Dec. 28th, 2022 Edition
"Well, hopefully
he’s a good cricketer. If he is, then he
will likely play for Australia; if he’s not – well, then I guess he’ll be able
to play for England!” – female Aussie cricket player (who is married to an
Englishman) when asked about their new baby boy playing future national cricket
Wow,
trash-talking your spouse through the press, and getting a dig into your main
rival at the same time! That has to rank
right up there as one of the best of all of time! The game of cricket is the second most popular
sport in the world (soccer/English football would top the list), and the England/Australia
rivalry is arguably the fiercest amongst all the cricket playing nations. As you can imagine, this quote received a ton
of international press as it was not only humorous, but also further stirred
the pot for two of the top-performing national teams on the world stage.
Sometimes
we need that person on our farm team that always stirs the pot to keep everyone
on their toes. Most farm operations enjoy
a lively co-worker or two that help set the daily pace for the operation, keep
tensions low and promote a semblance of teamwork. As the New Year is about to ring in, lets tip
our hat to all the teammates that make our farm operations better. Cheers!
Weather
Earlier this month at the Prairie Grains Conference, Daryl
Ritchison from NDSU presented his thoughts on how the climatology models are
shaping-up for forecasting the weather over the next 8-10 months. Mr. Ritchison does a very thorough analysis
by evaluating a package of eight to nine different models, and usually his
predictions are fairly accurate for such a significantly long look ahead. In summary, here are the bullet-points for
the 2023 calendar year from Daryl’s perspective:
·
The winter-season over the next couple of months
will trend colder than average by 1-3oF, and with the above average
snowpack already received, it will be hard for temperatures to climb above
average as the snow will reflect most of the sun’s rays, and the sun doesn’t
climb very high in the southern sky in January and February
·
The current LaNina trend will fade to neutral by
mid-year (July timeframe). We are
currently in the third year of LaNina and about to begin a new 27-month ocean
oscillation pattern
·
The spring season of 2023 will be drier than
average with normal or below average temperatures
·
As the calendar shifts into summer, temperatures
will begin to shift towards above average and moisture will come in early
summer rains
·
Daryl forecasts that we will have a much better
planting season in 2023 versus 2022 (how can it be any worse?)
·
Overall, the season will have the typical swings
of hot and cold/dry and wet, but will most likely come to average at the end of
the season for heat units and moisture
·
No prediction was forecasted for end of season
frost.
For a little history on NDAWN, Mr. Ritchison also provided
these bullet-points that I thought were interesting enough to share:
·
The NDAWN mesonet started in 1989 and currently
boasts 175 weather stations – which is the most stations of any local mesonet
(worldwide)
·
The goal of NDAWN is to have enough weather
stations to gather full coverage across the state (each stations covers a 15-20
mi radius)
·
NDAWN stations utilize both a 10m wind sensor (international
standard) and a 10 ft wind sensor for determining crop impact
·
Many NDAWN stations also have soil monitoring
(soil temperature and moisture)
·
There are 38 weather stations in Minnesota currently
and an opportunity for NDAWN to significantly expand further into the state over
the next few years
·
Montana is the only other state with NDAWN representation
(six weather stations in the far northeastern part of the state)
Winter
Enlist Webinars
It’s the winter
season and an opportunity for improvement by working on the business. Ag employees who also look towards improving
their value during the off-season will find opportunities with Corteva
Agri-Sciences. This winter’s classes are
designed to be educational for farm workers and flexible enough to fit
everyone’s schedule. Webinar opportunities
revolve around soybean weed control management with Enlist and other herbicide
technologies. One of the many benefits
of the Enlist herbicide system is no formal training or class work is required by
applicators – only engage as desired.
Enlist Webinars
Announced for 2022-2023: For all upcoming
webinars, Register Here.
Applicator Training with Enlist Label
Reminders (Choose one of
the following dates):
- Jan. 12,
2023, at 8 a.m. CT
- Feb. 14,
2023, at 9 a.m. CT
- March 14,
2023, at 8 a.m. CT
Special
Series: Seed Selection + Enlist Weed Control System vs. In-crop Dicamba System (Choose one of the following dates):
- Jan.
17, 2023, at 9 a.m. CT
- Feb. 21, 2023, at 8 a.m. CT
Special
Series: Set Your Operation Up for Success with the Enlist Weed Control System (Choose one of the following dates)
- Feb. 7,
2023, at 8 a.m. CT
- Mar. 16,
2023, at 9 a.m. CT
- Apr. 6,
2023, at 8 a.m. CT
Soil
Testing Myths
For the most part, I’ve avoided discussion on soil fertility in
this newsletter. However, it’s not
because I don’t like the topic, it’s more because of how complex the topic can
be and the need for more lengthy explanations.
I’ll give the topic of “soil testing myths” my best shot and apologize
in advance for not keeping it concise.
Personally, I like scientific research papers for my primary
source of information (present me the data and I’ll come to my own conclusions
on whether or not I agree with the author), but many folks today like podcasts
or videos to learn from and they’re easier to find and implement while you’re traveling
or driving a tractor. The University of
Minnesota Extension provides some good content via podcast and the topic at the
end of November was about the myths of soil testing. For a summary, I’ll hit on a few key
bullet-points for farm managers to be efficient and effective concerning soil
fertility and soil testing.
https://blog-crop-news.extension.umn.edu/2022/11/four-soil-test-myths-that-farmers.html
First, is the fact that most of the soil fertility research results
are not statistically different and thus many broad conclusive remarks are
summarized by the professionals in this arena.
For example, I remember seeing some sound NDSU research about 10-12
years ago basically stating that corn yield and nitrogen application rates were
only about 20% correlated in the MN/eastern ND region. This data set indicated that most years found
a wide range of applied nitrogen rate ranges, anywhere from 40-180 lbs/ac, were
still able to hit average to above average yield levels. In regards to nitrogen and corn, I like to
start at 1.0 lb N/ac per bushel of yield goal, and tweak from there based on
soil type, application type/timing(s), implementation of variable rate
technology, tile drainage, and best guesses on expected weather.
Phosphorous Soil Testing: The key understanding to extracting
phosphorous from soil to obtain an accurate laboratory test value of
exchangeable phosphorous is that different soil characteristics will bind
phosphorous more tightly and thus make it less available to the plant (and more
difficult to measure in the lab). Yes,
there are some benchmarks (like higher pH soils of approximately 7.5 and above
should implement an Olsen Bi-carb test), but it can get confusing when
different labs promote different phosphorous tests (i.e. Bray 1, Mehlich-3,
Olsen Bi-carb) and each test has it’s own scale for interpreting results.
Micronutrient Analysis:
Many do it yourself farm managers get a complete soil test evaluation conducted
when sending in a soil sample – their thinking is, “I’ve done the work to get
the soil physically into the bag and shipped for testing, so we may as well run
a complete test with micronutrients to gain the most knowledge; the dollar difference
is minimal”. However, most crop advisors
will scan over a large majority of the micronutrient data and focus on a half
dozen or so parameters: soil pH, nitrogen, phosphorous, potassium, CEC, and
maybe another category or two depending on crop species plans. If you’ve been farming a field for several
years and have some soil test history, the micronutrient composition on that
particular field isn’t going to change much and your management style probably isn’t
going to change based on those results – either you’re adding a micronutrient
package into the fertility plans or you’re not across the farm (not field by
field).
Base Saturation:
There is this myth that farms will have greater productivity on fields
with more equal base saturation levels across the soil fertility spectrum. The truth is that soils naturally have a wide
range of soil base saturations for each specified nutrient and trying to
manipulate these numbers in dramatic fashion is a very lengthy and highly expensive
process. Many farms have and do continue
to undertake this challenge, but overall, I would bet the honest feedback from
these operations is not favorable when considering their return on investment.
At the end of the day, the 4R’s of soil fertility play a
very important part of our management plans… right source/product, right rate,
right time, and right place. Each farm
is different on how they best view to implement their fertility dollars as the
logistics have become such a big part of the business. If a farm would like to dive into the
fertility spectrum, I would advise they pick a couple fields to experiment on
over the next decade and challenge themselves to learn as much as they can to
drive yield. Personally, I would think
an independent crop advisor would be a key partner to aid this learning – they don’t
have anything to gain and should come with a broader array of ideas for
experimentation.
National
Corn Growers Assoc. – Yield Contest Winners Announced
Every good farmer loves a competition and the NCGA provides
the nation’s corn growers such an opportunity with their annual high yield
contest. Thinking back to the 2022
season, most major agriculture producing areas within the United States experienced
some level of drought, creating extra challenges for top end yield production. In fact, the 2022 contest results bordered on
bizarre as several non-irrigated classes out yielded the highest performing irrigated
classes. To emphasize how unusual the
contest was this year, no participant topped 400 bu/ac which was a first since
2012, and none of the national winners within the top three finishers in their
individual class had the last name of Hula, Dowdy, or Stall.
If you remember from last year, David Hula topped
600 bu/ac for the second time in his career and added to his legacy over the
last decade of the competition. This
year, a newcomer tops the charts at 394 bu/ac from the state of Virginia. His name – Heath Cutrell. Congratulations to Mr. Cutrell and the many
other national and state winners in this year’s NCGA corn yield contest!
https://www.ncga.com/get-involved/national-corn-yield-contest
List
of prior NCGA winners:
2011: David Hula –
Virginia – 429 bu/ac - * set new record; first to exceed 400 bu/ac
2012: David Hula – Virginia
– 384 bu/ac
2013: David Hula –
Virginia – 455 bu/ac - * set new record
2014: Randy Dowdy –
Georgia – 503 bu/ac – * set new record; first to exceed 500 bu/ac
2015: David Hula – Virginia
– 534 bu/ac * set new record
2016: Randy Dowdy –
Georgia – 521 bu/ac
2017: David Hula –
Virginia – 542 bu/ac * set new record
2018: Don Stall – Michigan
– 477 bu/ac
2019: David Hula –
Virginia – 616 bu/ac * current record holder; first to exceed 600 bu/ac
2020: Don Stall – Michigan
– 477 bu/ac
2021:
David Hula – Virginia – 602 bu/ac
2022:
Heath Cutrell – Virginia – 394 bu/ac
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