“HELP!” Horticulturist Ron Morse remembers the day nearly 30 years ago when that message, scrawled by a county extension agent on the bottom of a snapshot, arrived at his Virginia Tech University office. The photo showed a mud slide blocking a rural Appalachian farm road. What was left of a cabbage patch planted on a steep sloping field was mired in the mud.
As plantings of genetically modified (GM) crops continue to climb by millions of acres per year, one crop stands out for its absence from the list. Wheat growers, including no-tillers, are still waiting for the benefits of biotechnology, and the wait is likely to be a long one.
With concerns continuing to develop over glyphosate weed resistance in no-tilled crops, weed scientists keep suggesting that growers start using LibertyLink and Clearfield traits that offer alter- native herbicide modes of action.
There are at least 10 ways adjuvants can make your post-emergence herbicide work harder — and literally hundreds of adjuvant products to choose from. Here’s a look at what’s causing this proliferation and how you can be sure you’re treating your crops right.
It’s no longer a guessing game, but rather a matter of sorting through all the information to find seed that fits your no-till field conditions and practices.
There have never been more corn hybrid selections and protections on the market to help meet the needs of no-tillers. We’ve moved a long way from the hybrid guessing game no-tillers were in just a few short years ago.
For more timely no-tilling, John Deere in late August introduced the 1990 CCS no-till air drill as a replacement for the 1890 model. For big-acreage growers, these new no-till drills offer many options for designing a high-capacity seeding rig to fit your operation.
If I had to pick out one consistent thing about no-tilling that I have observed over and over, it is that most no-till benefits come with continuous no-till — season to season and crop to crop. That’s the message I delivered last winter to attendees at the 2005 National No-Tillage Conference just a few days after I retired from the Natural Resources Conservation Service. And it’s the message I would like to expand upon as a private consultant: It’s time for the no-till community to aim higher.
No-tillers growing non-biotech crops in which genetically modified crops are also growing due to wind-blown pollen or volunteer plants from a previous year’s seeds are liable to be sued by Monsanto Company, according to the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Food Safety. So are no-tillers who grow biotech crops without signing Monsanto’s technology agreement, the group says.
BASF, the chemical company most widely known for its ongoing “We make it better” TV commercials, owes U.S. farmers $52 million for making it dishonestly.
Contrary to what you may think, most contestants don’t go overboard with inputs in their contest fields and find that competing helps them find new ways to push up no-till yields across the entire farm.
When it comes to learning what it takes to turn out profitable corn yields, many no-tillers find they learn a great deal from having contest plots on their farms.
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On this episode of Conservation Ag Update, brought to you by Martin-Till, precision specialist Chad Baker, co-owner of Baker Precision Planter Works in Orangeville, Ill., helps a first-generation no-tiller with planter setup, and later encounters a couple problems with a strip-tiller’s new 24-row planter. Plus, veteran agronomist Brad Forkner checks in with a couple tips for farmers to keep in mind before they take the field.
Needham Ag understands the role of technology in making better use of limited resources within a specific environment by drawing on a wealth of global experience to overcome the challenges facing today's farmers, manufacturers and dealers.
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