Dog Days

Are these the dog days of summer? I have heard the crickets and cicadas for sometime now. The wildlife population must be maxed out, starting to see more fat racoons and skunks on the highway. Some skunks look like big porcupines!

The deer are really plentiful again so we are going to have to watch our driving this fall. There is a new big buck on the block and that guy is massive. LuAnn pointed it out late one evening to a visitor and he just looked in awe. I don't think he ever saw a buck that large.

This buck is so big you can see him easily grazing on the beans by the creek from our quarter mile vantage point at the house. There there are those smaller does everywhere. About half the heard seemed to be twins this summer so there are a lot of deer out there. It must have been a great year for a new crop of deer and other wildlife.

I wish LuAnn had a got a shot off the eight big coons wandering out of the grain bin setup. I haven't had time to look or do anything about them. I am more concerned about getting the unloading auger repaired and a new motor on another auger and getting all the wiring up to snuff. The guy who rewired the bins didn't finish his job.

We need to really clean out those bins and suck up all the excess kernals and dust for the new crop. That requires renting a grain vac and the dirty job of operating it. Now that would make Mike Rowe's World's Dirtiest Jobs, vaccuming out grain bins!

Have a good Tuesday, we will hopefully.

Ed

Monday

So nice to have some moderating weather! Farmers have to be reeling with this new marketplace today! I bet many forward contracts got surpassed this weekend and the procastinators got rewarded for not doing anything.

Prices of all three commodities are about as good as they have been all year, so we really can't complain now. The farmers who hedge positions and made a profit at the bottom have bought back in and riding it to the top again. Those very few, rare people are making money at both ends!

Me, I will be happy with just a profitable net price I can live with. I can live with all of the prices today until inlfation sets in and all my inputs go up again. It is a constant game of "catch up."

Inbetween, a handful of farmers will have record crops, most will have less than last year and a few will have really poor crops. I guess it is like that somewhere every year. This is where crop insurance comes in and most carry it because most farmers borrow money to put out a crop and a lender is going to require you to carry crop insurance.

I got a little check finally for my little bit of replant corn. If I had my drainage straightened out on these farms I wouldn't have needed it because it was basically cosmetic anyhow. You had a narrow window to do it once and do it right and I doubt that replant will pay for me. Hopefully you are different if you had to replant.

That's where it stands here on the first of August.

Ed

Cool Down

I love to take pictures of field canopies. It is a whole different environment down in our fields. My goal of having my soil covered by summer solstice June 21 really paid off this summer as it was so much cooler down there than on top of the leaves. Still, it got quite hot on the soil surface across the midwest with these near record temperatures we had this summer.

Lots of things need cooling down right now. It is so pleasant this morning here it is a real breath of fresh air. We need that breath in our lives, in our country and in our relationships in some cases. There is nothing like a cool down to get a new perspective on things.

It takes heat to make things happen, especially in a crop field but it is nice when its over and you get a cooling down time like we have today. It is the first of August already and my younger son is thirty years old tomorrow. Where did 30 years ago? Some days it just drug on but overall it was the blink of an eye.

Such is life. Some farmers will be at Farmfest 2010 in Minnesota this week while others will be looking at David Hula's and other operations down in hot, dry Virginia. Others of us will be doing the daily routine or vacationing or whatever. No matter what you are doing, today's cool down will be a nice break for us.

We have decided to plant wheat again this fall with the recent rally as local millers are bidding in the seven dollar range for wheat for their needs next summer. That throws a pleasant kink in our fall plans but it will keep our fragile soil covered and give us opportunity to address lime, drainage, weeds and a host of problems on some of our farms.

Every day brings something new and this one is no different in that aspect. We are looking forward to seeing family and friends this week and making some new friends.

Whatever you do this week, make the most of it.

We will try.

Ed Winkle

Judging

Yesterday we judged the third day of the Clermont County Fair Flower Show. It took more time than the other days as the exhibits seemed to be more closely matched. The exhibits all looked good but you can see where the dry weather is setting in. Today I saw my first spider mites on the edge of soybean fields on Farmers Road.

We had quite a crowd watching as we got down to the Best of Show. The dahlias often win but yesterday there was a little too much damage from the drought on the foliage. We picked a baby's shoe full of a flower arrangement for Baby's First Steps or whatever they called that category. The theme categories are always interesting and the Midway them is shown in the big arrangements on the left of this picture.

Today I had to get a new padlock for the old barn and some rough service bulbs for the grain dump building. The Martinsville Mall didn't have any so Sable and I wondered over to the old Murphy Hardware store in Lynchburg managed by Charlie Spaeth and his daughter and grand daughter. Charlie used to run the only grocery store in town and knows Lynchburg as well as anyone.

Lynchburg has seen quite a demise over the past 50 years like most rural towns but a few good stores are holding on. I will have to go there more often as he said his business is off half from last year. The big box stores like Lowe's and WalMart has killed most of the mom and pop stores and I much prefer spending my money in the little stores.

They do have two good little diners in Lynchburg and we eat there once in awhile. Cantrell's First Stop killed off the good little Marathon station and has the only groceries in Lynchburg now. That's a similar story across the nation, no matter the town.

Tomorrow we go judge the Great Greene County Fair in Xenia. Xenia is famous for the tornado that almost destroyed it back in 1974 when I was a young teacher driving through Xenia to take an FFA member to the DP&L FFA Awards in Dayton. We made it but we were lucky to tell about it. Thirty something people didn't.

It's Xenia too, not Zenia. It is pronounced zenia like Xavier is pronounced zavier not X avier like lots of people do. Words that start with X really messes people up in English.

They had another tornado a few years back that just about destroyed the fairgrounds, too.

Such was the last day of July for us.

How was your day?

Ed Winkle

GypSoil

A farmer asked on AgTalk this week about GypSoil. He wondered if it was worth the money to try this product to improve his tough to manage black gumbo soil. The answer is gypsoil will help but what is the economic benefit?

My corn in the picture would benefit greatly from gypsoil, broadcast gypsum, pelleted gypsum, any kind of gypsum. All of these products are forms of calcium sulfate which occurs naturally in some formations of limestone or can be now be made synthetically by removing the sulfur from coal burning plant stacks using high calcium lime to scrub the stack walls.

"The benefits of gypsum use in agricultural production have been studied for many centuries. Recent research continues to substantiate earlier studies as well as find new benefits to gypsum use. Here is a summary of data in a concise format.

Benefits of gypsum include:

:1. Improving soil structure
2. Amend sodium affected soils
3. Improve soil infiltration
4. Decreases the swelling of clays
5. Offsets affects of aluminum toxicity in low pH soils
6. Helps curb phosphorus runoff from soils
7. Improves quality of several fruit and vegetable crops
8. Is an excellent source of plant available calcium and sulfur
9. Increases iron uptake by reducing the detrimental effects of bicarbonates
10. Serves to decrease the bulk density of soils
11. Useful tool in decreasing the negative effects of high magnesium in soils
12. Increases the efficiency of nitrogen applications
13. Increases the availability of potassium already present in the soil
14. Offsets ill effects of irrigation with poor quality water
15. Can serve as a tool to enhance iron, manganese and zinc availability
16. Aid to stop soil erosion
17. Decreases incidence of some diseases
18. This list could go on forever

Sounds like a miracle product, doesn't it? Ben Franklin painted words on the hills of Philadelphia with gypsum. The plants were so much more green where he applied the gypsum.

If I could get an affordable source I would apply a half ton per acre to all my land every year. It is that good. It increases water absorption in the soil that much.

What is affordable? That is a personal question. My budget would be $20 per acre. It might be worth $50 an acre but that is getting pricey in my budget.

You can't go to your dealer and buy it. The closest outlets here are probably Columbus, Ohio and eastern Indiana unless I am willing to pay a premium price for it. I could get it delivered next week from many sources if I am willing to pay double or triple the price at the source.

I am not willing to pay that at this time, perhaps some day I will. Everything I do today has been after years of seeing the effects of what I started. I just haven't started this one yet on a grand scale like liming or tiling or cover crops. It may be just as valuable or even more so.

That's the brief on gypsum. It works. Try some. Maybe you will want to build it into your cropping or gardening program.

Ed

Teachable Moment

Yesterday I had that teachable moment again. 42 French speaking farmers from Quebec visited our farm to learn more about no-till. As we walked down to the modified drill planter I whipped out LuAnn's Cybershot and took this picture.

Teachable moment. I showed them how the Martin system works on a drill or planter by tip toeing over the soil one trip and gently tucking the seed into crumbly soil that warms up quickly after the planting pass. It enables farmers to plant quicker than not no tilling and get back into the field quicker after a rain event. It really works well for us.

I explained how the Martin system was developed and how I almost quit no-tilling until I met Paul Reed on AgOnline. Paul and Keith Schlapkohl and many others are my mentors and I showed them my cell phone and how I could call any of 300 people for answers to my questions. One farmer quickly pulled out his wallet and asked, how much for your cell phone? We all had a good laugh with that one.

We talked much about conservation and nutrient balance. I shared my soil and tissue tests, my prize possessions I worked hard for because they were done right and really mean something to me. I stressed tp then to get the right soil test, follow it within your crop budget and spread a little of all the nutrients it says you need, not just the NPK we get in a fertilizer bag or mix. Follow it up with tissue tests as they are more accurate on what the plant got than the soil test says they need, especially on ratios and micro nutrients. Attention to calcium and secondary and mircro nutrients has made me a lot of money.

How do you explain what you have learned in 60 years in a 3 hour visit? You don't. You outline the major points, make bullet statements, answer questions, study your group while you are talking and make adjustments. That is the mastering of teaching in a nutshell.

Every classroom is different each day depending who is there and what mood they are in. These farmers paid to get on a bus and come to the states and learn and see how others do it so they can improve their own operations.

Speaking two different languages throws a real kink in the communication. Their leader, Odette Menard, did an excellent job interpreting. I would speak a bullet point, she would speak it in French and we would talk back and forth and fine tune the communication. I have done this in Europe and China so I had some experience in doing it.

I spoke of all our differences except for two things, we both grow soybeans and we both no-till. Right there we have much in common. So I focused on seed, treatments, biologicals, inoculants, pest control, harvesting and the like. The were very impressed with the nodulation on my crop and counted 60 pods on a 160,000 population.

A couple were pushing their calculators and showed me the number and it was so large I laughed and told them I would be very happy with half that many beans.

We talked about cover crops, we talked about double crops, we talked about tillage radishes, we talked about inoculants but it all centered around no-till farming. This is the ninth cash crop in this field in seven years and I have had some cover crops, too.

I am sure they learned new ideas and they gave me personal information and invited my wife and I up to see their crops and where they live. I hope we can reciprocate some day.

As they loaded up and were ready to pull away, the UPS truck pulled up and there was a new hat for each from NoTill Farmer Magazine thanks to my good friend Alice Musser. I said see, I told you I was well connected! They cheered and saluted Alice and waved goodbye going down the road.

Today they will get to see the work of my friend David Brandt in Carroll, Ohio. They had already visited our close friends the Dean's in Bryan, Ohio and we all share tips regularly and check up on each other.

July 28 was quite a day and a very teachable moment.

Ed

Free Breakfast For A Year!

"Ohio residents can register at www.FarmersFeedUS.org to win one of two grand prizes of "Free Breakfast for a Year" at Bob Evans Restaurants. Visitors to the site will be guided through registration by an Ohio farmer, who will also explain how he or she produces safe, nutritious and affordable food. Consumers can register with each of seven farmers daily through the end of the program on Oct. 15.

"Ohio's farmers work hard every day to produce the food that feeds us," says David White, executive director for the Ohio Livestock Coalition. "Through this program, we hope Ohio consumers learn more about how the state's farmers provide safe, nutritious, affordable food, while caring for their animals, land, families and communities."In addition to guiding visitors through their registrations for "Free Breakfast for a Year," the www.FarmersFeedUS.org www.FarmersFeedUS.org website features beef, dairy, pork, lamb, soybean, egg, and turkey farmers from across the state sharing information about their farms and their families.

The site also features nutritious recipes and fun farm facts. "We take great pride in our company's heritage – founded by a farmer in southeastern Ohio – and we are proud to partner with Ohio's farmers to provide our customers with the opportunity to win 'Free Breakfast for a Year,'" says Mary Cusick, senior vice president of marketing, Bob Evans Farms. "Through this sweepstakes, we are helping our customers better understand where their food comes from and helping them meet the wonderful people who provide it – Ohio farmers."More information, complete rules and eligibility requirements for the sweepstakes can be found at www.FarmersFeedUS.org."

How can you beat free breakfast for a year? That even beats my 50 cent breakfast so many of you nominated for my best blog! Kudo's to Bob Evan's Farms Restaurants for supporting this effort and Tim White and staff at Ohio Farmer for the great story and links.

Looks like we are headed to a local Bob Evan's for breakfast this weekend. Residents of Ohio, Indiana, Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan and Missouri can enter as this is Bob Evan's marketing area. You can meet a farm family in those states by clicking on that state on the entry form on the website.

Enter and learn more about farmers from those states!

Ed