Harry, Henry and Floyd

Harry, Henry and Floyd are 3 men of agriculture I talked to yesteday.  Those are great old names, aren't they?  Harry Young has the NoTill Plaque on a roadside near his farm where notill really started in America in 1962 near Herndon, Kentucky.  His son and his grandson opened the 21st NNTC up, describing how notill has changed their lives and their farm.  I think everyone sitting there felt the same way.

Social media is so powerful now that my old friend Dr. Howard Doster was at home in Ohio when he saw a Tweet that his student Harry Young Jr. was speaking in Indianapolis.  Once again his dear wife Barbara got him here on time to listen to his former student at Purdue!  It sounded like the beat my land speed record from east of Cincinnati to downtown Indianapolis.

Before his talk I was part of two bus loads of notill farmers that got a wonderful tour of ET or Equipment Technologies in Brownsville Indiana.  We got to see Apache sprayers built from the ground up and received free spraying lectures and a lunch from City Barbeque as they often provide their dealers and customers.  Did you know an Apache sprayer loaded with product weighs less than a dry John Deere sprayer?  This is critical to notill.  Their philosophy matches the modern notill farm of simplicity, speed and light weight, ready to tackle any issue.  Their sprayer reminds me of Gleaner combines, simpler, lighter and stronger.  The big Gleaner weighs 6,000 pounds less than the equivalent John Deere.

In the seat ahead of me was Derek Hines of Maine, his wife, his son Keith and his 9 month old son Floyd.  Floyd reminded of Floyd's Toy pulling days when my oldest son Matt was little but he really reminded me of our grandson Finnegan by his face and his demeanor.  He listened to me pretty well for a 9 month old.   That reminds me of little Katherine!

Derek is renting worn out potato ground to notill soybeans and barley.  He was interested in what I had to say because his barley yields have tanked.  I mentioned SabrEx and he became very interested.  I explained he could get SabrEx on his beans too by innoculating with GraphEx SA which includes SabrEx.  I could tell he needs more disease control at seedling stage to harvest.  Potato ground is pretty dead because they spray so much fungicide.  He needs more soil health by keeping the ground covered and inoculating his seed for disease control.  We never had time to talk about the importance of calcium.

I got to talk in lenghth with Henry Apple of Bowling Green, Ohio at the FHR Hospitality suite.  He was allowed to miss class at his senior year at Bowling Green High School to attend the Farm to Plate Conference at Riverside, Iowa in December and now the NNTC!  His dad is a very progressive farmer with an innovative soybean seeder.  He took a worn out piece of ground and put on 3 tons of burnt calcium lime 8 years and now it is one of his best fields.

With all the young people here I say agriculture and notill has some good young hands coming up.  We need to nurture those hands and minds and keep sound agriculture at the forefront.

The hotel is overwhelmed with over crowding but so far we are getting along.  My French friend Odette Menard just gave a wonderful presentation on earthworms.  I will try to get her to put it on Slide Share and get her night video of earthworms on YouTube!  It was worth the price of admission!

Ed