No-Till Farmer Blog

We often talk about the value of soil porosity and soil biology, and we talk about macropores and earthworms, but a video taken by Dave Robison of Cisco Seeds really did a nice job of visually portraying a good soil profile built upon high earthworm populations (and numerous earthworm channels), the benefits of cover crops, good tile drainage and more.

In this video, you can see smoke from a diesel engine that’s pumped into pressurized tile emerging from the macropores of a corn field. It’s a pretty neat site to see the smoke rising up from the soil. You can see more videos at www.plantcovercrops.com.

Frank Gibbs, NRCS soils specialist, presented this experiment in Williams County, Ohio.

Last night, I didn’t watch President Obama’s speech on his economic plan. After the first few minutes of watching enthusiastic applause for the President from the members of the House and Senate, and others, I just couldn’t bare to watch it. Our elected leaders deserve our respect, but count me as one of many individuals who are having trouble putting my faith in government. It just seems that too many politicians are living in their own little world inside the Beltway, oblivious to the real world outside D.C.

Today, I received an e-mail from one of the communications agencies I correspond with regularly that offered a video of the Birds Point Levee disaster this past spring. Watching this video once again reminded me why I probably felt the way I did Thursday night as the President was about to address the nation.

While I realize the Army Corps of Engineers believes it was proper to blow several holes in the levee to avert a possible disaster in Cairo, Ill., what it did to the farmland and communities in the New Madrid flood zone has been nothing short of disastrous. It appears some of the assumptions they made were just flat-out wrong, and the damage to this area may be far greater than anticipated.

I don’t have all the facts; this is just one view of the disaster. But the video suggests that our government that created the disaster in this area — the disaster didn’t occur naturally, it was the government that decided when and where the disaster would hit — has not done anything for the people whose lives were impacted.

Watch the video. You’ll see some amazing images of soil erosion and destruction, and you’ll hear how devastating this event has been on folks impacted by the Birds Point Levee disaster.

It’s almost September — where did the summer go?

How do your crops look?  Ours look good, but have had plenty of stress of planting in near mud, then record heat and rapid growth. I’ve never seen corn grow that fast in my 61 years.

Look at your fields and find out what is really going on inside them. Here, the corn is not so good 20 rows in.

The ProFarmer Crop Tour, and all the pictures on Crop Talk, has spurred a lot of farmers to look at their crops. I’ve been studying them again all summer and I really wonder about Goss’s Wilt.

Some good friends did their own crop tour and they think ProFarmer is even high on their yield estimates. They think Goss’s Wilt has really wrecked the U.S. corn crop and will again.

Look up Goss’s Wilt. It’s a bacterial blight that was first found in Nebraska in 1969. There is concern our plant genome and farmer practices have led to the outbreak of this disease in the last few years.

I would like to hear a good pathologist who can communicate to farmers speak on the disease followed up by a farmer who understands it from his fields and has taken action against it.  I think that is something we could all learn from.

On soybeans, it’s weed resistance that is the rage again this year. The Roundup Ready program is failing in more and more states as resistance builds up and resistant weeds spread. It “looks pretty good” in so many places, but there is a false sense of security.

I just looked at a “clean field” of RR soybeans that looked really good and were well-podded.  I found 3 patches of resistant weeds in it that glyphosate didn’t control.

Here in southwest Ohio, the main weed culprits are marestail at No. 1, closely followed by giant ragweed and common ragweed, lambsquarter and pigweed. Redroot pigweed, and its cousins Palmer amaranth and tall waterhemp, have wrecked a lot of soybean acres in the U.S. this year.

That’s why I’m on a mission to learn about sprayer-tank chemistry, glyphosate soil residual and glyphosate resistance. Learning never stops and this is especially true of no-till and how we farm today.