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.

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.

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.

Farming was too easy for us no-tillers and all farmers when that stuff came out, and now we have so many resistant weeds we have to go do what we should have done in the first place: Read labels, follow them and learn about adjuvants and tankmix partners.
 
Ignite or Gramoxone are contact killers, so they require more water and different droplet size than glyphosate.  Marestail, tall waterhemp and resistant pigweed or palmer amaranth has made us all re-think this spray-issue deal.
 
The crop in Ohio has really caught up, with fields tasseling now or wanting too, but it’s all confused. I wrote a blog on that issue this morning at www.hymark.blogspot.com.  I hope it makes you think about your no-till cornfields because ours are confused!
 
Spraying is job one this week in Ohio, so farmers have all kinds of questions about adjuvants, glyphosate tie-up of manganese and other nutrients, how to kill tall weeds, how to kill weeds that didn’t die the first trip, and so forth and so on.  Tons of questions, few answers!
 
We’re thankful though for the heat and moisture, and for places like the NNTC, where we can all go learn and talk about these things this winter.  I have spent all my life killing weeds and learning how to build and save soil instead of tearing it down. 

Life and Mother Nature hit me hard this spring! Hope to talk to you in January if not before.