on the geog of the Tajuña river (in Chinchón)... thank you very much. In our area nobody sows corn, so we don't have any knowledge about this crop... we'll try to speak a little about that explaining his comments. As he told us, he had to sow it again because wild boars had eaten it, so the fallow, which you can see in the pictures, isn't ideal for that. An important point is the birth of corn, so the weather must be appropriate if we don't want to have problems: it needs heat and moisture to grow in a week. If these conditions aren't satisfied here, corn will grow a month later and we may lost a lot of plants.

The seed drill used is a Monosem NG of four rows and the tractor employed is a John Deere 6200. This work is quick and the air seeder works without problems at 5.5 km/h. Corn is not very heavy so the turbine can aspire it easily. It is planted at a row spacing of 73 cm (it can be at 50, 70 or 80 cm in other areas), at 16 cm seed spacing and at 5 cm depth. He used about 80,000 and 90,000 seeds per hectare (if the corn is to silage, farmer can use to 120,000 units).

Regarding the seed used is of Pioneer brand and their varieties are the 1574 and 1758 (he used other varieties like w86, p66, d58 and y74 in other times). They are sold in bag of 50,000 seeds. He used 40kg/ha of microgranular fertilizer too which is fixed together with seed by the seed drill in the sowing process.

You can see a video from his YouTube channel.

Versión en español.

Joaquín y Herminio Tribaldos (Twins' Farm)