Oak Point Agronomics

The year was 1963, and I was a Summer Assistant 4-H Agent in Fairfield County, Conn. One of that summer’s 4-H projects was raising capons for meat. In case you didn’t know, capons are neutered chickens. I knew nothing about chickens in general or capons in particular except that I was supposed to go to one farm and pick up a  delivery truck, to another farm and pick up the wooden crates, and then to another place to pick up the capons. (The two full-time 4-H Agents were smart enough to avoid this trip entirely, which should have told me something right there.) I was to haul the capons to the county fairgrounds where the 4-H kids and their parents would pick up their individual allotments. It was one of those hot, humid Connecticut summer mornings, and it was only to get hotter and more humid.

The truck was an old stake-body with no protection from the wind. Oh, well, at least the birds would get some fresh air. Upon arriving at the “crate place”, I was surprised that there were a whole pile of crates! Boy, these kids must have ordered a lot of capons. I arrived at the chicken place and started loading capons, quite a few birds to a crate. The only way I could fit all the crates onto the truck was to stack them several deep, solid from front to back and side to side. Then I left for the fairgrounds, which was quite a long drive. By this time of the day the temperature was in the 90s, with the humidity pretty close to that. I figured faster was better and lit out, leaving a stream of white feathers in my wake. 

The capons apparently did not enjoy the trip (neither did I), and by the time I got to the fairgrounds some of them were in sorry shape since the crates on top had airflow to the max while the ones in the middle didn’t have much of any. In fact, it looked like some of the capons didn’t survive their ordeal, with a few crates of birds worse than the others. Therefore, some sorting was necessary to ensure that there wasn’t more than one bird per crate that had expired, or nearly so. (A 4-Her is fair, even in the face of adversity.) This  situation was distressing, but there wasn’t much I could do about it.

Being completely ignorant about bird physiology I thought they that chickens were like fish; their eyes would stay open regardless of whether they were alive or dead, and the kids wouldn’t be able to tell the difference until after they got home. But I soon got a shock: Chickens got eyelids! And when they go to that great Chicken Coop in the Sky, they do so with closed eyelids. My response to a couple of the 4-Hers, noting a prone capon with closed eyelids: “Maybe it’s sleeping.” What the heck, maybe it was…

Last fall I shattered my wrist in a fall from a tall ladder, the result of an activity so inane that you will not read the details of it here. The break required extensive surgery involving a titanium plate, screws, and many pins since they had to piece my radius back together like a jigsaw puzzle.

I’ve been a serious though minimally skilled golfer for over 50 years, during which time I’ve always had either a fade (when things were going well) or a banana-shaped slice (when they weren’t). Prior to surgery I kiddingly asked the orthopedic surgeon that since he was going to have to reconstruct the bones in my wrist, could he perhaps position the titanium plate so that I’d have a draw instead of a slice?

Well, as the saying goes Be careful what you wish for. Because whether he did screw the plate in on an angle or if something else changed drastically, ever since I started playing again after a 3-month recovery period, damned if I haven’t traded a slice for a draw!  A draw at best; far too often, a banana-shaped hook. The result is that I’m still playing far too many second shots “from the shade”, as they say, except that now I’m in the woods to the left of the fairway, not the right. I’m now seeing parts of courses I never knew existed, including interesting rock formations, previously undiscovered (by me, at least) bodies of water, and in one woodsy expedition resulting from a towering hook, the place Where Elephants Go to Die . The only upside is that the several other members of my golfing family are also hookers (remember we’re talking golf here), so I get to spend more quality time with them between tee and green. However, “quality time” is perhaps too generous a term when the whole group is poking around in the underbrush searching for their errant shots.

This year most regions of the Northeast have had an unusually early spring; warm conditions and below-normal rainfall. This has resulted in corn going into the ground in April in places where this seldom occurs, and much more corn planted by May 1st in places where April corn planting commonly occurs but only with limited acres. I’ve heard of more farmers than ever who essentially corn planting in April.

Is this the new reality of climate change and global warming? I think not. What has changed a bit is seed corn’s tolerance to cool spring soil conditions, not the least of which is due to much better seed treatments. The old planterbox treatments are not a good match with plateless and air planters, and it might not be a stretch to say that especially with air planters the pour-on powders are all but useless. I wish I could find that old research report done in the midwest where ag engineers determined that only about 25% of planterbox treatments remained on seed corn by the time the seed was planted by a finger pickup planter. For air planters it was even worse–a whopping 8%. I lost the report but well remember the numbers because they’re so shocking.

Plant breeders also have played a part; for instance, one of Cornell University’s corn breeders’ efforts have been to develop inbreds that are more cold-tolerant. Judging from how well much of this extra-early corn has done, their efforts have been successful.

But in the end much of the reason for earlier and earlier corn planting is simply that farmers have become more aggressive in their planting time decisions. Maybe I’m an old fogey–correct that; I am an old fogey–but I get concerned when a farmer 15 miles south of the Canadian border in Northern NY has 500 or more acres of corn planted, much of it in clay loam soils, by April 20th. Too many of our decisions are influenced by the previous year’s results. Plant a bit of corn in mid-April and it does real well? Let’s plant a lot more in mid-April this year! It’s been a while since most areas of the Northeast have had a long stretch of cold, wet weather in late April/early May. Sooner or later this will happen, though–we all know it will. Then we’ll find out just how good these super-seed treatments and cold-tolerant corn hybrids are.