A month ago, the question was if March was going to go out as a lion or lamb. It did not take long to find out and observe the closing cliff hanger. Would it be: a day bringing up cold or warm temperature, sixty degrees or below freezing; would it be sunny, cloudy, or foggy; would it be dry, rain lightly, rain heavily, hail or snow; of the worst which would include heavy storms including tornados which would create major damage to portions of the state? By that evening we saw all of those things play out across sections of the state. Topping the weather event in eastern was a very photogenic EF-2 to an EF-4 tornado in southeast Iowa near the towns of Ollie and Ottumwa. This twister was tracked by storm chasers who get their adrenalin flowing chasing predicted hot zones of turbulent weather in hopes to getting close to a storm during daylight hours and getting a lengthy footage of a monster twister tail. If you have not watched the five to ten-minute videos of the tornado of the Ollie and you like to watch nature in her most violent form you need to do so. Unluckily, getting to see this and other tornados which roamed the eastern portion of the state also meant damaged towns, businesses, houses and farmsteads, totally disrupting and totally changing people’s lives. Whatever they had been doing or planning for activities for their next months will change to figuring out their next step in rebuilding and picking up the strewn debris. Prayers for them.
I guess I speak from experience after an F-2 hit our and other farms the afternoon of 7-12-1971. It clobbered a few farms and was known as the Mitchell County twister. I got the chance to see it up real close and personal as I was caught up in it and ended up hanging onto a fence post to keep from blowing away. I did get to see that hogs and cattle can fly. It hit the Kittleson potato growing site and destroyed their warehouse and office. Paperwork and canceled checks were found the next days out in eastern Wisconsin. It was an isolated storm that happened in a small area on an otherwise calm day. A week earlier there were greenish storm clouds that came over our place where several small funnels were dangling down but never touched down. However, swirl marks could be found in the fields below.
This is the Final Four Weekend. A large contingent of sports fans get to watch their local high school or college teams compete locally during the season attending games in person of on TV. We can always hope they are competitive and grow as individuals during the season and get to build memories that will last a lifetime. In most seasons their idyllic storied season ends in defeat. This afternoon the lady team from the Univ of Iowa gets to compete on the largest stage of the season. They actually out played the #1 and undefeated the past national champs and undefeated South Carolina team which out-heighted them with players who measured 6’7”, 6’5”, 6”4, 6’3” and so on… At times the game looked more like wrestle-mania. Let’s hope they can end on a high note. It seems unreal to have a lady basketball player like Ms. Clark from Iowa getting so much publicity. Only Ashley Joens from ISU and Maddy Poppy from Clarksville have done it in recent years.
The 2023 Growing Season
After the last half of the 2020 growing season and thru the 2021 and 2022 droughts it seems strange to see rain again. Those dry months of waiting for rain over many sections of the state where the forecasts often included rain only to see the clouds diverted by some strange forces don’t seem to have been etched in our minds like the droughts of 1977, 1983, 1988 and 2012 as by some miracles we have ended up with decent yields. Was it by luck, heavier soils, lots of dew, higher CO2 levels due to the western wild fires, rain arriving just before the crops died or improved corn varieties due to all of them be screened at research stations at sites where corn has to be raised with irrigation. What can we expect in the coming season? We would all like to be planting by the second or third week on April, but that is not likely to happen as many parts of northern Iowa still has decent depths of snow in the ditches.
A number of us listen to meteorologist Simon Atkins who sends out his forecasts late on Monday and Thursday each week. Now most meteorologists never make predictions that vary much from predicting rainfall being a bit more or bit less than normal, or temperatures a few degrees warmer of cooler than normal. Simon is different in that he will often go way out on a limb making very wild prediction, but he actually tracks many more cycles due to solar and planetary than do his colleagues. Who else predicted the twelve or thirteen atmospheric rivers that would dump on California and the rest of the Pacific NW? I talked to a colleague from Logan, Utah yesterday and he said they local ski resorts were reporting receiving 800 inches of snow so far this winter.
Simon carefully notes that the largest influencing thing over our weather is our local sun and what it has been doing. Our sun cycles on a 12 to 13-year basis. Sun cycle #24 ended and cycle #25. Solar storm activity dies out at the end of a cycle and becomes very active at the start of a new cycle. His latest observation was that we have had more major solar flares during the first three months of 2023 than we had during all of 2022. Now those solar flares can jump as much as 150,000 miles from the sun’s surface. Their accompanying bombardment of the earth’s atmosphere and semi-molten core respond to the energy pulses. He is saying the weather will continue to very erratic most of the year with extremes of many types. All we can do as crop producers is be ready with seed, equipment, supplies and fuel when the ground gets ready and is dry enough. As the harvest was being completed last year I had a few farmers comment that working the ground when it was too wet lowered their corn yields more than did the lack of rain.
Biology in Today’s Agriculture
It is always interesting to note how and when paradigm shifts occur and how major was or is the shift. When I was taking classes at ISU in the Ag sciences soil fertility was explained only in chemical terms. NPK based fertilization was the rule and not much else mattered. Those three minerals were the only important ones we had to learn about or influenced how well or how poorly our crops fared. And it was believed that the only method of increasing yields was to apply more inputs. There was only one soil biology class offered at that time and that professor was considered a bit off in his thinking and teachings. That small mindedness was also present at the national level at national conferences and seminars as it was believed that the dry forms of each minerals could be applied to the soil and magically picked up in the solid form making their way into the plants. Did those plants have mouths or was something else happening to make the conversion from the solid form to the liquid form. The old beliefs did not answer the new questions.
The theory on paradigm shifts is that the first people to develop and extol new thoughts or ideas are believed to be crazy. Then more people begin to read or hear about the new ideas or way of thinking and it begins to answer questions they have had. In the next sequence the new ideas become accepted by the populace and are taught or used in schools, industry or everyday life. Those individuals who continue to denigrate the new ideas become marginalized and left in the trash dump of history. No one likes fuddy duddies. And that has happened in our recent past as soil fertility thinking has changed dramatically as agricultural thinking has evolved to where we now are learning so much about how important biology and soil microbes are responsible to producing crops, and to our health as many of those same microbes inhabit our body and influence so many factors.
As proof of this shift just pick up any farm publication and see how many companies are competing for space in your 2023 products-to-use portfolio. In the future we may see current industry behemoths become the new dinosaurs while new and more agile companies become more important in providing new products. The exception is likely to be in the herbicide industry where new compounds have to be developed in the labs and methodical steps of discovery and product testing need to be done. Almost every week I hear about or get questioned about a new product a grower is wondering about. EPA shifted their thinking and regulatory process a few years ago. The FIFRA act and areas of registration had the category called Bio Stimulants, added since the sometimes-arduous testing of these testing and licensing new products did not fit. The newer and more nimble companies did not have the funds, personnel staff, and geographical reach as did chemical-based companies and did not affect human health as did products from companies producing chemical products.
Rhizophagy in the News
I am not sure if I have covered this topic before. There are many new biological products to choose from to use in the 2023 season. How about finding a newly discovered, somewhat strange process occurring in the soil? That can make news. Here is something to check out. Look up a You Tube video entitled James White-Rutgers University-Rhizophagy. (HERE IS THE LINK.) This is a term to describing how plants and their root actively seek out and eat microbes from the soil within their root zone. They suck them in, release a compound to dissolve their skin or cell wall, extract their sugar and mineral load, and then either incorporate their chromosomal matter or spit the DNA back out into the soil to repeat the process. It is like a blue whale cruising thru the ocean with its mouth open straining out the krill while releasing the water. There are many incredible clips in the video to show this activity occurring.
I thought this was cool stuff, so called Dr. White to leave a message about this interesting finding. He answered in person, so we had an interesting 45- minute conversation. I asked him if it gave him a different view of the old Rich Moranis & Steve Martin musical movie named Little Shop of Horrors where a carnivorous plant named Audrey 2 developed a taste for humans? He laughed and said it had occurred to him. Now James did not claim credit for discovering this Rhizophagy. That credit goes to a team of female endophyte mycologist at the University of Queensland in Australia which did that work in the 2010 – 2012 era. They did not have enough funding to continue, which is a shame. Some of the work continues as evidenced by the fact that a young scientist from Uruguay, who got her degree in entomology from ISU and MS from K-State while her mother got her PhD in Plant Path, took the job of Pasture Entomologist with their governmental agency, ENYA, did sabbatical type work with such a team a few years ago.
Other Happenings
Another company entering the U.S. as a supplier of biologicals and BioStimulant products sent a management team into Iowa last week. (We used one of their products about ten years ago to control Goss’s Wilt in corn and saw an average yield response of 45 Bu/A with a documented top of 80 Bu/A by one SE Iowa grower.) We met with them in Ft Dodge on Wed night and listened to what they could tell us about their company, products and entry into the central Midwest. I was totally amazed at the depth of their portfolio. We got to know their president as he spoke at a Glyphosate summit held in Des Moines over ten years ago. There is the chance that they will be marketing an effective Tar Spot management product for 2023.
There was also a Zoom call with the top Bio-Chemist with a company which has an animal nutrition, human nutrition, human health and the beginning to a plant nutrition division in the Midwest. Tracey is very knowledgeable and has over 40-years’ experience in the field in the Americas. They are leaders in the field of amino acid chelated products and currently sell about 50% of the top-rated mineral supplements for people. Those are sold under many different labels such as Swanson’s, Puritans Pride and Blue Bonnet. A question that he had the answer for was “what cellular mechanism or process allows Cu, Mn, B, Zn and Fe to act against pathogens”? I had never met anyone who had the answer. Does that seem like pertinent question to many of you?
Bob Streit is an independent crop consultant and columnist for Farm News. He can be reached at (515) 709-0143 or www.CentralIowaAg.com.