We are now about a month from when the wheels start rolling in states to our south and about six weeks from alfalfa and oats going into the ground is the central part of the Midwest. A lot of progress still to be done as to individual cropping plans. And for a number of operations financing plans and approvals are still up in the air.
Have we ever seen as many thaws in one winter as there have been this year? Just this past week we had temps around -10 on Thursday and in the upper 40s three days slater. The snow banks are getting much smaller in most parts of the state so we have to hope the amount of moisture over the next few months is minimal.
Many of the marketing companies are softly mentioning that much of the northern and Central Midwest have a record amount of moisture in the ground, creating a situation where any big rains will have no place to go except downhill to raise rive levels into their flood states. Having two straight years of ‘wettest in 125 years’, plus soils that don’t have the sponging ability like they had a few decades ago.
The people most affected by this will likely be those on flatter topography and also clay soils that were delayed last spring. Imagine if you are along a river with 600 to 3,000 acres to plan for as to fertilizer, seed, crop protection products, fuel, machinery updates and crop insurance to line up and your chance of being delayed or prevented from planting again. Let’s home someone smiled on us this season.
Steve Apple Tree
Actually the guy’s name is Steve Apfelbaum, which means apple tree.in German. He is an ecological engineer who has a large company known as Applied Environmental Engineering, which has its headquarters in Broadhead, Wisconsin. For you who are not aware of this town it is also home to the Knight Machinery Company, which makes maybe the best manure spreader on the market. A few of us visited his facility two years ago and sat down with a few of their engineers over to learn more about what they did in this field. At the time he was down in Brazil with his sonar equipped airplane surveying an area in in east central where they plan to be developing another national park area in that country.
A few of were lucky enough to meet him in person when he was the invited guest speaker for a group of Maui citizens who were worried about their upcoming weather events. In that planned event he gave a talk that seemed to satisfy both the landowners and operators as well as the global climate change crowd. I formerly did not think that was possible. But he told how Mother Nature has always been fickle and that in settling the county and building cities, the founding fathers did not always locate the towns and cities on the high ground. Being near a river let them get rid of unwanted things. I applauded him for that ability. So we got to spend the evening visiting with him. To describe him in person, just look up what Arthur Godfrey looked like. They are twins. Where that fits here is that he told us that he and his company has been enlisted and signing contracts with a number of major cities to plan how to sculpt the ground and hills, craft large retaining pond areas, and reroute roads so businesses, houses and roads are not threated by floods such as we have seen the last few years. They either have the equipment or can network with major construction companies to move several million yards of rock or dirt. So citizens along major rivers in Iowa, or which there are a few, may be affected by Steve and the work he does in future years.
And as an aside, Steve has many friends who happen to have apple orchards. In previous years they used to dump their seconds. Now they turn it into some great tasting apple cider as well as what he said was very good fermented product. Imagine that.
Speaking of Fruit Trees
This past two or three weeks a fellow named Steve Limbaugh was making a bit of noise. What the cause of the noise was a court trial that has been about four years in the making. It pitted the largest Missouri peach farmer, Bader Farms, against two companies with one of them selling soybean seed that grew into plants resistant to Dicamba herbicide. Without any EPA approved herbicide to spray on those acres, and weeds coming up, would it be a surprise that any growers would think to load a sprayer with an unapproved products to apply? And with a product that has an extreme volatility problem who would ever think that it got hot enough in southern Missouri that this product might move miles to kill trees, especially those very susceptible to the vapor?
In the 94 page long court proceedings the extension weed specialists in MO, ARK, and Tenn. told of how they had tried to get samples of the new and improved, less volatile product to test to see how much the vapor pressure had been reduced. They were turned down in their request.
Then when the product drifted, as it was expected to any person knowledgeable and experienced in the fields expected, the company who released the seed before the accompanying herbicide had been approved, they plead innocent. That sounded like Eddie Haskell from the old ‘Leave it to Beaver Show’ telling one whopper after another. As of Saturday afternoon after the jury deliberated in District Judge Steven Limbaugh’s court room the jurors found two herbicide firms guilty, fining them $15 million in damaged with a punitive award of another $250 million. It sounds like the second firm really was not as liable.
It will take Solomon type wisdom to determine where the path for weed control in soybeans will go. Developing a product and seed around a very drift prone product was questionable. (There are now three products which can help minimize the problem). In a joint project between weed scientists at the NDSU and the U of MN they observed air inversions almost every night between late May and late June in the targeted year. Individual growers with their own big sprayers can better choose the calmer days. The custom applicators with long lists of itchy customers waiting for the spray rig to treat their fields are the one most vulnerable. Pulse width technology did well in testing but proved to be too expensive to gain popularity.
Seed Treatments
The wide array of new seed treatments available for the coming spring got larger at the many displays at the Power Show. Besides the hard chemistry entries we are seeing more biologicals as well as mineral based ones. Thus far the combination of minerals and microbes, sometimes combined with a bit of hard chemistry will likely win the competition as they broaden the number of threats that can be counteracted, especially in a cool, saturated seed bed. In work done by Dr. Andre Cuomo at a University in Canada, he has noted a marked increase in germination and vigor when adding minerals to the mix.
Until seed companies begin to spray more of their seed fields with needed micronutrients this will likely remain the same. Why a combination of hard and soft chemistry makes sense is because the effects from the hard chemistry is greatest right after the seed goes into the ground. A biological product builds in number from day 1 but starts out low in number. The goal is to have the beneficial population in place on the seed or on the root before any pathogens are able to set up shop there.
Corona Virus and other Health Items
How much can we learn from any source about the virus spreading in China? News from a closed Communist country can be scarce. The news that they had a level 4 containment lab was a surprise to most people. Until a few years ago few people knew they existed. Level 3 was at the top until recently. Level 2 still has a high degree of security and they are scarce within the U.S.
The report out of Los Alamos detailing each of the first victims and how well they were tracked news provide good insight as to how tightly they were monitored. The question now might be reflective of what we have seen with Asian Swine Fever. What can anyone do to stop it? Genetic specificity does seem to be a reality, as was stated in old research projects.
We have fielded many good questions about the Farmer Shield product package, how it works and the proper way to gauge the need for any individual to take the 30 day program. We tell them to start by sending a sample for analysis at the Health Research Lab in Fairfield, IA. (There is a program offering a discount from the lab using the promo code). We began taking it last Monday. We will be taking samples before our TX chelation trip, then before and after the Farmer Shield treatment. Though the timing can be difficult it sure beats getting stuck with needles for five hours.
To learn more go to www.centraliowaag.com and click on the shop button.
Bob Streit is an independent crop consultant and columnist for Farm News. He can be reached at (515) 709-0143 or www.CentralIowaAg.com.