Crops
“Made in the U.S.A.” has never looked or felt so fine. The father-daughter team of Mark Yeager and Anna Brakefield is taking cotton from farm to table, except with a “seed to sheets” twist.
Randy Dowdy shattered soybean records in 2016 after a 171.7 bu. per acre yield with a UniSouth Genetics 74A74 variety. Dowdy’s corn was also exceptional, with four separate AgriGold varieties each significantly surpassing the 450 bu. per acre mark. Here’s how he did it.
Z-Trap 1 is an electronic insect trap allowing for remote monitoring of pest problems. The automated process of capturing and counting insects carries the potential for labor savings and greater accuracy of pesticide applications.
A field of weeds can pay better than a field of corn, and costs almost nothing to produce. No inputs, no sweat equity, no management, no harvest, but plenty of profit in a scheme plucking millions from the pockets of U.S. taxpayers. Percy Carroll and a growing number of Texas farmers say a crop insurance racket is hiding in plain sight.
With yields consistently bouncing above 100 bu. per acre, crop consultant Robb Dedman is among the best cornermen in the business. From 2013-16, Dedman eclipsed 100-plus bu. five times in four consecutive years in three separate Arkansas counties, with five different varieties.
Harry Stephens is literally burning weed seed to save money and boost yield on his ground. Narrow windrow burning has arrived on U.S. farmland.
When a producer laces the gloves and climbs in the ring for soybean combat, a capable cornerman is vital.
Ducks are a hunter’s sweetest dream, but can be a farmer’s nightmare akin to flying time bombs expelling rapid-fire payloads of resistant weed seed. Wonder where the next pigweed outbreak will come from? Listen for quacks and honks, and look up. Waterfowl may be a significant source of resistant weed spread.
The big deer of Boone and Crockett tell a soybean tale. A proper soybean variety, served on a food plot plate, is a Cadillac protein source for deer. When deer walk into an Eagle Seed soybean plots, the kitchen is always open and stocked.
On many farming operations, mowing has given way to high-powered pre-emerges to kill vegetation, but bald ditches may spawn a regulatory leviathan. Silt gathering in the bottom of ditches and canals; eroded turn rows; washed out roads; and hammered PTO ditches are caught in a vicious spray cycle of unintended consequences with no simple fix.
Thumb-sized plastic beans, packed with a world of sensor circuitry, may soon be ready to monitor grain bins and storage facilities. Toss in a magic BeanIoT pod to check grain vitals. One bean to mind them all.
Timothy Gertson kicks up dirt off Texas’ Gulf Coast, southwest of Houston in Wharton County. He’s a young 31, but Gertson is an old-school farmer with no time for ideology and no wish to curb his options. Field decisions across his 2,000 acres at G5 Farms are dictated by dollars, and in 2016, he’s found a profit window in organic corn.
Rotation is only defense against this new soybean disease
Sticking GMO science on the back shelf carries the highest consequences. As millions of children go blind and die due each year due to vitamin A deficiency, opponents of Golden Rice whistle past the graveyard.
When Winter squeezed the chemical trigger on a sugarcane aphid army, he didn’t know he was protecting bin-busting grain: the best sorghum crop of his life.
When William James Beal crept out under cover of night and buried 20 uniform bottles filled with a mixture of soil and seed in 1879, he lit the fuse on agriculture’s longest running experiment.
10,000-farmer sample seeks best management plan answers to resistance
The agriculture industry may be on the cusp of an unprecedented takeoff with the advent of ribonucleic acid interference (RNAi) – a sniper’s bullet technology with implications for every aspect of crop growth. Disease, drought, pests and much more are in the crosshairs and the possibilities for this non-GMO crop alteration technology seem boundless.
In a crop field cull, how do the knives of judgment distinguish saint from sinner? A new approach uses a fluorescent systemic marker that is applied onto seeds through a seed treatment. When the plant is stimulated with a special color of light, it emits a fluorescent color.
Cottonseed derivatives find their way into a remarkable array of products: cooking oil, cattle feed, electronics, food ingredients, and many more.
Rubber-producing plants are back on the edge of farmland, backed by the muscle of genetic breeding.
Hell or high water, producers are often forced to chase markets. However, solid data stacked over multiple years shows the peaks and troughs of a consistent crop rotation system.