Webel Farms is a diversified grain and livestock operation located near Perry in Pike and Brown Counties in West-Central Illinois. Three Generations work together to make the farm a family venture- Rick Webel, along with father Richard and sons Joe and Jon Webel, operates a cow/calf operation with around 60 cows and raises swine in confinement buildings. Our crop rotation includes corn and soybeans, with smaller acreage of wheat and clover hay each year.

We purchased Farm Trac, version 8.46, in December of 2002, and have used it for the 2003 crop season. We are very pleased with the user-friendly features that allow us to track inputs, equipment usage, and crop yields. Herbicide and soil-sample recordkeeping was our initial purpose of looking for a software program to track our records.

With pork production being our primary enterprise, nutrient management has become a major focus on our farm. We discovered that Farm Works gave us the ability to track our manure application on our crop fields, and archive those applications to show compliance with our manure management plan. We set up our 2250 gallon Clay manure wagon as a distributor, and set up the different types of nutrient (from finisher, grower, or weaner buildings) under fertilizer in the supplies tab. The nutrient content is very different from the weaner building, which houses pigs from two to six weeks, and has a great deal of wash-water, compared to the finisher buildings which have the most concentrated nutrients. More gallons can be applied of nutrient from weaner buildings than from finisher buildings per acre to our fields, and some soil types respond better to more concentrated nutrients.

Farm Works software has allowed us to track the nutrient application date, type, and destination over the past year in terms of number of loads or gallons. This information will be used in the coming years to plan our manure nutrient applications, commercial fertilizer and lime use, and in general terms, determine the added yield benefit to manure as a crop fertilizer. Our manure management plan makes it necessary to track manure applications, and Farm Trac makes it easy to do!

For more information on our operation, please visit www.webelfarms.com, or feel free to contact Joe Webel at 217-621-7362, or at Joe@webelfarms.com.