News
Today’s agriculture headlines and expert perspectives serving farmers, ranchers, crop consultants, livestock nutritionists and the entire U.S. ag community.
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.
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.
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 first four-year precision agriculture degree program in the United States is set to kick off at South Dakota State University in September 2016.
A secret war is waged above farmland every night. In games of hide-and-seek between bats and crop pests, the bats always win, and the victories are worth billions of dollars to U.S. agriculture.
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.
Think truffles are an agricultural sideshow? A billion dollars in demand says otherwise.
Guesswork and irrigation are long-time farming partners, but it can be a happy-in-hell marriage. When to turn on the spigot? How much water to deliver? Every farm soaks and dries in isolation because one field’s irrigation recipe is another’s death sentence.
The evil twin of drought is drainage and both can cripple a crop in short time. When a river rises or a culvert backs up, water can sit on farmland for weeks and prevent planting and harvest, or simply kill crops mid-season. Time to saddle a Water Hog beast and pump directly through a levee.
The single-row tractor is back and about to roll across a machinery graveyard. The first American-owned factory on Cuban soil in 55 years will manufacture single-row tractors.
The promise of precision agriculture to find the sweet spot between hardware and agronomics, under the banner of simplicity, hasn’t arrived.
Cooperation between agriculture and archaeology vital to preserve American Indian history
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.
Invasive fire ants, six-legged devils barely an eighth of an inch long, are a scourge to farming and livestock production. Keep the granule bait close, and the Benadryl closer.
Guesswork is a bedfellow of loss.
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.
Rotation is only defense against this new soybean disease
10,000-farmer sample seeks best management plan answers to resistance
With record storage of 100 million barrels, propane production is on the rise and prices remain low, which is a distinct advantage for row crops farmers and poultry producers these days.