If you would like a dose of hope, listen to Lowell B. Catlett’s Smart is Beautiful: 21st Century Agriculture’s Revolution speech. From what I have seen his figures are valid, so dare to hope!
Rich Zollinger from NDSU forwarded this paper on Glyphosate-Manganese Interactions in Roundup Ready Soybean (PDF). The quick summary is that most studies indicate that you should treat fields with manganese deficiencies similarly whether you’re planting conventional or Roundup Ready Soybeans.
We did run into some manganese deficiencies in wheat last summer, so we will be keeping an eye out this summer as well.
Extension.org has a post on What do I need to know about manure agreements and land application easements for application of manure? that’s worth looking at, especially if you’re selling the manure from your livestock operation. As with any contract have a lawyer review it if you want it to stand up in court, but they do mention a number of points to consider when drawing up an agreement to sell manure to a neighbor.
I often run across results or recommendations in tables in PDFs. Unfortunately doing anything with PDFs apart from reading or printing them is awkward. Some common tasks such as calculating the sum or average of specific rows (e.g. what’s the average yield of 10 particular varieties of canola) would require retyping the PDF or trying to get a hold of the original table.
NitroPDF has a free online PDF-to-Excel Converter that seems to work very well. I gave it the PDF version of Guidelines for Estimating Improved & Unimproved Pasture Production Costs and it did a beautiful job of converting the tables to Excel and formatting them to look like the originals. It’s worth looking at it.
(I have no relationship financial or otherwise with NitroPDF, I just think this is very useful.)
When taking pictures that show a field from ground level, panoramic photos are often quite useful. I’ve been using the software that came with our digital camera and it’s been working pretty well. I’m sure that as I get more photos I’m going to run into some issues where the photos don’t stitch together too well. Cool Tools has a write-up of one particular program for assembling panoramas and links to a couple of others. I plan to check them out as time allows.
There are still a lot of possibilities out there for manure management. 7 Creative Uses for Poop isn’t directly about manure management but it shows that there are a lot of possibilities out there.
It wasn’t that long ago that manure was seen simply as a waste product. Many livestock producers would have liked to see it vanish the second it left their livestock. That attitude is still there to some extent, but more and more producers are seeing manure as a valuable resource. The nutrients from manure play a key role in crop and forage production for fields around livestock operations. The ideas in the linked article are probably not feasible on a large scale, but they show that there are many uses for manure still to be found.
Manitoba Pork Council has a checklist of Steps To Take When Closing Down A Hog Barn For An Extended Period Of Time (PDF). Shutting down a barn isn’t something that anyone wants to do, but many producers are finding themselves in that situation. This checklist can help make the shutdown a little smoother.
AIC Notes pointed me to an Ammonia Loss Calculator by Alberta Agriculture and Rural Development. What I found interesting was not the dollar values themselves, but the way that they are affected by the different factors in the calculation. Change from broadcast to injection and you are suddenly losing half the nitrogen you were before. The factor that surprised me is that the losses go down as the gallons per acre go up. I wonder if that’s because the manure isn’t spread so thin and thus is harder to evaporate?
Anyhow, it’s a useful tool if you want to see how different factors can affect ammonia losses.
Last week I attended the Manitoba Soil Science Society’s 53rd Annual Meeting.
I felt that I learned the most from the first two speakers.
Henry Janzen of Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada Lethbridge’s key point was “What will our descendants wish we had recorded or started?” He gave examples of studies in the late 1800s and early 1900s that turned out to answer questions posed in the last 10 years. Who would have thought that a soil sample collected in 1920 would answer questions about carbon levels today?
Con Campbell emphasized the impact of long-term trends on studies. In the fields that he’s been studying for 50 years there’s been a wetter trend for the last 18 years. The temptation is to attribute improvements in crop production on those fields to better crops and practices but it’s also quite possible that a lot of the change is simply do to that shift in weather patterns.
Yi Zhang’s presentation on soil surveys and agricultural drainage in Manitoba was interesting. Over 1/4 of the land in Manitoba benefits directly from drainage. 37% of the crop insurance claims are due to excess moisture.
I hadn’t thought that the Atmospheric Concentrations of Currently Used Pesticides in Relation to Wetland Water Quality in Manitoba would be very relevant. As it turns out, it answered a nagging question from a damage claim we did a few years back. The plant tissue tests showed the presence of some chemicals that had not been sprayed on a particular field or on any of the surrounding fields. After hearing this presentation, what we think happened is that there was atmospheric deposition of the chemicals on the field – not enough to affect the yields but enough to register on the tests.
Some of Don Flaten’s students had a poster on the actual nutrient uptake from manure. Unfortunately there wasn’t a handout with the poster and I didn’t write down the details. The conclusion was that a significant portion of the calculated available manure nitrogen was not being taken up by the plants, leaving them deficient in nitrogen compared to plants fertilized to the same target levels with commercial nitrogen. I’m hoping to get more details on this.
Those were the highlights from the conference for me.
If organic farming interests you, the Guelph 2010 Organic Conference Proceedings are available for download.
I’m not convinced of the value of organic farming by itself. You avoid chemicals and fertilizers, but the energy input seems awfully high. On the other hand, by avoiding the “easy ” answers of more/different chemicals and fertilizers organic farming encourages thinking in unconventional ways.
