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!