RFD Live from the NCRS

So guess what?  The wildly popular TV show RFD Live came to the NCRS for a live broadcast from our farm.  I had been on the show twice from their Nashville studio and always invited them to come up to the NCRS for a show.  Well what do you know...they did!  So yesterday (Monday) in spite of preparations for the big Research Field Days that started this week, we took time out to appear on the show.  After a busy day in the field getting things in order for the field day on Tuesday, everything stopped to get ready for the live broadcast at 8 pm EDT.  Well there was some makeup necessary so that we wouldn't be so shiny.  RFD producer Becky doubled as makeup person.  But wouldn't you know that Stephanie locked the door to the office that doubled as makeup room, knowing that I wanted to take a picture.  Well she didn't close the blinds on the window, so here she is getting made up for the big show.  She already looked nice as usual, but now she isn't so shiny.

Brian required a little extra work however. 

In our non-shiny mode, Stephanie and I are looking over the set in our shop.  It looks nice with some equipment and Liquid displays that were brought in for the show.  Nerves are on high alert.

Prior to the live show, RFD Live host Mark Oppold had an on camera interview with Stephanie, Brian and myself which would run on the RFD TV and radio news. Mark is a great guy and I was very happy that he was there for the show and to see the farm earlier in the day as I showed him and the producers around. 

Showtime at 8:00 with a live studio audience even.  It would not only be on TV, but on radio as well.  Rural Radio Sirius/XM channel 80 broadcast the show as well, but it was a little harder to see. There were a number of guests who had come in early for the field days to watch and participate.  There were a number of questions asked from the audience of guests from Michigan, Ohio, Kansas, Nebraska and Maine.  Now there is a cross section of growers.  In addition to the questions, we described what the NCRS is all about, how we do research here and elsewhere, and what is going on in the upcoming farm tours.  They also showed videos of the farm and tours, plus pictures of various research plots from around the country.  It was actually a good time and I thought it was the best show ever. 

Well I of course, DVR'd the show and watched it today after work.  It was good but always hard to watch yourself on TV.  (I need to keep my hands still.)  Here we are as we looked on the TV. 

Stephanie answers a question from the audience.  Notice that she is not shiny. 

So that was yesterday, and it was a good time and good show.  Today was the first Research Field Day of the week, but that blog post will be later tomorrow.  Hope you enjoyed the show, and if you couldn't see it, it should be available on our website soon.

 

Everyone Was Mint Today

So if it's the second weekend in August in St. Johns, Michigan...that can only mean one thing: The Mint Festival.  In recognition of the area's mint heritage, the annual Mint festival includes a fair with rides, queens, craft fair, and of course the parade on Saturday morning.  AgroLiquid has always participated in that, and we assembled at the staging area for final rehearsals. It's fun to get family, kids and friends to go along. Below is most of the group, some were off petting llamas or something.

We always show off one of the tankers driven by one of the truck drivers.  Well all of the real drivers were busy, so we settled for Dale.  Actually Dale, who has been with the company practically from day one, used to make truck deliveries back in the day.  So I'm sure this reminded him of that, although the trucks are a little bigger and nicer now.  His Dad rode with him to make sure he didn't speed.  Here he is getting the final polishes made.

It was time to start, and here is the Liquid banner leading the Liquid entry. 

 This is the Liquid float which has a picture of the new office, an invite to the open house, and crates of vegetables from the NCRS to pass out to the parade public.  No really, it's a tradition.  What's that on top of the tractor?  It' a bird.  It's a plane.  No, it's a bird.  Where did that come from?

On closer inspection, it's a wayward pheasant.  I guess it wanted to have a birds-eye view.  That's Stephanie's husband Ryan at the wheel and son Gabe looking at his mom, brother and sister who have to walk.  Ha ha to them. 

The parade route wound through the tree-lined streets of St. Johns.  It was funny to see how excited kids got at receiving vegetables.  Anyone can pass out candy, but we are different.  We had green peppers,  sweet corn, various squash and cauliflower.  We are proud that we are improving the diets of the town.

Business was brisk.  It was run back and forth to fill your vegetable bag and then pass them out.  By the way, if you ever come to the parade, choose a watching spot closer to the start as we ran out towards the end.  Sad.  Despite our perception, we are only human after all.

Shaun passes out a pepper to a cute little girl, to which she replied: "Thanks, Daddy."  Guess what's for dinner tonight?

And down the stretch they come.  Driving to the finish through downtown is Dale and the tanker.  We untangled the mailboxes and phone lines from the back end before the home stretch.  (I'm sure I'll pay for this as my desk is right next to Dale's.)

Looking for a last pepper or rutabaga to pass out.   

Then it was back on the trailer for the ride back to the office.  And that's a wrap.  Fun for all it was. 

Well fun aside, it will be a scramble to get everything prepared for the first Research Field Day on Tuesday.  And I already mentioned the shooting of RFD Live from the farm on Monday night.  Didn't I already say that we are only human?  Well hopefully super human for a day.  Don't forget to watch.

Everyone Should Have Been in Brownsburg Today

So today I was in Brownsburg, IN for the Cover Crop & Nutrient Management Field Day hosted by Area Manager Mike Starkey.  The Hendricks County Soil and Water Conservation District was the co-host.  Brownsburg is right next to Indianapolis.  It was attended by around 50 area growers who are all seeking ways to best farm ground close to urban developments.  This would include the use of cover crops and no-till.  I used to live in the Indianapolis area and it was sure a contrast to see corn growing so close to the city.  The Starkeys have been farming here for six generations, and are very conscious about using responsible cropping management practices. 

One of the featured guests was Barry Fisher who is Indiana's Soil Health Specialist.  He is well known and evidently has spent more time down in soil pits than up on the ground.  Here he is in a pit in a soybean field that had a cover crop of cereal rye.  It was flown on prior to corn harvest last year.  Well last year this area was hard hit by drought.  This left a lot of unused nitrogen in the soil, and it was utilized by the rye, which was up to four feet tall prior to planting.   You can see a thick clump on the side. But there is a good stand of soybeans this year.

He was able to show that the soil was loose from about 7 years of no-till with cover crops.  He also was able to find ample evidence of earth worms, and showed a string of soybean root nodules up to 16 inches deep, that evidently grew down a worm tunnel.  (They are those knobs on the root to the left of his face.)  Nodulation this deep would provide oxygen for organic matter decomposition and better soil health.  (Note: if you don't know, certain soil bacteria called Rhizobia japonicum form a symbiotic relationship with soybean roots where the bacteria provides nitrogen to the soybean and the soybean provides a place for the bacteria to live.  The bacteria form nodules which are the "factories" where the bacteria convert nitrogen from the air, which the soybeans can't use, into a form that they can use.  Everybody wins.) 

 We also looked at a pit that had annual rye as a cover crop.  It wasn't as thick and tall as the cereal rye.  But rye is a cover crop to prevent soil erosion and to "scavenge" soil nutrients and then release them back after they are killed prior to planting.  Plus they can add organic matter and keep the soil more biologically active. This is a view of some nice beans from the pit sites looking back to Mike's shop where we were meeting.  The beans look great this year.

Here is a view from Mike's shop.  It was suburban Indianapolis where they also grow sub-divisions.  So farming responsibly is very important. There were also some folks that talked about equipment and which closing wheels work best for the soils and no-till around here.  And there was a guy from the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) who described a watershed program that Mike is going to participate in to compare fertilizer practices in adjacent sides of a creek that drains into a nearby reservoir.  It will compare a Liquid program vs a conventional program and will be monitored for drainage tile nutrient loss, soil nutrient levels, erosion losses, and yield.  Details to follow.  This is brand new.

To pay for the free lunch, they had to listen to me talk about the products that Mike is using on his farm with great success.  Mike said that many growers were not aware of things like phosphate fixation and crop nutrient demands, so I did my best to lay it out, plus how research at the NCRS supports conservation and nutrient management practices.

Everyone else paid attention and hopefully learned some things.  But there were a few in the audience whose brains got filled up too fast and nodded off.  Fortunately it was only SAM Adam and Regional Sales Mgr Bob, who have heard it all before anyway.  At least they didn't snore. 

After that Mike came up to follow up on what he does with AgroLiquid and to have some Q&A. 

Mike also is a Dawn Equipment dealer.  And the last thing was a brand new prototype fresh from Dawn Equipment.  In fact it was just painted at the factory in Illinois last night and driven over this morning.  It is a planter attachment for planting into a standing rye cover crop.  The disks go in front of the row and bend the rye over, and then the rolling blades flatten and crimp the rye.  This would be able to kill smaller rye, but larger rye, like 4 feet tall, would still have to be sprayed.  But this would enable easier planting.  So this meeting was the first in the solar system to see it.  Everyone likes to look at equipment. 

So after that I headed back North to Michigan.  Tomorrow will be a very busy day on the farm as the Research Field Days start next week.  And here is a heads up for next Monday night.  Make sure to tune in to RFD Live on the RFD TV channel at 8 pm EDT.  You will see some of your favorite researchers Live From the NCRS.  (Hey that has a nice ring to it.)  So if you don't have Dish or Direct TV, then find someone who does and be there next Monday. 

 

Future Researchers?

So we have to say that we could not get all of the work at the NCRS done without some help.  This year like the previous two, we hired some college interns to assist with the various research tasks, and hopefully they learned a thing or two themselves.  This picture was taken earlier this summer at the start of their internship.  That's why they are smiling.  But I still catch a smile every now and then, and they tell me that it has been a good experience anyway.  Below we see Chance, Mike, Erin and Peter.  Details below:

Chance is originally from a family farm in Boise City, Oklahoma. So being an Okie he can't be all bad.  But now he lives in Amarillo where he is a senior at West Texas A&M University majoring in Plant, Soil and Environmental Sciences.  Prior to that, he spent four years in the Marines and was deployed practically all over the world, including Philippines, Germany, Kuwait, Australia and in Iraq.  He hopes for a career in research and consulting.  Mike grew up on his family farm in Pigeon, MI which is out in the thumb (hold out hand with thumb on right to look like state map.)  Mike is a youngster having just completed his freshman year at Michigan State as a Crops and Soil Sciences major.  He plans to return to the family farm after graduation.  Erin has the shortest commute being from right here in St. Johns growing up on the family farm.  She will be a senior at Michigan State as a Horticulture major.  She has an interest in food crops and a love of plants.  Well she fits right in here.  Peter grew up in East Lansing and had no choice but to attend Michigan State University.  He too has an interest in food crops as well as trees and tree crops.  So this is the perfect place for that.  Peter plays guitar in a band, and so we are all looking forward to the NCRS talent show.  All of us full-timers are very pleased with all four of these students, and hopefully they got an inside look at the workings of a leader in agriculture and how we support our products.  I feel they will go far in the ag world. 

 

I never remember stacking straw bales to be so much fun.  But that's the life of an intern.  I hope they remembered that during the seemingly non-ending job of taking stand counts.

Unfortunately (for us) their time at the NCRS is almost over as school will be starting up again in a few weeks.  But if you need some good summer ag help in the future, I would vouch for all of these.

Aeroplane Ride Over the NCRS

So yesterday was a special treat for Stephanie and Tim B.  They got to go on an aerial flyover of the NCRS with pilot Nick.  We try to do that every year, but it has been awhile since the last one.  Sadly, St. Johns has no municipal airport, so they drove up to Alma where Nick keeps his plane and then headed back South by air.

They soon reached cruising altitude, although Nick better keep his eyes on the road, er..air and not so much on the instruments. 

And here is a view of the NCRS office/barn complex on Farm 1.  It was a partly cloudy day which made it difficult for Stephanie to take pictures.  But you get the idea. 

This shows Farm 3 looking to the North.  You can kind of see the irrigation running.  To the bottom of the red barns is where Brian has some of his vegetable plots.

This is Farm 5 which has corn, soybeans, sugarbeets, winter wheat and alfalfa. 

This is Farm 7, one of the newer farms that we started farming in 2010.  It is very productive.  To the right in about the middle, you can see the plots on Farm 12, which is the demonstration and tour farm.  We will have a riding tour of Farm 7 to show some of our replicated plot field nutrient research.

This is Farm 12 looking back to the North.  You can see Farm 7 to the North, and in the middle on the right, you can see a drive across from that wheat field.  That is the Farm 8 apple orchard. This is area  is where our Research Field Days will happen.  Everything is conveniently close.  Regarding Farm 12, this is the first year we have had this farm.  You can see the dark soil with high organic matter.  In fact the bottom part would be considered muck.  It has very low nutrient levels, so it should be interesting for fertilizer comparisons.  That water area at the bottom is a gravel quarry, which is kind of strange to be right next to muck soil.  Hope you are coming to a field day to see it all for yourself.

 Next they flew over the new office building.  The old office is completely gone now, like it was never even there.  They are in the process of getting the grounds landscaped.  It already is looking pretty nice.

 This is a nice shot from the other end.  It does look like  barns from the back, which is intentional.  Haven't been out on the walking trail yet, although this place is so big on the inside that you do quite a bit of walking anyway.

 And then it was back to Alma.  I liked this shot that Stephanie took of all of the windmills up there.  I did not realize how many there are, and this is all pretty recent.  Hopefully there are none in front of the runway.

Safe and sound, back on the ground.  She brought her pics to show at the farm this morning, and I carried them straight to my computer so they can be up in blog land.

Specialty Crops on Display

So the first Research Field Day of the season was on Wednesday of this week.  It was for a tour of the vegetable and fruit crop research by Dr. Brian Levene and his staff.  Sadly I was at another field day out of state and missed it. But I received these pictures so that I could give a report.  Wouldn't you know that it was rainy that day.  So the new rain-proof trailers were put to the test.  They passed.  It was much better than sitting on soggy straw bales.   

They made the rounds through the various plots over five farms.  Here is a review of the cantaloupe plots on Farm 3.

The Riesling and Concord grape research on Farm 1.

Since many vegetable growers also grow field crops like corn, Stephanie talked about different AgroLiquid in-furrow options and showed fertilizer effects on corn roots at a stop on Farm 12.

 A tour highlight was a stop at the new apple orchard on Farm 8.  Brian talked about treatments and plot layout in the high density orchard.

The potatoes on Farm 2 were soggy on tour day, but here is a bonus shot taken yesterday (Thursday).  They are really growing nicely.  These are Snowden variety potatoes that are used for potato chips.  Mmmm...potato chips!

So that was that.  Hopefully everyone that came enjoyed themselves and learned something besides, in spite of the rain.  So the field day season is underway.  The field crop tours begin the week after next, although Brian's research plots will still be part of those events as well.

Sloshing Through Kentucky Field Days

So if you were driving by this field outside of Hopkinsville, KY last Tuesday and saw all of these signs, it could only mean one thing.  Field Day!  And with the AgroLiquid signs at the front, you know that means fun and a chance to learn something.  Yes, this was a field day put on by Security Seed and Chemical at their main research farm.  Since the name includes seed, this is the start of their corn hybrid plots, with the soybeans down the way there.  Area growers and supplier vendors, like me, loaded on the trailers and set out.

There were several stops to see what was being tested there.  That is one nice thing about Security Seed and Chemical (SSC) is that they put the products they provide under careful scrutiny in the field before they provide it for sale to their grower customers.  There are so many crop input choices today that it can be confusing for growers.  So they run replicated plots to see what works.  Below we see SSC Fertilizer specialist Lang talking about in-furrow fertilizer options on double-crop soybeans with AgroLiquid. You may remember Lang and how he spent 13 years preparing for this important job he has now.   

And here is SSC Research Director Patrick talking about the different fertilizers being tested in this corn trial.  He has posters of how the corn looked on May 16, which was when I was last here.  In fact I posted those pictures on the May 18 blog if you care to see for yourself.  They also had some root digs similar to what we do for our Research Field Days that show the bigger roots with the AgroLiquid in-furrow applications. And they also showed pictures of tasseling differences where the AgroLiquid tasseled several days before the dry, 6-24-6 and 10-34-0.  So it is gratifying  to see that the plots here are showing results similar to what we see at the NCRS in Michigan.  So this means that AgroLiquid not only works in plots in Michigan, but in other places as well.  What a breakthrough! (Note to reader: this is sarcasm.  We've known this for years, but it's still nice to see.)

SSC's Tom and George gave the tour some information about some of the biological product treatments under investigation for nitrogen fertilizer enhancement.  There are a number of biological additives out these days, and they are often viewed with skepticism.  But under replicated plot testing now, there are several of these that are showing promise.

Patrick and Tom showed the wheat fertilizer trial results from plots here and at Morganfield, KY.  Here are the results of ferti-Rain and NResponse.  Over the past 4 years, the addition of 3 gal/A of ferti-Rain to the head scab fungicide application (usually Caramba) had an average yield increase of 4.7 Bu/A.  In 2013, this application with ferti-Rain had a 5.7 Bu/A yield increase and a similar rate of NResponse had an average yield increase of 5.1 Bu/A.  So addition of nutrition to a fungicide application can reap rewards.

Here are some of the fertilizer plots in Hopkinsville that I am working on with Patrick.  These are the start of some long-term corn/soybean rotation trials that are being conducted at the research farm here.  But when the tour came around, I barely got started ant it began to rain.  So we all moved to the SSC Hopkinsville store where I finished and then ate lunch.  Now that's a day.

So after the lunch and the field day was over, I had some unfinished business to attend to.  On one of my previous visits on April 17, I told about my visit to the Jefferson Davis memorial monument in nearby Fairview (in the April 19 blog.)  It is the tallest concrete obelisk in the world, meaning that is not made from blocks, but rather from poured slabs all the way up to its 351 foot height.  Well it was closed until May back then, and I vowed that I would re-visit it on a later visit so that I could go up to the top to peer out on the farmland below.  Well just my luck, there was a sign that said it is closed on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.  That's an outrage! I blame the sequester.  Seeing that this was on a Tuesday, and I probably wouldn't wait around until Friday, I left.  But my vow still stands!

The next day was the field day up at the Morganfield research farm.  There is also a SSC store there.  Morganfield is about a 90 minute drive north of Hopkinsville.  Unfortunately, it had rained all day the previous day, and most of the morning.

But are we scared by a little rain?  Of course not!  The tour must go on.  We have people that came to see and learn.  It was a little muddy, but the trailers and people saw everything there was to show.  Again, Patrick and Lang talked about corn fertilizer options, and showed pictures from earlier in the season. 

 

Here are the double-crop bean plots again.  I was impressed by how good the corn in Western Kentucky looks. You can see some in the background in addition to the plots.  They have had ample rainfall this year and the corn looks great. Last year was a drought disaster.  I saw no evidence of N deficiency from too much rain and N loss.  Just about all of the solution N is sidedressed, and knifed into the ground.  They don't make broadcast or surface sidedress applications due to the heat and usual lack of rain.  They don't want to risk N loss from volatility.  That is different from Northern areas where "weed and feed" broadcast is common, as is surface banding of sidedress. 

And here is my tour stop.  I am either talking about Liquid fertilizer product descriptions and how they work, or giving a hula lesson.  Either way, I hope the growers saw the light.  (Glad I had my boots in the trunk.)

So it was a great couple of days.  I always enjoy my time in Kentucky and am anxious to return. (I didn't even mention the pulled pork and pork chops at the two lunches. And I did make sure I had catfish one night too.  So food intake met expectations.) Patrick and his crew do a great job of establishing the research plots and putting on informative tours.  And thanks to the research they do, the staff of Security Seed and Chemical are certainly knowledgeable about crop input options for the growers they serve.