The month gains an extra week this year, but will still be the shortest month of the year. So far the time has been a blur ever since our Jan 22nd meeting and the Iowa power show. The weeks left will be consumed by farmers and their Ag advisors in finalizing fertility and cropping plans as well as making additional cropping decisions and purchases for the upcoming season. This recent thaw reinforced the thought that spring will arrive and may do it earlier than normal. After last spring’s major delays, we can expect most famers getting things done as early as possible to avoid getting caught by any rain delays. The main caution should be to make sure the ground is fit and suited to field traffic so as to minimize any compaction.
The recently global news has had two major topics. First the early bean harvest in Brazil continues without major weather delays. Typically, as soon as the first crop is harvested the second crop which is usually corn or cotton is planted within days. The calendar and the acknowledgment that planting corn after March 15th can become risky due to dry weather during grain fill.
More facts have been unearthed about the corona virus affecting China and now many other countries. Let see if this gets publicized with some head rolling. According to Professor Francis Boyle, International Law specialist at the University of Illinois, who wrote the bylaws for the international biological Agreement and tracks such matters, the research on this virus was paid for by the NIH and allowed by two U.S. oversight agencies.
The genetic tinkering was done at the U of North Carolina and sold to the Chinese for over $300 million. The Chinese biotech team made a few more insertions at their Wuhan Lab. It supposedly escaped form that facility. According to this professor he has copies of all the paper work on file. Questions to be asked are: should this have been allowed in the 16 or 19 level 3 labs in this country and how many are level 4? Why was the engineered virus allowed to be sold to China?; What country were they hoping to use it on and when?; is anyone going to take corrective and punitive action? Aren’t those oversight agencies supposed to be protecting us?
What the end result and end tally from this release is anyone’s guess. In the 2004 book entitled Lab 257 African Swine Fever was discussed. We can see how damaging and uncontrollable viruses can be when seeing how devastating it has been.
Missouri Peaches
After two years of court filings and delays the Bader lawsuit over Dicamba drift was finally heard. The jury after just four hours of deliberation sided with the Bader’s whose acres of peaches were nearly destroyed. Remember it takes time to replace a 10 to 20 year old, producing peach tree. That is a lot of years where no crop income comes in. The most damming evidence was how the two companies denied access of their low volatility products to three University herbicide researchers who had requested it so they could conduct their own volatility tests on the new formulations. Apparently a key witness for the defendants suffered from severe, selective amnesia when quizzed about this. Internal documents from this individual proved her undoing.
What this is likely to cause is for more drifted on farmers’ legal teams to use the same evidence, questions and logic path to file their own suits for past drift damage. I know there are a few still torqued off growers from a few years ago to major yield losses from a few years ago. The end result may be that growers may opt for a less volatile line of seed and herbicides. Most growers still resent being blackmailed on this issue.
A quick Trip
In the four weeks since we had two medical people from a company called Microbe Formulas present at our meeting and introduced a product mix called the Farmer Shield, which has performed as formulated to remove heavy metals and environmental toxins from a person’s body, lots of phone calls have come in. There has been a huge amount of interest as more growers recognize they are regularly exposed to those products on a regular basis, and like me, have gone to too many funerals for family members, friends, cousins, or neighbors at an early age.
The Cell Core parent company officers invited Carol and me to their training and information meeting down in Orlando this past weekend. We said we would not miss it. We went and were totally impressed. They formed the Meridian, ID based company three years ago and are staffed with a number of very sharp biochemists and formulation specialists who are now supplying over 4,000 clinics and health care professionals with plant, mineral and essential oils that are providing to work very well in treating and curing the core of the problem rather than just the symptoms. It was three day lesson of biochemistry, human physiology, vaccines, kinesiology, and last but not least, parasitology. They had zeroed in on the latter after their due diligence informed them that over 60% of the people in this country are now affected or suffering from this and are often going undiagnosed. The most common and most mentioned of these is the Lyme bacteria.
One specialist told of how she is seeing that the influx of immigrants from SE Asia back in the 1970s and from Africa in the 2000s brought many water dwelling and insect borne parasites in that formerly found in third world countries. They showed a lot of pictures and galleries of them to illustrate their point. She told of how 17% of the mosquitoes have been found carrying the Malaria spirochete. When she called the CDC three times they said the disease was not in the U.S. and hung up on her.
Because I had taken classes in entomology, soil biology, zoology, and nematology, plus dissected four legged mammals and been around two legged dissected ones, plus having been around livestock all my life, nothing shocked me. The number of misdiagnosed cases of parasite infestation, where the actual cause of the problem was missed did.
What they have done is scoured the globe for natural based herbal products that can treat the problem with very few or no harmful side effects used either alone or as companion products. So together with the cleansing products they have been highly successful in working with people who are facing health challenges.
Cornell University Bug News
One astute Story County corn grower who raises continuous corn found an article about a Cornell Univ. entomology professor who had found a species of nematodes that when sprayed on a field heavily populated with root worms, fed on those larvae. By the second year the nematode population had become numerous enough that did as good a better job of controlling the CRW than either insecticides or traits did. They were hungry and waiting for any eggs to hatch in year number two. This is worth watching and we will have to see if we can get a small sample for testing purposes.
Bob Streit is an independent crop consultant and columnist for Farm News. He can be reached at (515) 709-0143 or www.CentralIowaAg.com.