Demise of the English Language

A farmer found an advertisement he brought up on Machinery Talk. I thought his post hinted at the demise of the English language.

"This was pointed out on the British Farming Forum. New Holland has published the T7 series brochure on their Euro website. However someone forgot to review the document. They have a couple of user testimonials. However on page 10, someone left the note "Fake testimonal needed". Was I the only person naive enough to think they would ask real users what they think about the product?? Haha."

That is quite an editing blooper, especially among farmers. We can be relentless yet forgiving and have been more attached to the work end of food production than the print end of it.

Two of the best things I got from my public education was my instruction in English and typing. My science instruction was good but didn't match with my mathematics instruction. I got caught or left somewhere in the middle. They never found all the good in me, I had to find it on my own. Wow, that sentence just struck me, myself as I have never thought of it that way.

I have tried to make an easily understandable lesson plan as young teacher to a very readable blog as an older farmer. I read tons of material and have to put it in a understandable, readable form I can understand and share with others. I am a sharing person because I learned quickly that is how you move along in society. There is great need to make the complex simple throughout life.

Whoever wrote and printed up the New Holland brochure missed more than I did. A farmer found the brochure and put it up on the Web for all to read. I hope and work to do better than that and please call me out when I don't. That is why all blogs I trust have a comment section and why I use it. The writer doesn't know what you are thinking unless they get feedback.

Spelling mistakes is one thing, typograhphical errors are another but printing a brochure with modern day text style social communication writing is pretty bad. Is it unforgivable?

Today, it is. Or is it?

My English teachers should cringe when I make a mistake I should have found.

This is where the social network really falls short in communication. The network provides ultra fast ideas and sharing, but are they communicated in a way all can understand?

Ed

What To Plant

I see the market is getting all exciting about what farmers should plant. Shoot, I set that course with what I did last year and the year before.

I guess acres do flucuate to make markets respond but it is pretty steady. Not too many farmers just jump into corn after corn or whatever. It looks like corn and cotton are kings with record prices. Someone said cotton is it has been since the Civil War when we ran out of cotton for soldier uniforms.

Watching the hounds on US Farm Report I can see why farmers don't trust marketing advisors either. Not one of them said don't sell much this year and plan to store every bushel you can store or delay price on. Not one of them.

Sound crop rotations make more sense to me. The best one I have found is corn, corn, soybean, soybean, soft red winter wheat double cropped with soybeans. That takes less total fertilizer and pesticide than anything I have done and my soil has really responded to it.

So I think I have sold 11 crops off this farm in 7 years and it has never laid over winter in soybean stubble that is subject to the most erosion here. I have more flexibility in switching crops if I want to also. All this wheat could become corn or soybeans in one trip across the field.

The prices are so high now I really don't see any advantange switching. I can see where the guys that can raise cotton would plant more cotton. I don't expect to see much changing going on around here.

LuAnn said the garden is dry we could till it. I don't doubt that. It might be a good year to plant cole crops and potatoes early but overall I don't like a dry February. Last year covered in snow was better.

Who knows, who really knows. All I can do is plan the best I can and see what happens.

It's like driving down the road, looking out the windshield and wonder what's coming next. I know what to expect but it often turns out a little different than I planned.

But, it has worked for 60 years.

Ed

Cynics

An old cynic has showed up on ag talk again. He has done more to bash people than ever lift anyone up. I am sure glad they can't say that about me.

This means the good guys will be tipping toeing around him or just quit posting so good exchange between people will slow down and stop. That is bad for an ag forum and bad for people in general.

I have become much more cynical over my age but just to trash every idea another person comes up with isn't good for people. It isn't good for society.

Maybe that is how President Obama feels as even people in his own league have bashed him. It seems like he can do little right, yet he is our president.

Some people just have a mean disposition, don't they? I don't understand what makes them so mean. I just treasure being around people who are happy all the time. How can I be mean or sad around them? They are God's true blessings to me.

Sometimes I get in a bad mood and I am not even fit to be around. In my experience most people are that way. But I don't like being there and I do work to get better and see things on the positive side as quick as I can.

So many cynics have went down with the ship and I never ever wanted to be there. Yet, sometimes I do a little bit but I don't feel right when I do and is surely no way to bring up children and grandchildren.

Things can't be honky dorey all the time but sometimes when you don't have something good to say you just shouldn't say it. Patience and temperment are hugely important things I should strive for and I surely respect in others.

Cynics come and cynics go just like the rest of it. There is a time to be cynical but to spend your life in it? I just see that as a life of misery.

Lord don't let me be a cynic.

Ed

Vantage

The Virginia NoTill Alliance has named theirselves Vantage and are starting new chapters of Vantage across the state of Virginia. Pennsylvania has done this with great success. I wish we had that in Ohio and other states. We are a little proud and arrogant in Ohio sometimes I think and want to be first rather than adopt an idea from another state.

It was truly a privilege for me to speak where my ancestor Heinrich Winkle settled in the 1700's. Some of our best ideas and founding principles have come from the great state of Virginia, which was one of the main destinations from Europe in those days. This really brings American History to life for me.

We got the Future Farmers of America and lots of great ideas from our early settlers in Virginia. I really feel my roots in Virginia and how they spread to Ohio across the mountains. I had forgotten how formidable those mountains are until I purposely and non purposely drove across them this week.

We shared every idea we could think of how to farm better. Farming better means more profit to me but soil health and conservation comes from that too. I wish I had their livestock manure here in Martinsville and they wish they had my more open fields of land. Two good minds are better than one so it is good to help one another as we did.

Planter setups where a major focus of the conference and I threw in soil and tissue testing to balance soil fertility and we talked about how to improve our soil and bottom lines with cover crops.

It occured to me how much has changed in a short period of time as I add one new practice each year and when you look back 10 years, there has been a lot of change in farming and notill especially.

Ten years ago we had less than an inch of snow fall. This year we could break forty inches. The farmers adaptation to these climatic changes dtermines his success or failure. We can't change Mother Nature even if they try to prove we have. We can change how we adapt to change and I think a meeting like this one just helps us figure out what to do next.

One good friend thinks these high markets and small crop carryovers are limiting our customers. They sure are and they always will. Weather and production and market prices have always went up and down and I think they always will.

We keep producing more with less but we see this crunch increasing now. There are more people and no more land and economies which are not as healthy as we would like as we continue to spend and borrow more. We can only borrow so much until we default.

The little farmer can stand this situation more than higher leveraged bigger farmers if he is careful. I don't see how the livestock industry is making it in these times but they seem to continue to. We are rationing grain or food with price in our economy right now. If anyone doesn't think we have inflation, get out your tax returns and records from the last ten years and see how much it has changed.

The smart ones, usually referred to as the lucky ones will survive. NoTill helps me survive and adds to my bottom line as I seek to grow more grain with less in these poor weather, high commodity price years.

Vantage people, you did a great job and thanks once again for the opportunity. My email box is always open like my front door, so just knock and we can talk about how to help each other.

Ed Winkle

I Made NoTill Work

I made no till work, at least in the minds of others.

We had a really good meeting in Harrisonburg Virginia Yesterday. I spoke three times as we shared how to make no till work and work better.

I had lots of interesting people come up and offer me their stories, much like what we have in the Ohio River Valley but there they have drier soil and lots of people next door. It reminded me of Warren and Clermont Counties and Boone County Kentucky.

When you get that many people near farms they love the farms but don't understand how we farm.

We protect the precious land but they see the news and think we are raping it. We aren't or we would be out of business.

Just as I thought, they still use that big disk blade called the coulter on their no till planters and I told them throw it off like I finally learned to do the the 90's. Well, it came on the planter and I paid for it, why can't I use it?

You sure can but you will too long for the soil to dry out and miss your optimum planting window like we did for decades if not centuries.

When they saw my pictures taken north of them I think they wondered why they couldn't do that south of me in warmer, drier soil.

I heard every excuse I was taught, it's too, early, it's too cold, the slugs will take you. You don't have slugs they exclaimed? Not enough to hurt me I replied. Plant no till, plant early and scout your crop, that is what I answered.

That is the same message I share everywhere I go.

Farming is an old culture and the foundation of modern society. I love it.

It was great to meet Delmarva and all the NewAgTalkers at this conference.

Keep on keepin' on guys!

Ed

Make NoTill Work

I was thinking this morning how I could help others make notill planting work. Notill is not a substitute, it is an astute way of saving soil and making money farming. It is not a church or religion but it sure pays to be religious in the right things to do.

Notill won't make wet ground drier. If you need drainage improvements, you need it whether you notill or conventional till. Drainage is drainage and most of the corn belt has wet soils. That is good because it gives water to the crop in the summer but it is not good when you are trying to plant. Drainage keeps a lot of farmers from planting their crop when it should be planted.

Notill will improve soil structure over the years and make the soil less subject to ponding in big rain events. But too much water is too much water and drainage tile and surface drainage helps keep the soil to a term called field capacity, the capacity of the soil to only hold the water a crop needs. Anything else is excess and needs to be removed.

The soil test report has a measure of measurable Hydrogen which is usually a water molecule. My fields are all zero on H but many have a number. They have too much water and probably not enough calicium to balance the soil.

Balanced soil fertility is huge in crop production but no substitute for drainage either. Notill will be most successful on your best soils that are adequately fertilized. Cover crops will improve soil structure and soil life activity but is not a substitute either. All these good practices work in harmony to make the best and most profitable crop a farmer can grow.

I have passion for notill. I just hope I can pass it on. I feel it is a key to the future success of farming and to our country.

Ed

Monday

I am traveling to Virgina by road, mainly on US 50, one of the roads of the age old path from Virginia to Ohio.

I wonder if any of my ancestors made this trip?

It seems so.

There are so many markers alond this path, cemeteries to businesses that have been here for a long time. The native American's who lived here for many years left some good indicators of what life was like then but I have never read a really good history on it.

I am sure there is one out there and I ought to find it and read it. My friend Fred Shaw, Shawnee nation story teller is a good start.

I have heard Fred speak many times but there are so many missing parts of the history of this country. They were in the business of surviving, not writing and preserving the history they were making.

It is interesting who stayed in Virginia or wherever on the east coast and who moved on. I guess we have seen that in agriculture.

Very few sons stayed on to farm in my time of the late 1960's forward as mechinization had taken a bigger role in producing food and not as many family memmbers were needed to run a farm. That happened even earlier as my dad stayed on to farm after WWII but my uncle Roy had to find a different career.

It's been an interesting journey from Heinrich Winkle's move from Europe to Virginia and from his sons to mine here in southwest Ohio. I would imagine very few if any of a farm families children went on to farm from their arrival in America until today.

Ed