Goodbye windchills of 20 to 40 below zero. There is no guarantee of us not having such cold temps as we had in early to mid-January, but as the weeks slowly churn and the deep snowbanks slowly melt away the chance of a repeat of those bitter temps become less and less. Feb always seems to dash by and now with much of the snow cover disappearing we are going to start seeing more and more signs that winter is ready to loosen its grip on cold country in the northern parts of the Midwest. Much of central and southern Minnesota are really hoping for measurable snows as the bad drought of 2023 continues. Across extreme northern IA snowfall amounts have been less than central and southern IA. Here in central IA where the two blizzards hit hard and dropped amounts for two storm totals of 18 to 24”. Cleaning out after the two storms took time as the snowbanks left after the wind blizzard and they felt more like concrete.
Typically, during a normal winter, the snowmelt only contributes roughly one inch of moisture to the deep soil reserves. This could change as the super warm conditions kept the soil temp above freezing and runoff seemed to allow any and all soil types to let any moisture soak in. Hopefully the top inches remain thawed and any spring time rains can contribute to the moisture profile. Aa number of meteorologists are predicting is several spring rains of 1 to 2”. Are the many fog days telling us the same thing?
Nature is showing signs of waking up as two pairs of Canadian are staking out their claim to the pond in our backyard and with the squawking are letting all other geese know it.
Winter Events
The big Iowa Power Show scheduled for Jan 31and Feb 1-2 has come and gone. Historically the three-day run has often been battered with big blizzards and getting to the site has been a challenge. Not this year as getting all of the gear and printed material inside without any of it blowing away went without problems. The number of exhibitors and booths increased again as more floor space was opened up to new companies. The number of microbial companies and their products seemed to increase over last year. This category included a wide variety of minerals and living biologicals meant to be applied to the seed, in-furrow, or during early V stages to promote faster germination, improve early growth and provide the minerals needed.
Our Central Iowa Agronomy Supply had our booth as the bottom of the escalator and the number of visitors who stopped to pick up literature or ask questions was a steady stream. The challenge is spending sufficient time to answer all of their questions and fast enough before new guests get impatient and have to move on. We had info on the Haney and BeCrop test, newer biologicals, newer products to treat for Tar Spot and other related diseases, soil and tissue testing to formulate fertility and giving guidance to those who had questions about soil health. In a planning season where budgets remain tighter growers are looking for answers.
FIRST Plots and Drones
Nick Hoffman of northeast Nebraska has accepted the challenge of running the FIRST Plots in NW Iowa. He is going to be scouting for a few new cooperators who have always been curious about how those plots have been planted and managed to do a great job to provide accurate measurement and performance data. The plots typically contain the newest hybrids from both large and small companies. All of the note taking helps provide performance on info about seed treatments and/or traits using a number of hybrids entries are non-traited they are asking for persons farming using conventional weed control products.
I mentioned in this last column of a young man from Ames and Webster City who is trying to line up acres to spray this summer. His email address is nutridrones@gmail.com
Last summer there were a number of local farmers who needing a custom drone applicator to spray fields and found none. The number of operators who are taking pilot training to meet FAA requirements has increased.
Drone Information
I broke away near closing time to tour a few of the booths and found a few drone operators who will be making applications this coming season. Getting licensed is one of their first challenges as they need to take pilot training. Their next big challenge is getting acquainted with the fungicide families, their strengths, weaknesses and precautions. Their learning curve is going to be steep as absorbing all of that knowledge and being able to lead an intricate discussion with astute growers does not leave much room for error. Just learning how to pronounce many of the product names takes time. How quickly can they learn to think like a trained plant pathologist or grad level mycologist?
Any person hoping to generate repeat customers is going to want to do the best job of spraying a crop and generating as good of results as possible. I wrote a lengthy letter yesterday to one newer drone operator from my home area giving him guidance on which line of products he should focus on and how he can make decisions on applications, gallonage questions, how to correlate weather variables with disease incidence and severity. Being able to make educated deductions is critical.
I learned quite a bit down in my 300 days spent in South America with some of the top pathologists in the world where disease pressure was severe and any spray gaps or misapplications would be glaring. If the application was made in error the crop died. Many JDI drone will hold 8-gals max. This operator has a 14-gal capacity drone. Will their two gallons of product and carrier per acre be adequate to provide good disease control? To answer that and explain coverage and the value of systemic movement in the plant, here is one story. In an application trial conducted at a research station down in Paraguay by Dr. Glenn Hartman, the USDA’s top SB pathologist, and assistant Monte Miles, they painted the left-hand side of SB leaves with strobe and triazole fungicides. They then inoculated the entire leaves with the diseases of choice. They saw that there was so little systemic movement of those products that the tissue on the right side of the leaves was not protected.
With most ground sprayers nozzled to apply 15 to 18 gals of water to get sufficient coverage and disease control, how might a drone operator applying only two gallons provide good control? The answer is use products which will move systemically into and thru the entire plant within two to three hours and are amino acid or phosphite chelated. Every cell in the plant is hungry for amino acids since they are used as an energy source and a building block.
Both aerial and drone operators are asking what the risks are from long term exposure to the products they are spraying. What is the risk to their health and that of the person who washes their clothes.? Product labels give guidance on protection garb, gloves, masks, and breathing apparatus if any is given. But spills, broken hoses, unexpected wind gusts are all part of the game. Every operator hopes to return home each evening or at the end of the spray season as healthy as possible to their family.
All custom applicators have to live with the fact that all customers expect to be first on the list to get their crops sprayed. If their products of choice do not offer curative action, once the plants get infected the pathogen is not likely to be terminated by any later applications, then that can lead to hard feelings and unhappy customers. If your products of choice offer curative action they will provide reach back and destroy a fungus or bacteria which has already invaded. We have done thermographic imaging with a pilot in NW Iowa to show that BioEmpruv will prevent further plugging of the vascular tissue.
I hear of a number of young farm raised men who did not have a land base so they could be a crop grower. A number of them are already buying drones and plan on doing custom application for farmers who for a number of reasons are not equipped to do their own application. There are a number of reasons for this: Small fields with limited access; the ground is too wet to pull in with a ground rig; Too many trees such that a copter or drone can best do the job; The fields are near a town or houses that don’t like the sight of a large, noisy sprayer operating close to their house; Their high dollar self-propelled sprayer is spending more time in the shop than in the field; or a strong wind or derecho tipped the corn over and making a trip with a ground rig is now impossible.
I have put together an information piece on deciding which products they can use that will give them the best chance of creating satisfied repeat customers. I will post that on our web site. One piece of warning is that to me good mineral nutrition trumps any other means of disease control. What I have learned and observed in a greenhouse down in Brazil and reinforced by the top pathologist who was involved in a cold war project 40 years ago that was never revealed to public, could be very valuable to learn from. Look on our website for this article on our website in a few days. www.centralIowaAg.com
An Old New Sprayer to Learn About
Roughly 35 years ago the hot new spray item was going to take the sprayer business by storm. They were the electrostatic sprayers which came out of one of the Nordic Countries such as Holland or Denmark. They involved wiring and electrical currents which put a negative or positive charge on the spray particles as they came out of the booms and nozzles. Now with the plants carrying a neutral charge the released droplets surrounded the plants and stuck onto the leaves with both the top and bottom surfaces covered. The amount of product used and carrier applied with were dramatically reduced. In the end the sprayers requited lots of maintenance and down time. So, they fell by the roadside. A few are still made by a shop up in Oregon and by a degreed engineer down in Peru.
There was story printed on page 32-33 in the Oct issue of successful Farming which told of an inventor in Florida who worked on the idea enough to further development. A fellow from Ireland acquired rights to it and took it into an Ag Engineering Dept at renowned university. They changed the design away from fancy electronics and now generate the charges with high powered rare earth magnets placed onto the booms. My guess is that they are using Boron Neodymium magnets, similar to slimmed up N-52s which are incredibly strong. If you put two large marshmallow sized ones together you have to use a large crowbar to separate them.
They have several tech people from MagGrow Tec crossing the Midwest to gauge farmer acceptance. The comments from growers who attached the units on their self-propelled sprayer were that particle drift was eliminated and product use was trimmed.
Bob Streit is an independent crop consultant and columnist for Farm News. He can be reached at (515) 709-0143 or www.CentralIowaAg.com.