EDITORIAL SERIES

Grains See Profit Taking, Risk Off Selling: Cattle Recover with DOW, Hogs Extend Gains

Fri, 06 Oct 2023 20:15:19 GMT

Grains see profit taking going into the weekend with initial risk off selling on the jobs numbers. Cattle recover as the DOW rebounds while hogs extend gains. Allison Thompson, The Money Farm, has details.

Avoiding Common Grain Bin Hazards Can Save Close Calls or Even Fatalities on the Farm

Thu, 27 Oct 2022 02:42:46 GMT

In the past several decades, hundreds of injuries and deaths have occurred in grain bins across the country. Few people realize the hazards from flowing grain, including the risk of engulfment, entrapment and suffocation. Today we look at some of the common hazards as part of our series Close Calls: Stories of Survival.

A grain bin engulfment can happen in the blink of an eye and cause serious injury or suffocation resulting in death. Flowing grain entrapments fall into four primary categories:

Engulfment in a Flowing Column of Grain. Bill Field, professor of agricultural and biological engineering and leader of the Purdue Ag Safety and Health Program, says: “When the grain is flowing, it’s common to scrap the walls or break up crusted grain. Get too close to the center and that center is moving at about the same volume or capacity as the auger that’s emptying the bin, so it only takes a few seconds for your body to get into that flow and you almost go to the floor.”
Collapse of Horizontal Crusted Grain Surface. This happens when grain spoils, forms a crust and becomes compacted. Farmers often enter the bin to break it up. “There’s a surface on the grain and that grain surface will be very compact and you can walk on it,” Field explains. However, you might not realize there’s a void underneath areas or a hot spot and if you break through and you end up getting pulled into the flow of grain and getting entrapped.”
Collapse of Vertical Crusted Grain Surface. Field says this is where spoiled or caked grain stands in almost a vertical column. “It looks like a statue or a column standing in the middle of the bin and farmers will try to go in there and break it up from the base. It’s a very unstable column of grain, just molded together, and if it collapses it will often bury the farmer.”
Entrapment or Suffocation in Grain Transport Vehicles. This includes grain carts, wagons and trucks and often occurs during the unloading operation. “People have been caught in truckloads of grain when trying to break up corn, beans or whatever is wet because it sealed up overnight and become difficult to empty. They’ll get on top of that grain and try to break it up, and the next thing you see is they’re down in that truck.”

Field says it only takes four or five seconds for a farmer who enters a grain bin with the unloader running to be submerged to the point of becoming helpless. It takes less than 20 seconds to be completely submerged in flowing grain. Again, Field says most grain bin accidents occur when farmers are trying to move out-of-condition grain, so he recommends keeping grain in good condition with proper management.

Learn more at Purdue Extension’s Agricultural Confined Spaces website .

(Thanks to National Farmers Union for the use of this farm safety video.)

Win the Furrow: Pump up High Yields Focusing on Ear Flex in Corn

Tue, 04 Oct 2022 21:11:54 GMT

What agronomic ideas can help you Win the Furrow next season? Today, we look at how to pump up yields by focusing on ear flex in corn.

Crop-Tech Consulting Agronomist Isaac Ferrie says farmers never want to walk away from a crop in season. “And even if things have gone against us most of the season, some of these corn hybrids have so much potential and kernel depth and so much variation and kernel depth that there’s a lot of yield to be made later in the season, you know, even if the front half hasn’t gone against us. So we know all year flex, but they can flex and girth the rose around, they can flex in length and they can flex in kernel depth.”

Ferrie says some hybrids have a tendency to flex in certain areas over others. “So maybe more likely to flex in girth, more likely the flex in length or depth than some others. And and one of the things that we look at is trying to figure that out. And then once we figure that out, we know when it happens. So girth. Girth is being established somewhere in that v4, v6 frame. Well, if we have a hybrid that that’s susceptible to flexing and girth, that V4, V6 time frame becomes very important.”

Farmers need to make sure the corn crop has a good day says Ferrie. “We don’t want it to be deficient any nutrient during that time frame, you know, getting it off to a good start planting and good warm conditions and starter fertilizer are how we ensure that it doesn’t flex downward during that that stage if we have a hybrid that predominantly flexes and kernel depth that you know that’s happened the last 40 days of the season. So being on top of our late season in applications, making sure we have enough water, staying on top of the fungicide applications become pretty important because that’s when that hybrid is most susceptible to stress as we get to later season.”

Ferrie also recommends growers do everything they can to mitigate stress during that critical growth stage. “Especially if that’s where it’s most susceptible to to truncating yield. Overall, when we look at the hybrids flex, we always think of flex as flexing down. Whereas if we flex in length, we’re flexing backwards. So we had a high genetic potential for that year. And then as it’s stressed, it starts limiting how long that year’s going to become. So low populations don’t cause the ear to flex up. Low populations just allow that ear to get closer to what the genetic potential of that ear was to begin with, because we alleviated stress by reducing the populations. As we increase populations, we increase a little bit of stress in there and then we’ll start to truncate, whether it’s rows around or whether it’s length, because we increase stress, it’s going to start to work its way down. But flex, flex kind of always happens on the downward movement, not the upward movement. And so that flex could be a key. It could be associated with risk. Right? So a high flex hybrid means under stress. It’s going to start to move down. And if we have flex and girth, that’s that’s where our risk time is, right. That V4 to V6 is when we have a risk of flexing down and girth. We’ve got to keep it happy.”