News
Today’s agriculture headlines and expert perspectives serving farmers, ranchers, crop consultants, livestock nutritionists and the entire U.S. ag community.
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 first four-year precision agriculture degree program in the United States is set to kick off at South Dakota State University in September 2016.
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 promise of precision agriculture to find the sweet spot between hardware and agronomics, under the banner of simplicity, hasn’t arrived.
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.
Cooperation between agriculture and archaeology vital to preserve American Indian history
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.
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.
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.
Guesswork is a bedfellow of loss.
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
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.
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.
When city expansion nibbles around the edges of an operation with an inch to a mile appetite, erosion of landowner will is often the tacit intention. However, legacy and livelihood are a wedded pair for many producers.
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.
Agriculture-archaeological relationships, once tainted by mutual suspicion, are protecting the past and allowing farmland to serve as a vast repository for history.
Lifelong cattle and turkey producers in southwest Missouri’s Newton County, Rick and Nathan Clymer have tapped into a heavy demand vein: inland shrimp farming.