Pesticide Regulation

I just posted the contents of an email of a long time friend and reader on Crop Talk. I am seeing more and more evidence of government scrutiny and regulation of all things environmental, which does affect agriculture greatly.

Would you, the average farmer or spray operator apply for this permit? We all spray near potentially running water and therefore I think we are all subject to the ruling. Even a "dry ditch" becomes a tributary in a heavy rainfall event.

I really don't want to apply for another permit and I imagine most will not. I do want to be covered in any "investigated report" that we may have sprayed near a body of water where pesticide could be claimed to cause damage to the quality or contents of the stream. The potential is there.

The potential should be very small most of the time so most won't concern themselves with this. Most of the herbicides we use only affect plants to any extent so I am not too concerned about fish kills or other wildlife effects.

"In accordance with the 1990 Farm Bill, all private applicators are required by law to keep record(s) of their federally restricted use pesticide (RUP) applications for a period of 2 years. The USDA Agricultural Marketing Service’s (AMS) Pesticide Recordkeeping Program administers the Federal pesticide recordkeeping regulations through compliance and educational outreach activities."

We are licensed and we do keep records. We can always improve the record keeping and I need to ask the first point contact, our Ohio Department of Agriculture pesticide person what they look for in a spot check or investigated report.

I will keep you abreast of what I learn on the subject.

Enjoy the warm weather!

Ed Winkle

Crop Insurance Revised

How many of you are impacted by crop insurance? I think it affects us all as it subsidized by our Federal Government but really only impacts my farmer readers directly. Thursday is the last day to sign up for the product.

I never used crop insurance until we bought our first farm large enough to need to address our risk of putting out larger acreages of crops. That was 2004 and some of those fields have produced 11 crops in 8 years through my double cropping practice.

There are several different products available, GRIP, GRP or commonly called group and CRC which is also a revenue product today. This one is most common in crop producing areas.

Basically, I need a history of 4 corn crops on a piece of ground to get full benefit of the product I select to insure it. I have that on some, not on all. I can buy $900 worth of income protection for $38 on my longest history ground and only $600 for $24 on my short history farms. It adds up to thousands and dollars of insurance but tens of thousands of income protection.

The meeting between my young banker and agent went well. After an hour and a half of discussion, my brain wandered off thinking, these guys are having old home day and I only wanted us to agree on my risk! I guess we accomplished our mission.

Today I am trying to figure out how to best get my nitrogen in place for that corn crop while getting the ground in shape for production. There is always some land shaping to do, even in "no-till."

My friends are emailing each other about red meat consumption in the news and pink slime while the front page of the paper is about surplus salt sitting in all the county warehouses from the record warm winter.

Weather is the news today as we will approach the record high of 79 degrees and farmers are itching to get in the fields. One farmer in Indiana is planting soybeans today.

"The next few weeks weather forecast has farmers shining up their planters and looking to the fields. Just a reminder, see below for the earliest planting dates for corn and soybeans in your area.

Corn and Soybeans planted before the earliest planting date will still be insurable, but our underwriters cannot authorize a replant payment on acreage initially planted before that date. Acreage planted before the earliest planting date must be replanted if authorized by an adjuster, in accordance with the RMA Loss Adjustment Manual, to remain insurable. Acreage that is replanted after the earliest plant date may be eligible for a replant payment on the second replant.

Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, & Illinois
Corn Early planting date - April 5th
Soybean Early planting date - April 20th

Missouri & Iowa
Corn Early planting date - March 25th
Soybean Early planting date - April 15th

Ed

Plant Identification

Plant identification is an important part of the study of just about any field of agriculture. It's a basic part of any agronomy class because we need to know what plants we are dealing with.

The Internet has expanded my scouting to the state next door to around the world. I get all kinds of plants and pictures emailed to me. I got this one in yesterday's mail and it stumped me for awhile.

It's in a lawn in Arkansas that looks like a pasture field. I saw the purple dead nettle, a relative of Henbit in the background and the flower resembles it. But the plant looks more like a grass than a broadleaf, the two major plant classes, so the blue flower on the green stem confused me.

Opening the picture up, it looks like an onion plant. I don't know if they have blue blooms but it sure looks like onion. What is your identification of this plant? An application of 2,4-D or TriMec lawn weed killer would help control these weeds in this "au naturale lawn" but we better plant some grass seed to fill the space!

Any of the fescue type lawn grasses work well here to the south. Fescue has been credited to saving more soil in the south than any other plant introduced to the region.

So how is your plant identification and weed id? Who do you go to for identification? As an ag teacher and county agent, I have been looking up plant names all my life.

I started a bad thing today, I mowed grass. Mowing stimulates growth and now it will be mow, mow, mow all year!

Ed

Maine

I'm getting the bug to travel again. LuAnn suggested I relive our trips by writing about a different state each week, like States of America, every Saturday or Sunday. How about Monday? It's more like it might happen when the mood hits me!

For some reason I thought of Maine this morning. I saw my friend Andy in St. Louis, he grows sweet corn and fresh market produce at County Fair Farm. He was one of the first fellows I met who wanted to raise sweet corn without tillage. His old Maine farm has plenty of drainage and too many rock and reduced tillage made sense to him.

We finally made it to his place on one of our trips up the east coast around ten years ago. He has made a lot of improvements to his farm since our trip. He was excited about his son graduating from college and coming back to the farm to help manage the challenging task of marketing their fresh market produce. Andy is the farmer and one person can't handle all the tasks well.

Maine is known for timber, potatoes and maple syrup, among other crops. Fresh market produce has grown in rapid acceptance, a trend we see across the United States. Agriculture is important to Maine's economy, like it is in every state.

The lobster and sweet corn is terrific, but I love the sweet Maine shrimp. I can't get enough of them when we are there. Maine is a beautiful place to visit and we vividly remember the bed and breakfast south of Jefferson, Maine that had the outdoor shower. There is an Italian restaurant on the ocean, kind of in the middle of nowhere we visited on two different trips that is as good as they come.

One time we drove all the way through Maine on the way to Nova Scotia. We had the most beautiful weather you can imagine right before a major hurricane came up the east coast. Our first trip was over ten years ago for an east coast soil and water meeting and the boat trip to an island lobster bake was so foggy you couldn't see your hand in front of your face.

You don't hear much about Maine or Mainelanders, they keep to themselves. They don't keep their hospitality or beauty of their state when you visit.

Ed

News

What should I write about today? So many different things are in ag and other news. People I network with are discussing so many different things from somatic cell counts in milk to rehashing ethanol as a fuel. Here is a good link on somatic cells, or white blood cell counts in milk.

I only try to write about something I am passionate about and lately I am not passionate about anything but being a good person, helping others, and thinking about my work list before spring planting.

Tomorrow I have an important crop insurance meeting with my young banker and my young agent. I don't know why I did this but trying to decipher from one and explain to the other, I gave up and thought I will just try to get all three heads together at once. I have no idea how it will work out but I will let you know. It can't be any worse than trying to pick a policy the last 8 years, can it?

I am trying to help several part time farmers raise corn by email. Now talk about a challenge, one is retired like me but hasn't raised corn before, the others only know what they have learned since they were little and spend most of their energy on their full time jobs.

At least I got them all soil testing. I had to have a basis to start with. We have addressed CHOPKINSCaFeMg(mightygood)food recipe for corn. That is calcium, mangesium, phosphorous, potassium, sulfur, zinc, boron, copper, manganese. Now, how much nitrogen do we put on and how do we do it?

The easiest way is to put half on with the planter and half side-dressed. This requires tanks on the planter and longer fill-ups some farmers won't put up with. Most small farmers don't have proper side dressing equipment so they hire it done and worry they are getting ripped off or losing nitrogen.

Another way is to put a smaller amount with the planter or before the planter, a third or so with the chemical and a third or so side dressed. Any way can work, some are easier to do and others are more efficent but require more investment.

Two years ago I hired it all put one preplant with anhydrous ammonia and N Serve, a nitrogen stabilizer. That worked very well, let me focus on planting and the tissue test and yield said it was the right thing to do. Last year there was no time to do that so we put a big shot on at planting and tried to get the rest side dressed.

This year my soil nitrate is around 50 ppm so I will put on about a third with the herbicide and dribble the rest on before a rain. 28% UAN was $330 a ton three weeks ago at our lowest bidder it will be $400 a ton a planting.

That's what's in the news at HyMark Consulting LLC today. It looks like rain tomorrow then a chance all week. There is lots to do, so have a good week!

Ed

Bt Resistance

I posted links on Facebook and Twitter to a story that National Public Radio picked up about researchers across the United States who wrote to Monsanto about resistance to certain Bt events. Bt stands for Bacillus thurengeinsis and was found by a Japanese scientist in 1901.

Our daughter Becky asked my opinion about the story so I thought I would explain it today. I basically said don't believe everything you read and hear. I say that because there is so much not known about genetically engineered or modified organisms you will see the extremes first. You will hear everything from it's the greatest thing since sliced bread to it is killing us. The truth is probably somewhere inbetween.

The first Plant Variety Protection Act was approved in 1970. Before the first genetically modified seed was released to the public, the Plant Variety Protection Act was also modified in 1994 to protect "scientific property," even though many finds were at tax funded Land Grant institutions. Many were not. The first thing farmers learned that they could no longer save seed because of the complexity of these laws. That threw up a big red flag but most drove right on past to gain the productive advantages of less insecticide for corn or less chemical for soybeans.

Genetically modified seed made it so much easier to farm that these seeds took over 90% of farmers purchases by recent years. Now, 18 years later, we find rootworms resistant to the Bt in early genetic events and "super weeds" that are very difficult to control. It's easy to say it failed, it's failing or we never should have gone that route.

Some farmers never saw the need for the more expensive seed and kept using what they had been, non genetically modified seed. Since 1994, very little of my seed has been genetically modified. I had to prove it to myself. GMO corn never made more profit in my trials but Liberty Link soybeans are a very easy way to control the resistant weeds around here.

I work with farmers who are 100% GMO and 100% non GMO. Most best management practices aren't any different on either type of farm.

So I guess it comes down to your belief on which way to go. Either way is feasible and either way can work or fail.

It's up to us to obtain the information we need to make that decision. Those scientists are asking companies to proceed cautiously. Those companies will have to make and live with their own decisions.

Ed

Responsibility

I take what I write pretty seriously. I like to have fun like everyone else and some people have the talent for humor and light heartedness. Somedays I am more so than others, but I take my blog pretty seriously. Blogging is a responsibility to me.

Thanks to Google, NewAgTalk, and now FaceBook and Twitter, more and more people read what I write. The most difficult thing about blogging for me is to find a subject I am passionate about every day. 365 days a year is a lot of passion but I have been able to accomplish that for three years.

Today this blog is featured on FarmnWife's Blog. She invited me to answer a few simple questions about myself a week ago and it is published today. You can read it here.

Thanks to Judi and all of you readers for getting the word out to obtain this recognition. I wrote the blogs, you read them and you spread the word. I thank you for that.

Keep sending me questions, ideas, comments and email. I try to answer every question I receive because if you have that question, someone else in the world has it, too.

I consider myself a pretty average person, no better or worse than you but I have never met an average person in my life. Each is a distinct creation with gifts and talents and tales and experiences. Meld them all together and you get a picture of a very interesting person.

My blog arose from my passion from teaching agriculture, farming and helping others. That is what I am here for. So, keep reading, asking and making HyMark High Spots a well known agriculture blog. You don't have to agree with me but if you take time to read it and comment, we both can learn from the experience.

For me, that makes blogging gratifying.

Ed Winkle