The summer is now officially over with, as commemorated with the Labor Day Holiday and the end of the Farm Progress Show. It is always a moment to reflect on all the things that we did do or didn’t do, happened or did not happen during the summer. In much of the Midwest, and for people in Ag it was a year of intense heat and lack of little to no rain during the summer. It is now nice to resume activities that have been postponed since 2020 and attend family events again. The people involved in Ag and livestock put up with one of the strangest summers experienced where they battled all sorts of supply issues, very hot and dry weather, pesky flies, and worker issues as more people figured they no longer had to work to survive. Add to those the incessant news of Russia waging war against a sovereign country and destroying their homes and infrastructure. What is now left is the last part of the growing season and all of crop harvest work and preparation needed for next year’s growing season.
The Status of the Corn and Bean Crops
By now a number of crop tours have been completed and the figures compiled and publicized. The disparity between the USDA and private tours seemed larger than normal. Too much of the USDA calculations still seem based on models which assume normal weather conditions from that time point onwards. This year many locations either did not get any or much August rainfall, or saw either shallow grain fill or too many lost kernels or pods that could not be compensated for. Are they adjusting for kernel depth? At harvest time in 2021 most producers were amazed at how well both corn and bean yields turned out. Cooler weather and September rains helped the crops recover. This year it cooled off incrementally, but by Sept enough stress degree days had occurred that the damage had been done and not reversible.
The Farm Progress Show site is a mere three to four miles from our farm site so I got to observe the development of the nearby crops quite closely. In 2015 we were testing a new plant medicine
developed by an independent Utah biochemist on two farms where we hoped to keep the corn plants healthy thru September. It worked perfectly and increased yields by 90 Bu/A. I remember how nearly all the corn south of Hwy 3 or 20 was brown by the show date and lodging was so bad that the harvest demos for the show were cancelled. To this point no official has discussed or explained what killed the crop and what product would help remedy the problem. A few insightful Ag people did enough work to figure things out. Part of that tasked involved a long trip to do lab and electron microscopy work which identified the factors involved with early death of the corn crop. That is a question that farmers need to ask and learn about so as to not have a repeat of the yields damaging problem. Now, as of last week, many of the fields between Dallas and Guthrie Center resemble the dead fields of 2010 thru 2017.
We made a quick trip to Utah this past weekend to meet with a very good biochemist to discuss that topic and his updated fermentation capacity. His questions and our answers will be reliant on projected needs by alerted 2023 growers.
What is observable is that state and Midwest appearance of the corn crop that varies widely where lack of rain doesn’t not fully explain the variation. A high % of the corn fields either have yellow or brown coloration now, rather than green. How do we separate drought damage from disease damage? It is time for corn growers to do a postmortem in many of their fields. I plan to complete a bunch of those visits in the next two weeks, and will take a camera along. Remember that this was in a year with minimal rainfall and few fungal disease problems.
I had a good conversation with a seed/chem rep at the FPS who reported on some severe Tar Spot in his area in NE Iowa. The worst field had low mineral levels and the fungicide applications did not prove successful. He was looking for answers and has none yet.
As to the soybean crop, there are moisture stressed areas where many of the 2.3 RMG and earlier beans have yellowed. In central Iowa most fields have stayed green. Will those green plants receive enough rain to fill the pods to their maximum or will the top pods contain only BBs? What is significant is that more bean growers have woke up and learned that top bean yields don’t just happen. They have realized they needed to get involved in the head scratching chess game of high yield soybean management. From the time they began to organize their management schemes they planned for: seedling health; good early pre R1 growth; maximizing branch number; supplying foliars to manipulate plant growth and architecture; and supplying enough minerals to meet supply plant and grain fill needs through the leaves even if the soils are too dry for microbial activity to release needed minerals; and to control the leaf loss attributed to Septoria brown spot or Downey Mildew: and to keep any aphid or bean leaf beetle populations at bay, if needed.
Farm Progress Show
For the first time in years, I had the time to visit many of the booths and displays at the FPS. The show was larger than ever with huge crowds on Tues and Wed. The permanent roads and constructed buildings made for a great venue. Moderate temps and mostly calm conditions made for visitor comfort. And there were enough food tents to keep everyone fed.
Of course, there were many equipment displays, with many foreign companies joining the domestic firms. There were several machines that were absolutely huge, with a heart attack causing price tags. Fendt had their black colored T9 and T10 combines on display. The T10 price tag was very close to $1million. Geringhoff showed off the 24 row corn head that was non-folding. Now how might than be better than a folding one of a smaller size unless driving on roads was not an issue?
There were many high clearance sprayers from many companies. I had read reviews on the Horscht machine with their 7’ of clearance, futuristic design, 120’or wider boom, and $600K or higher price tag. It is surprising that there no reports of farmers having heart attacks when they asked about pricing.
One sprayer booth that I visited was that of Greeneye. They are a small engineering company from Haifa, Israel that advanced a long-needed idea, which is a sprayer utilizing optics to see the plants in a field, have accurate AI, ID capability to discern between weeds and crops, and then apply the herbicide to only the emerged weeds to minimize the amount of herbicide used. Environmentally and pocketbook wise, this should be an advancement. Tom Wolf, the infamous PhD Nozzle Guy, of Saskatchewan considered Greeneye to have the most accurate and complete AI capability of the companies competing in this arena. They had two fully equipped Hagie operating in the veggie fields in AZ since Feb and they ran those machines in the Lincoln thru Henderson areas of Nebraska in May and June. Their goal is not to sell sprayers, but to sell the fully optically equipped, twin tanked, twin pumped, and twin nozzle equipped boom to be attached to the sprayer the guy already owns.
I tried to visit every drone booth where the alternative or supplement to owning an expensive were displayed. A number of these companies are franchising to interested entrepreneurs their $25K machines to aerially apply fertilizer, minerals or pesticides to row or bean crops. For drier years the ground driven machines make sense. But when growers don’t want to run down their plants on the headlands, or years where the ground rigs traffic is halted due to weeks of wet weather or windstorms cause enough root lodging to prevent field traffic, drones make complete sense. Odd shaped fields and those surrounded by trees or power lines are also application challenges that drones will be perfect for. Rantazio is a drone company that had FFA approval by 2020 to fly as many as five drones as a swarm, allowing sequential loading and spray runs to be made. Their challenges seen in 2022 was keeping batteries charged and lack of enough people to keeping product mixed up and loaded. We had plans in 2020 to aerially spray a field with a product to eliminate a developing SDS problem. The derecho destroyed those plans.
The use and value of the drone will best be realized if the products they are applying have systemic and curative properties. Those two abilities widen the chance of successful outcomes of applying products to control leaf diseases. Timing of application, coverage and gallonage become non-issues.
The number of companies now offering biological products to aid their growth and health has increased dramatically in the last five years. A greater % of them may consistently provide positive results. There are still companies selling products which don’t deliver as promised. In a % of time the products may not performed as advertised when they are not applied correctly, at the wrong time, or if the soil or environmental was not hospitable to the microbe. Low oxygen conditions, applications of salt based fertilizers, high shear pressure application, or application of 82% are damaging to microbe survival.
I have seen projections for the growth in the BioStimulant arena in the 13-15%/year range with many of those belonging to the category of fertilizer efficiency boosters or involve atmospheric N fixation.
A few larger foreign firms have established beachheads in the U.S in the last year by buying U.S. firms. One was ABM, of Van Wert, Ohio, producer of great inoculants. They were purchased by a French yeast company, as their vat fermentation capacity could be very useful. The other targeted firm was Marrone Biologicals, as founded by Pam Marrone. In her years of biological frontiering work she also founded the company AgriQuest. It which was a leader in the field and eventually purchased by Bayer Ag. A second large seed treatment company, Rizobacter, headquartered in Pergamino, Argentina, and fully immersed with seed firms and the seed treatment business in S America, was the purchaser. I usually visited with their President, Gustavo Anta, when I traveled to Argentina to update him on things and hear about their new products. The Marrone folks were grateful to hear that this big company treated their employees as family.
Bob Streit is an independent crop consultant and columnist for Farm News. He can be reached at (515) 709-0143 or www.CentralIowaAg.com.