Oak Point Agronomics

At a recent farm meeting I met a young lady who recently left a Virginia Cooperative Extension position for a job with a multinational agribusiness. She said she liked her new job, and the timing was certainly right because the county Cooperative Extension office was being closed due to the severe shortage in available state funds. Note that this wasn’t a cutback: The whole county Extension program is being eliminated.  

This certainly isn’t the first Extension office to be closed and unfortunately it almost certainly won’t be the last. As an old Extension educator, every one of these offices that closes bothers me. Once eliminated, I expect it would take a huge increase in economic prosperity for a closed Cooperative Extension office to rise from the ashes.

Less dramatic but almost as damaging are the sweetheart deals being offered for early retirements of seasoned Extension workers. The way it’s supposed to work is that the old educate the young, passing on what they’ve learned to their eventual replacement. However, it’s cheaper to pay a entry-level professional than one with a quarter-century or more of experience, so it just makes good fiscal sense to offer early retirement incentives. However, what often happens is that there’s too little time for the “old guy” (or gal) to pass on the wisdom of the ages. Learning from your own mistakes is OK as far as it goes, but most farmers would prefer that you don’t make mistakes–even if you learn from them–on their backs!

Since I retired two years ago my wife and I have moved south for 4 months or so each winter. Last winter was typical for southern Virginia, with some cold weather (down here anything below 20F is considered frigid) but many pleasant days. On Christmas Day 2008 the temperature was in the 70s and we spent the day in the yard in shorts and teeshirts. However, this year ever since we arrived it seems that it’s either rained or snowed. The November-December period set an all-time record for precipitation, and now it appears we’ll set records for the number of “significant” snow storms.

Last year we only had one snow, about 5″ but that was all it took to close schools for several days. Municipalities simply aren’t equipped to handle snow, and days can go by before residential streets are plowed. We had a snowstorm last weekend that dumped 12″ of snow on us in about a day, and the region went into full-fledged panic, with schools closed until mid-day Thursday. Now we’re in the midst of another winter storm consisting of snow, sleet, and rain, with more snow expected tomorrow. Today (Friday) we got a total of about an inch of slush but schools were closed (yet again!), professional offices cancelled all appointments, state legislators fled the capital like rats deserting a sinking ship, and Richmond International Airport all but shut down operations for today and early tomorrow.

After a snow event it’s smart to stay off the roads, not only because many of them aren’t plowed but because so many Southern drivers simply have no idea how to operate a motor vehicle on snowy roads. My son was raised in the North Country and spent about 10 years during and after college in Buffalo, so he knows snow. But he avoids driving on snowy roads down here because of “the other guy”. Or gal.   

To a life-long Northerner it’s amusing to see how the locals react–make that over-react–to the mere expectation of snow. They make a run on supermarkets, stripping the shelves of dairy products, beer, toilet paper and other “essentials”. My daughter-in-law tried to do some food shopping the other day but couldn’t find a single parking space in the huge parking lot. I watched one of our neighbors try to clear snow from his front porch–with a garden rake.  

 We were hoping that “Virginia winter” was an oxymoron, but such has not been the case.

Once upon a time there were two brothers who were lousy dairy farmers, at lesat when it came to producing crops. They planted the wrong corn hybrids, never limed their fields, had poor weed control, and chopped their corn for silage in late August, almost a month too early.

Then a young Extension worker appeared on the scene, and helped them solve a problem. They grew to trust this fellow, and he wound up overhauling their entire crop program including changing hybrids, herbicides, liming fields for the first time, and harvesting corn when it was ready, not to be done by Labor Day. (Turns out that the reason they chopped their corn in late August was because their father always did so, and that was so he could get some free labor from his sons before they started school in September.)

Aided by a couple of years with good growing seasons, just about everything the Extension worker recommended seemed to work; both crop yield and quality increased considerably, and the brothers soon became more prosperous. So much so that they bought at least one Cadillac and two Harvestore silos. Did these purchases overextend them financially? At any rate, before long they weren’t able to pay their bills in spite of continuing to grow much better crops than before the Extension worker appeared on the scene. Eventually they sold their cows and went out of farming entirely.

In trying to help the brothers did that young Extension worker really do them a favor? If he’d never set foot on the farm, would they have continued to muddle along as they’d been doing for quite some years? I wonder about this, because about forty years ago I was that Extension worker.

I think I’ve figured out the retirement thing. There are several ways folks go about it: First are the people who just hate their jobs and can’t wait to retire. These probably include prison guards and cops in big cities where there’s lots of crime. Many of these folks do their “20 and out”, retiring while they’re still in their 40s. They soon discover that half pay isn’t nearly enough to live on, especially when there’s all that extra time to spend it. So they often go back to work at an unskilled or semi-skilled job, and at a much lower pay rate…go figure.  

The second way is to work until you die, skipping the whole retirement thing, something that Joe Paterno at Penn State is well on his way to accomplishing. Joe Pa has a serious problem: He doesn’t play golf. This has an advantage in that you don’t have to worry about your money running out, but assumes that you’re still competent as you increasingly become doddering. So far so good for Paterno, though he’s increasingly turned over decision-making to his assistants.

Most folks retire as they approach Social Security age of 62 to 66, which is what The Bride and I did. (We’ve found the folks at Social Security just great to work with, both on the phone and in person. They should give lessons to the people at DMV.) But as someone said, to be happy you must have at least three things: Someone to love, something to do, and something to look forward to. To that I’ll add reasonably good health. I’m in pretty good shape on all counts: I have T.B. and great kids, my consulting activities keep me busy, and I’m still looking foward to my first hole in one. That form of “retirement” doesn’t work for everyone, but it works for me.

USDA recently released a report on organic dairy farming involving a study of the practice in the 24 states that represent almost all the organic dairies in the U.S. Unfortunately, all the data is from 2005, which is sort of like evaluating your stock market-based retirement plan  today using the totals from four years ago. Lotta water under the bridge in four year–both on Wall Street and down on the farm. In fact, I’m not sure that any of the economic data is worth much, but it’s all we have, so…

USDA compared both large and small organic dairies, and organic vs. conventional dairy farms. Large organic dairies represented a small fraction of the total,  but in 2005 produced about one-third of the organic milk, a proportion it only expects to increase. This is bad news indeed to those opposed to “factory farming”. To date, efforts to exclude large organic farms from the organic milk industry have failed, and will probably continue to fail. (My opinion, not necessarily USDA’s.)

The most telling statistic: The total cost of producing organic milk was $7.69 per hundredweight higher than for conventional milk production. This was about $1.00 per cwt more than the average premium for organic milk.  While many farmers have switched from conventional to organic production in anticipation of higher net income, USDA’s data, while badly dated, suggests that on average these hopes are not being realized. Updating to 2009–and this is conjecture–I would assume that since the price difference between organic and “regular” milk has narrowed in some regions, the economics of organic milk production aren’t any rosier now than when USDA collected its data.  This certainly doesn’t mean that “going organic” is a poor decision for all farmers, but that it’s not the magic bullet to dairy prosperity.

Norman Borlaug, “The father of the Green Revolution”, passed away last month after living a long, full life. While most people outside of agriculture may have only heard his name in passing, few realize the impact he’s had on world food production. This is particularly timely since the United Nation’s FAO recently announced that by 2050 world food demand will increase by 70%.

Borlaug used plant breeding to greatly increase small grain production, initially in Mexico but his advances soon resulted in higher grain yields in other nations, as well. It’s been estimated that Borlaug was responsible for the saving (from starvation and the disease effects of malnutrition) of over one billion lives. Yet while most school children learn of Dr. Salk’s part in preventing polio, how many have heard of Dr. Borlaug?

Borlaug also had decided opinions on organic vs. modern agriculture, particularly the idea that we can farm without using commercial fertilizer. The following quote summarizes his opinion quite well:

This shouldn’t even be a debate. Even if you could use all the organic material that you have–the animal manures, the human waste, the plant residues–and get them back on the soil, you couldn’t feed more than 4 billion people. In addition, if all agriculture were organic, you would have to increase cropland area dramatically, spreading out into marginal areas and cutting down millions of acres of forests.

At the present time, approximately 80 million tons of nitrogen nutrients are utilized each year. If you tried to produce this nitrogen organically, you would require an additional 5 or 6 billion head of cattle to supply the manure. How much wild land would you have to sacrifice just to produce the forage for these cows? There’s a lot of nonsense going on here.

If people want to believe that the organic food has better nutritive value, it’s up to them to make that foolish decision. But there’s absolutely no research that shows that organic foods provide better nutrition. As far as plants are concerned, they can’t tell whether that nitrate ion comes from artificial chemicals or from decomposed organic matter. If some consumers believe that it’s better from the point of view of their health to have organic food, God bless them. Let them buy it. Let them pay a bit more. It’s a free society. But don’t tell the world that we can feed the present population without chemical fertilizer. That’s when this misinformation becomes destructive…

I’ve had two people visit me here at Oak Point this summer wanting information relating to biofuel production in Northern NY. I’m not sure how much I was able to help them but there’s certainly a lot happening, much of it good, in the biofuels area.

I’ve never been in favor of using feed and food grains (i.e. corn) for biofuel production. This involves converting a product edible by humans to one–distillers grains–that can be consumed only by animals, and even that in limited amounts. We will need to increase global food production by huge amounts in the years ahead, and a high percentage of the arable land in the world is already in production. Maybe millions can be made in grain ethanol production, but to date millions have also been lost, much of it by farmer investors, when ethanol plants went belly-up in the middle of construction when the price of corn and gasoline made grain ethanol a losing proposition.

Cellulitic ethanol is the future of ethanol production, as well it should be. All of the feedstock used in this process is inedible by humans, and most by livestock as well, straw being a notable exception. With this in mind I was interested to read that grass seed producers in the Northwest soon won’t be able to burn grass fields after seed harvest because of air pollution concerns. But at the same time this ruling was coming down the pipe, cellulitic ethanol production was being cranked up in the same region that could use this grass as a feedstock. The burning of grass seed fields has long been a concern in that region, particularly in the Willamette Valley. I remember being there in 1971 and learning what engineers at Washington State University were trying to do to reduce the air pollution created by burning this grass. They had a prototype machine that supposedly burned the grass in such a way as to reduce particulate pollution. It was easy to find this machine in the field–just look for a huge plume of smoke rising on the horizon! Oh, well, back to the drawing board. I know a bit about burning these fields, having participated in an Iowa ”field burn” after grass seed harvest. “Participation” in this case involved lighting one match at the edge of the field, then running like hell. Boy, was that fire hot!

Never underestimate the ingenuity and ability of American technology to overcome seemingly impossible problems. A few years ago the “experts” were saying that cellulitic ethanol production was the ideal, but the technology to do this economically was many years away. From recent reports, “many years” turned into a few years. Transportation of feedstocks is still a problem, but one that will be overcome by the siting of these plants close to where the material is produced.

I realize that when it comes to the weather we’re all about instant gratification, but I’m beginning to wonder about this global warming thing. I can’t remember the last time the high for the day hit 80F, and it might be a while before it hits 80 again. We’ve had far too many days with highs in the 70s and lows in the 50s, and that sure isn’t corn-growing weather. It’s been abnormally cool almost since corn went into the ground in May. “Knee high by the 4th of July” used to be the goal, but earlier planting combined with much more cold-tolerant corn hybrids resulted in a new goal of waist high or above. I sure didn’t see much knee-high corn this July 4th weekend… 

I can see it coming: Unless we have a really warm next six weeks or so (through August), there will be a lot of very immature corn ensiled in September. Because for some reason too many farmers pay more attention to the calendar than to the stage of maturity of their corn crop when deciding when to harvest.  I remember many years ago two farming brothers in Chazy with whom I was working closely casually mentioned that they were going to start chopping corn the following week. I did a double take, because it was late August. Why were they going to start on September 1st (or thereabouts)? Because that’s when Dad always started. And why did he start then? This question drew blank stares–they didn’t know why, he just did. We finally discovered the reason: Dad always started then because the boys helped fill silo, and he wanted to be done by Labor Day since right after that the boys were back in school and he lost his free labor. For him, ”Labor Day” had a special (and somewhat different) meaning. After learning that I was able to convince them not to start until I told them to, and starting that year for the first time in memory there wasn’t a stream of silage effluent running from their tower silos.

I spent a few days in Torreon, Mexico in mid-June doing some consulting and speaking for an international agribusiness. Quite a few U.S. university professors and consultants make the occasional trip down there. If there’s any public agricultural education system in Mexico similar to Cooperative Extension in the U.S. it’s pretty well hidden. The farmers are very interested in technical and management information; I had about 70 people at my seminar, probably 60 of them farmers representing well over 100,000 dairy cows. Dairy herd size ranges from big to huge, thousands of cows per farm. There are no “family farms” in Torreon, at least none I’ve seen in the two times I’ve been there. And there was another seminar, sponsored by a different agribusiness, the following night.

This trip had somewhat of an eerie feeling: The government fired a passel of security guards for mass corruption and the Torreon area has a serious drug problem, so they flooded the city with Federales. It was a scary sight: Military pickup trucks with six soldiers to a truck, two in the cab and four in back, two sitting and two standing. They travel in convoy, and it’s ill-advised for a motorist to get between one pickup and another. Dressed in black including helmets and full face masks, and all with automatic weapons at the ready. About two dozen of them were staying at our hotel, the Torreon Hampton Inn. Many of them were in their 20s, and out of uniform they were quite friendly. But it’s still a bit of a shock when one saunters past in the swimming pool area holding an automatic weapon.

They say it ain’t the heat but the humidity, and that sure is true. It was over 100F the first day we were there, but with so little humidity that it was bearable. In fact, in the shade with a bit of a breeze it wasn’t uncomfortable at all. Sunblock is highly recommended, especially for the light-skinned, as is a good hat. Temps can (and did) reach 110F, and there’s no humidity to temper the sun’s rays. Fortunately, I have a bit of American Indian blood in my heritage and as long as I’m reasonably cautious I brown but don’t burn.