Email

I was thinking how some important people to me have not answered recent email.  Did I offend them?  Are they OK?  Are they overwhelmed?  Are they sick of email?

You have to wonder.  Email is my number one method of correspondence.  I can think out my thoughts and word them carefully.  I can get a message to a reader in seconds if the servers are up and they are online.  The way people drive down the road, you would think they are all online, wouldn't you?

I sent my first email when email first came to life in the early 90's.  In fact, I think I posted my first comments on the old Bulletin Boards we had on the Radio Shack Color Computer in the late 70's or early 80's.  I lived at Fayetteville which had a Cincinnati phone line connection to the more modern things "down town."  I sent my first email on Outlook Express in January, 1995 when Curt Bolin helped me build my first MicroSoft driven computer.

That's when I found www.Agriculture.com and the Crop Scouting page.  We had 4 bad springs in a row (95-98) and I was ready to give up notill.  I posted my query on Crop Scouting and a farmer in Iowa suggested I take the notill coulters off and plant earlier rather than wait for the soil to dry out.  Take off the notill coulters?  Why, you can't plant without coulters!  By golly it worked and it worked well!  By 1999 I had the old White 5100 with about every Martin and J&S Ag Innovation attachment you could think of.  I have never found a better planter for me to this day!

You could go out on a day when the tillage guys were itching to field cultivate and successfully plant corn or soybeans in very damp, tacky condtions and get a good stand.  I learned to tip toe over the soil with a 1655 Oliver and 6 row planter.  It all came together in 2004 when we bought our best land ever and we had our best growing year to date. I have never beaten my corn yields since.  I should have, but unlike the champion corn growers this year I didn't work with Mother Nature.

1999 was a different matter.  I planted sweet corn and corn in March which did extremely well in one of our worst drought years.  I tried then new RR soybeans and had also had my worst soybean crop to date, 20 bushels per acre.  The things flat out died in  the middle of the summer!  Yield drag?  Yield lag?  How about NO YIELD?  I also planted Ohio Stressland soybeans with a CrustBuster drill and they made nearly 50 bushels with no rain!  But they weren't GMO and I didn't spray RoundUp herbicide on them!  13 years later I figured out what happened.

Mother Nature was sending me a strong message.  RoundUp is a strong chelator because its active ingredient was invented to clean railroad tank cars.  Yes sir it killed the algae in the tank but when they cleaned the tanks they found it killed the weeds and brush around the tracks!  Voila!  Instant weed killer!  Would you spray industrial tank cleaner all over the world and expect higher yields?  Think about that for a bit.

Like any other mail, email can become a curse, too.  Maybe that's what happened to my serious email expecting serious results.  Maybe I didn't acquire the desired results because I need to take a different mode of action.

A personal visit may be required.  That will be difficult on my part but sometimes you have to look the source in the face.  That's true about people, soil and plants.

If you email me, I treasure it.  Then I must file it in it's proper place.  My hard drives and files are full of it to prove it.  Yet I am lacking some key pieces.  I found a picture of my record corn in 2004 but I can't find that picture from the top of the grain bins.

I must get back to work on that.

Ed