Rients mixes farm, volunteer commitments

GRAYMONT, Ill. — Farmers not only produce the world’s food, feed and fiber, but they are also active in their communities, serving on township, school, church and other boards and community groups, and are often the first in line to volunteer wherever help is needed.

Aaron Rients of Graymont wrapped up his corn and soybean harvest the third week of October and has switched gears to other on-farm and volunteer duties.

He was removing some trees from a fence line with his skid steer at one of the fields he farms when we caught up with him on the morning of Oct. 29 before moving on to a project at the Livingston County Humane Society. He has also served on the Central States Threshermen’s Reunion board for over a decade.

The fieldwork is on hold waiting for a rain to soften the ground up a bit.

“If not, the weather looks good and we have plenty of time in November if I want to go out even if we don’t get rain and get some chisel plowing done. We have all of our soybean stubble disked,” Rients said.

He doesn’t apply fall anhydrous.

“I have FS custom apply in the spring. I know that there’s always risk if you can’t get the anhydrous on in the spring, but there’s so many people who do the fall,” Rients noted.

“Those big tractors that they’ve got and using a 24- or 26-row applicator bars, they can just go across it so fast. Unless it’s a really wet spring, I haven’t had any problem with that, and I don’t have to spend the money on N-Serve.”

Rients was happy with corn yields.

“We did have a few places that had some green snap, so, obviously, they weren’t as good.

“But for no more rain that we had, we were happy with the corn yields. I was hoping for a little better soybean yield with the later rain and I had late maturity beans, but it was still good. I just hoped for just a little better,” he said.

As the fieldwork wraps up, Rients, an LG Seeds and Golden Harvest seed dealer, is now transitioning to his seed sales business.