No-Till Farmer Blog

Just as Roundup Ready alfalfa has received an important approval to help clear its path toward usage, sugarbeet growers are left wondering what will happen with Roundup Ready sugarbeets in 2011. One judge ordered that the genetically modified beets needed to be destroyed, only to see another court block that ruling.

One of the effects of Roundup Ready crops is that the traditional herbicides used to control weeds in conventional crops are used less. As a result, manufacturers scale back on production of those products.

What we’re hearing now is that with the uncertainty of Roundup Ready sugarbeets is that these conventional herbicides could be in short demand and become very expensive if plantings of Roundup Ready sugarbeets is denied in 2011.

So what might be the impact? Higher production costs certainly could cause growers to switch to corn, soybeans, small grains or other crops, many of which have been soaring in price lately in the commodity markets. And could that mean a shortage of sugar eventually in the U.S.?

I don’t know the answer, and perhaps I’m looking to much down the road. Somehow, I find it unlikely that Roundup Ready sugarbeets won’t be banned from plantings in 2011.

What I do know is that for every action, there is a reaction. We’ll have to wait and see what eventually is the end game for Roundup Ready sugarbeets and how that impacts agriculture in 2011.

It was 4 days and 2,200 miles, but my drive to eastern Montana last weekend to attend the wedding of No-Till Farmer contributing Martha Ostendorf sure was a neat experience. Yeah, I’m dead tired right now, but I had the opportunity to visit with several no-tillers — two from North Dakota and two from Wisconsin — and finish my trip on Jim Leverich’s farm near Sparta, Wis., to shoot some corn harvest shots at sunset.

(Scroll down to see some photos from my trip.)

Lance Gartner at Glen Ullin, N.D., west of Bismarck is no-tilling in some pretty seriously dry conditions, but the rancher is growing no-tilled corn and experimenting with numerous cover crops — including some mixes with sunflowers, soybeans, hairy vetch, turnips, millet and more. He wasn’t sure his corn was going to make 70 bushels to the acre or even dry down enough before cold, wet weather sets in (he planted it in early June after a wet spring), but if it wasn’t harvestable for grain, he planned to allow his cattle to graze on it.

Gartner is really trying to allow nature to thrive in his system and help the soil biology improve with no-till and cover crops. In fact, he says he no longer kills the rattle snakes he comes across because he figures they have some type of positive impact on nature.

I only had 15 minutes with North Dakota ag commissioner Doug Goehring just east of Bismarck, but we will follow up with him on the phone later. He has been 100% no-till for about 15 years and has no-tilled at least a half-dozen crops or more. Goehring made an interesting point about erosion control. He says it used to be the windbreaks that kept topsoil from totally disappearing — you can see 4-foot high mounds of dirt in some of the tree lines. Today, he says no-till residue is holding soils in place and he’s urging more North Dakota growers to make the effort to no-till.

Bill Hurtgen at Downing, Wis., switched to no-till about 12 years ago. The dairy farmer says that he recalls thinking that no-till meant no yield until at the urging of Mike Kinney, his county no-till specialist, he took a newly rented, highly erodible piece of ground and no-tilled soybeans. Turns out they were the highest-yielding beans on his farm and he was on the road to no-till.

Carrol Wyss is just 5 miles down the road from Hurtgen at Boyceville, Wis. He was combining edible beans on Monday in a rolling field that came out of CRP a couple years ago. I was incredibly impressed at how soft the soils were on that farm, yet they held up well under the combine. The beans were running from the 40s into the 50s for yield. Take into consideration a $1.75 premium he receives and Wyss was in a pretty good mood about the harvest.

Finally, our No-Till Notes columnist, Jim Leverich, was all done harvesting soybeans and was beginning to open up his 20-inch-row cornfields at sunset. On one field that Leverich described as sandy soils, the combine monitor was hitting 230 bushels per acre at times. He didn’t get too far on his second pass when the corn started spilling out of the hopper. That brought a big smile to Leverich’s face and he declared, “That’s no-till for you,” when he gave the reason why that field with seemingly lackluster soils was yielding so well.

At one time, these growers were likely all doubters about the ability of no-till to produce solid yields. But it was clear that they wondered why more growers aren’t following suit.

Carrol Wyss harvests edible beans at Boyceville, Wis.

Edible beans running about 50 bushels per acre on Caroll Wyss' farm.

Jim Leverich harvesting corn at sunset near Sparta, Wis.

One of the nicest mats of soybean residue, along with a few cornstalks leftover from 2009, on Jim Leverich's farm.

Lance Gartner kneels in a field with six different species of cover crops.

Lance Gartner pulls up a radish. His cattle will graze cover crops and really respond well to mix of food sources they receive.

So, in this time of high unemployment and a stagnant economy and the threat of tax increases and the growing presence of disgruntled voters, just how do lawmakers on Capitol Hill figure that the American people are going to take their efforts seriously?

Here’s how. They will have a comedian — yes, a comedian — testify on Capitol Hill before the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship, Refugees, Border Security and International law at a hearing entitled “Protecting America’s Harvest.” (Wow, with a name like that, that committee sure has a lot to accomplish. Glad they could fit the comedian into their schedule.)

Yes, that’s right. We’ve been subjected before to Hollywood activists and even Elmo from Sesame Street in Capitol Hill testimony. Now Stephen Colbert — whom I’ve found to be humorous, even though my political leanings aren’t in step with his — will share his expertise on immigrant farm workers. Colbert is now an expert on immigrant farm labor since he spent one day on a New York vegetable farm picking sweet corn.

Colbert became involved in the immigration issue this summer when the United Farm Workers launched a “Take Our Jobs” campaign in an effort to prove that Americans will not do farm work so we have to hire migrant workers. The comedian decided to try out the job for himself, so that is what makes him an expert to testify before Congress about the importance of migrant workers for American agriculture.

Does this make sense to you, because it sure isn’t making sense to me. But then again, that’s why our fine Beltway and East Coast intellectuals are taking charge of the country because there are too many people like me who just aren’t smart enough to get it.

Obviously, the farmers who attend the National No-Tillage Conference have a strong love for agriculture. But once again, the NNTC has proven that it has the right atmosphere for love to bloom between a man and a woman.

Some of you may recall the story of how Indiana no-tiller Denny Roth and Missouri software trainer Sandy Cox met at the 1999 National No-Tillage Conference in St. Louis. At one point, they danced during the event. That was the start of a long-distance relationship. Eventually, the couple married after Denny sold his farm and took a job in ag sales to be with Sandy in Missouri.

Well, it’s happened again. According to a report in the Omaha World-Herald, Howard Warren Buffett will be marrying Lili Thomas, a Miami, Fla., resident but frequent visitor to Ogallala, Neb., where her family has a wheat farm. Buffett is the son of no-tiller and philanthropist Howard Graham Buffett — who spoke at the 2010 NNTC in Des Moines — and grandson of well-known investor Warren Edward Buffett.

The couple had originally met at a fundraiser for President Barack Obama in 2008. However, their relationship really took off after they got to spend a few days together in Des Moines during the conference.

According to the World-Herald report, Thomas recognized Buffett when she saw a photo of him and his Dad in a No-Till Farmer article last November (Sharing No-Till Benefits Around the Globe, pg. 27-34), and an ad promoting Howard Graham Buffett’s speaking engagement at the 18th annual event.

“I met him!” Thomas recalled telling her father after attending the event.

When they saw each other at the conference, Buffett told the World-Herald, “we just knew.”

We’ve always touted that by attending the National No-Tillage Conference, you’ll go home with many valuable ideas to improve your no-till operation and profitability. Not sure I’m ready to guarantee that single farmers will meet their future spouse at the conference, but let’s just say you just never know what you may “discover” at the NNTC.

Here’s a link to the World-Herald article if you’d like to read more. Congratulations to Howard and Lili from the No-Till Nation.

I’ll be the first to say that we need to make sure the crop protection products we use on our farms are safe to use. That’s why companies need to expend millions of dollars in research to show a reasonable safety factor and have their products registered for use with the EPA.

Hey, it’s one of the reasons the EPA exists in the first place. There needs to be checks and balances to make sure companies are responsible. But the question needs to be raised when it comes to atrazine, whether our federal agency is being responsible.

Crop protection products go through a re-review and re-registration process. It’s a fact of life, and it’s a way of making sure that products as labeled do what they were designed to do and have a reasonable factor of environmental and human safety to them. But now, just a few years after being re-approved, the EPA — under pressure from environmental activists and a couple of lawsuits — is prematurely opening the books on atrazine again.

So what’s different? Is there some new revealing, credible evidence that atrazine as used under its federal label is unsafe? Or is the only thing new have to do with which political party sits in the White House and currently controls Congress? Are we making decisions based on sound science or political leanings? You can make the call on that one.

You can learn more about the current battle over atrazine at AgSense.org and you can sign a petition supporting the use of atrazine if you’d like. In the meantime, check out this No-Till Farmer article that editor Frank Lessiter wrote in August 2006 about the battle over atrazine. After reading it, perhaps you’ll find that some things never change.

I just got back to my hotel room after attending Agro-Culture Liquid Fertilizers’ Professional Liquid Fertilizer Program. I received the opportunity to address a crowd of about 250 folks, including the company’s area managers, on the subject of Responsible Nutrient Management.

Now, how you define Responsible Nutrient Management can mean many things, but in it’s simplest terms, I think it means being as efficient and effective as possible with your fertility program in a way that pays off economically and doesn’t negatively impact the environment.

There are a lot of farmers today who are doing a great job using the right rate of fertilizer at the right time and putting in a place that the crop can use. In fact, our No-Till Practices Survey showed that 59% of our subscribers are applying less than 1 pound of nitrogen per 1 bushel of targeted yield, with 17% applying less than 0.8 pounds of nitrogen per bushel. That’s pretty phenomenal when you consider in 1980 that farmers were applying 1.65 pounds of nitrogen per bushel of corn raised. Furthermore, only 13% apply fertilizer in the fall, while 40% apply spring pre-plant, 53% at-plant, 55% sidedress and 10% foliar.

Those are some positive signs that growers are making an effort to be as efficient and effective as possible with nitrogen without hurting their yield and profitability.

But there’s work to be done. You’ve got hypoxia in the Gulf of Mexico, phosphorus issues in the Chesapeake Bay, nitrates in the Des Moines River and the list goes on and on. Are farmers responsible for these ills? Yes, to a degree. But so can industry waste, sewerage runoff and residential lawn fertilizer runoff.

The problem for farmers and folks who work in the ag industry today is that they make up only about 1% of the U.S. population and there are folks who don’t understand ag and don’t want to take responsibility for their role in water ills. Instead, farmers tend to get all the blame.

So, there’s work to be done. We’ll keep looking to share the best fertility practices of no-tillers, and we hope you’ll keep looking to share your good practices with other farmers or perhaps with the people in your community who don’t understand agriculture very well.

We’d also encourage you to nominate any no-tillers whose fertility practices you admire for the Responsible Nutrient Management Practitioners Program. You can learn more at www.ResponsibleNutrients.com.

A few days ago, I had blogged about the recent run-up in wheat prices on the market due to events in Russia and the Ukraine. Nila Martyniuk of the Agro-Soyuz Corp. in Majske, Ukraine — a good friend to No-Till Farmer and the National No-Tillage Conference — took a moment to update us on the situation on the other side of the globe.

Here are her comments:

“Often, when the press writes about Russia, the Ukraine is thrown into the same pot, so to speak. Ukraine, except for a few regions, has had a relatively successful winter wheat harvest. Russia, according to official announcements, has suffered a 30% decrease in grain harvest yields.

May rains covering significant portions of Ukraine allowed for moisture reserves to protect crops from the intense summer heat. As for the prospects for
winter wheat plantings in the steppes of Ukraine, it’s too early to tell since our rains statistically do come in September and October.”

We’ll try to share a few other insights from Nila at another time.

I’ve been watching with interest what’s happening with the grain markets since the Ukraine canceled some big export orders of wheat due to some delays in customs clearance and shortages from farmers, all fueled by a ban of wheat exports through the end of the year ordered by Russia. There is even talk that if the drought in the Ukraine continues and limits winter wheat plantings, the export ban could continue well into 2011.

So, at the open, wheat shot up the limit of 60 cents today as more buyers around the world are looking to the United States for its wheat. September wheat ended the day at $7.85 and will have a limit of 90 cents on Friday. We’re at 2-year highs.

Is it time to think about adding winter wheat into your rotation yet this year?

Of course, this also has a positive affect on corn and soybeans. December corn was up 3 cents to finish at $4.18 and November soybeans closed nearly 5 cents higher at $10.29. If the wheat shortage in the Ukraine drags on and U.S. producers start adding more wheat acres to take advantage of the price increase, this certainly could fuel further price increases in corn and soybeans, particularly heading into 2011.

Meanwhile, while this has the makings of good times in the U.S., keep in mind that Ukrainian farmers are likely not enjoying this scenario. We’ll drop a line to our friend Nila Martyniuk of the Agro-Soyuz Corp. in Majske, Ukraine, to see if she can share how our fellow no-tillers are doing there.

Like many no-tillers, Larry Bonnell of Pittsford, Mich., had a late harvest that made it difficult for him to get all of his acreage seeded to cover crops. He e-mailed me this weekend to share an interesting experiment he tried this spring.

Following are the excerpts of his e-mail to me.

“I have spread grain rye into corn stubble as late as November with excellent results. This year, I went and broadcast 20 pounds of annual rye into corn stubble on March 1 with the snow melting. Here in the last week of April, it’s 4 inches tall. I’m going to no-till soybeans into that corn stubble on May 1.

“I’m starting to see the added benefits of no-till after 10 years. My organic matter has risen from 1.7 to 3.2 in a very short time. Cover crops are the biggest thing that has helped.

“I quit baling wheat straw and blow it out the back. I then no-till annual rye into the stubble. On my soil test, I have 35-plus pounds of nitrogen for my corn and I’m cutting nitrogen rates a little.”

I hope you spent a good part of your Easter weekend with family and friends, particularly since you may be heading full speed into the fields if the weather cooperates in the coming days.

My father offered up some bits of farm wisdom during our family gathering Sunday when he told me that the weather you have on Good Friday is the type of weather you can expect for the next 30 days.

If that’s the case, southern Wisconsin farmers and many throughout the Corn Belt have got to like that bit of news. It was nearly 80 F at our home on Good Friday.

Of course, there’s another bit of farm wisdom, too, that says you better not plant corn unless field conditions are right. My father says he knows of one farmer in his county that already has planted 300 acres of corn. Of course, this same farmer was the first one in the field last year and re-planted nearly all of his corn.

There’s another saying: Get it done right the first time.