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It was the summer between my seventh and eighth grades when I went to Rex’s funeral. Rex was a year older than me, popular at school, athletic and charismatic. He had been helping his father farm when his tractor rolled. It was closed casket.
The genetic makeup of modern corn grown in the U.S. and elsewhere has long roots. Most of it can be traced to Hawaii, where many of the leading corn-growing companies have established farms, “growing new varieties genetically engineered for desirable traits such as resistance to insects and drought,” reads an Associated Press article by Audrey McAvoy and printed in The Washington Post.
“My wheat is gone! How am I going to get more chicken feed made?” If I hadn’t paid so much for that tablet with gaming apps, I’d have tossed it across the room.
Warm-season annual forages play a vital role in many grazing, haying and feeding operations across the country. We typically think of crops such as forage sorghums, sorghum-sudan crosses and the various millets to provide summer forage production needs in place of or as a complement to perennial forage systems.
Forage tests give us very valuable information about the forages we are feeding. But which numbers should we be looking at? Which are the important ones? The forage report (Table 1) gives some very good examples of numbers to compare to your forage tests.
A simple definition of soil fertility is a soil’s capacity to produce crops. For practical reasons, traditional fertility emphasizes soil chemical aspects that affect yield and nutrient availability.
Herbicide-resistant Palmer amaranth continues to invade many areas of Michigan and the Upper Midwest. Our first encounter with Palmer amaranth in Michigan occurred in the fall of 2010.
Kansas farmer Gail Fuller (near Emporia) experimented with no-till farming during the 1980s. Later he started grazing cover crops with cattle. During the past few years he has also been experimenting with pasture cropping.
Alfalfa weevils continue to plague our alfalfa hay production in the north-central states. Last year, producers and agronomists reported severe defoliation from weevils, reducing the alfalfa biomass and yields, especially in drought situations.
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