Oak Point Agronomics

I continue to get crop-related questions from farmers, production animal vets and other agricultural professionals. I’ve been getting these questions for about 60 years, but the difference is that over the years the questions have become more challenging. I choose to believe that this isn’t because of the loss of brain cells due to aging: I can still do the NY Times Sunday crossword puzzle, also the tough Friday and Saturday puzzles, so I think I’ve retained most of my marbles, so to speak.

Three things have changed: farmers’ level of education, their access to Certified Crop Advisors, and the World Wide Web. I’m often dealing with the sons and daughters of the farmers I used to work with, and many of them have 2- or 4-year degrees from a agricultural colleges. They already know the answers to many of the questions. And many large and/or progressive farms have crops consultants who have passed the CCA exam, proving that they at least know the basics of agronomy and crop production. The third change is that many farmers have become used to using the internet to supply information and answer questions. There’s no need to contact me about the proper plant population for corn; a few key strokes and this information is at hand.

Therefore, by the time a question or problem reaches my desk (or computer screen or smart phone, which are virtual desks of a sort) it’s often a gnarly one. I remember one from a year or two ago, where the farmer asked if he could harvest an unusually large crop of 4^th cut alfalfa. He didn’t need the forage, but wondered if left unharvested the alfalfa might lodge and smother the plants. My experience has been that left unharvested, following a hard freeze the alfalfa leaflets fall to the ground, leaving most of the stems standing so little chance of smothering. But while several of us were cogitating on this problem, the farmer went ahead and plastered the field with a heavy rate of liquid cow manure. Now whether he needed the forage wasn’t the issue. We eventually decided to recommend that he mow and chop the manure-laden forage back onto the field, since his actions had increased the smothering chances. I don’t expect that the farmer was thrilled with this recommendation…

We read about all sorts of “Don’t do this” warnings, including regarding crop production. It’s often convenient to think that these warnings are for the other guy, until one of them rises up and bites you in the butt. Two come to mind based on recent communications with farmers:

1. Alfalfa autotoxicity: It’s recommended to wait at least 12 months before seeding alfalfa in a field where the previous crop was alfalfa. Farmers sometimes get away with ignoring this because the toxins are quite water-soluble and are either biodegraded or leach past the seeding’s rooting zone. But not always: Recently I’ve been dealing with a situation where the alfalfa just isn’t doing as well as expected. We’re not sure of the cause but suspect that it might be the residual effects of alfalfa autotoxicity—not enough toxin to kill the seedlings but enough to permanently stunt the taproots.
2. Boron: This micronutrient is often needed by alfalfa and other forage legumes, but as a topdressed fertilizer, not during seeding. That’s because boron can be toxic to germinating legume seeds. This is especially true if the alfalfa is band seeded, which puts the fertilizer in close contact with the germinating seedling. I’ve seen first-hand that this isn’t an empty threat: The same rate of boron recommended as an maintenance application for established alfalfa is highly toxic to an alfalfa seedling. We could see the effects until the first cutting, and it was easy to see because of a part-way switch to a starter fertilizer that didn’t contain boron.

On a completely different topic: The Bride and I support a number of charities, but none gives me more pleasure than the donation we send each month to Mercy Ships. For over 45 years Mercy Ships has been performing lifesaving surgeries, dental care, and medical training in impoverished nations. Mercy Ships has two vessels that are the size of cruise ships including the Global Mercy, which has the capacity to house 600 volunteers including volunteer medical staff, with 6 operating rooms and 200 hospital beds. Thousands of surgeries to both adults and children are performed each year on these ships.

I was approaching middle age (so obviously this was more than a few years ago) and it’s my first visit to the dermatologist. No problems that I knew of, just preventative maintenance so to speak. I’m in an exam room with the dermatologist and I hear him ask: “Would you like a genital exam?” Geez, I think, that’s one of the places where the sun never shines, but in for a dime, in for a dollar so I said sure and dropped trou.

The doctor turns around, looks and asks “What are you doing?” “You asked if I wanted a genital exam.” “No, I asked if you wanted a general exam.” As opposed to what, but I quickly hiked ‘em back up and he focused his exam on the tanned parts of my body, which in those days was a “farmer tan”—neck and arms. I’m sure that the door had no sooner closed on the office than his whole office heard about it. (In my defense, the words don’t sound all that different, especially since the doctor had his back to me when he asked.)  Since retirement I spend the summer months in a tee or golf shirt and shorts, so there’s more surface area for the dermatologist to examine.

My annual goal is to go the entire year without wearing a tie, and if it weren’t for two grandkids getting hitched I’d currently be on a 2+-year run. Our church service dress code is “whatever”, ranging from jeans to 3-piece suits and everything in between. Ah, but we’re into August, the ties are still hanging in the closet and not around my neck, so there’s hope.

Each year one of my goals is to avoid a visit to either of our regional hospital Emergency Rooms. (We have two, one 18 miles to the East and another 18 miles to the West, and in recent years I’ve been a patient at both.) I admit it: I’m injury prone, in spite of taking what I consider sufficient care to prevent accidents. This includes mishaps both large and small. Another goal is to become scab-free, though usually this doesn’t happen until winter when the weather prevents my doing anything hazardous. At present I have half a dozen scabs of various sizes, and from my knees to my ankles is a patchwork of scar tissue.

I can find the most interesting ways to injure myself. In recent years this has included puncturing a vein in my arm while cutting down a small tree, and tripping over a rake, taking a face plant into a stone wall. That one took half a dozen stitches in my cheek to mend. I now have titanium plates in my left wrist and left leg, both the result of falls, also a torn right rotator cuff and a torn left bicep tendon. The fractured wrist was due to a fall from a 24-foot ladder while trimming a limb, something that in retrospect was so monumentally stupid that you will not learn of the details. The fractured leg was much more innocent when I slipped on dew-covered grass while walking off a golf course tee box. The tee box was less than 3 feet high, but obviously high enough to result in surgery that afternoon.

I have two fractured vertebrae, both discovered when I was being x-rayed for a different reason. Both were almost certainly the result of falls from ladders, with the result that I’ve now been banned from climbing a ladder any higher than head-height. This lets me clean our gutters, but that’s as high as I’m allowed.

I’m 83 years old so maybe it’s time I started acting my age, but that doesn’t seem like much fun. So I’ll continue to be “out and about”, doing stuff that may result in occasional blood loss (which The Bride claims is an almost daily event, but she exaggerates) but is much better than vegging out in an easy chair.

In the old TV program “Get Smart, secret agent Maxwell Smart, played by Don Adams, used a “shoe telephone” for secret communications. Seeing him hold his shoe up to his ear was always worth a chuckle. But now most of us carry a powerful computer (a smartphone) clipped to our belt or tucked into a purse Smartphones don’t come with instruction manuals because their capabilities far exceed anyone’s interest (or time availability) in reading such a manual. The other day I saw The Bride seemingly talking to her wrist. Turns out that she’d received a phone call, and since her smartphone was in the other room she was talking to the caller via her Google smart watch. So T.B. has both a smart phone and a smart watch; everything, apparently, but a smart husband.

All this technology is wonderful, but there’s a downside that’s becoming increasingly evident. As young people rely on their smartphones and on various social media, they’re apparently doing so instead of reading. How else to explain that over the past ten years 82% of the U.S. school districts surveyed had a decline in reading ability? It’s not just school children that aren’t reading: Our daily newspaper, the Watertown Daily Times, is now published only 5 days per week, and has about half as many pages as it once did. Fewer paid ads mean fewer pages of copy, and there continues to be a slow decline in the number of paid subscriptions. At least we still have a “daily” newspaper: Many communities have lost their only local newspaper and have to access the news on-line. Or not at all.

Closing on a high note: In a 2-year study beginning in 2019, 17,000 wallets were dropped and “lost” in 355 cities in 40 countries around the world. In most cases the wallets were given to the authorities in an attempt to return them. Wallets containing cash were more likely to be reported, and the more cash in the wallet, the more likely it was reported. Proving once again that most people, given the opportunity, are honest. The most recent evidence of this is a guy who found a fanny pack containing $30,000 in a Florida Wawa restroom. There was no ID in the fanny pack, so he contacted the store in an effort to return the money but without success. Eventually the man who lost the money realized it, contacted the police who were able to locate the finder and the money was returned to him.

The national news usually ignores agricultural issues, but the war in Iran is having such a severe impact on fertilizer prices that it’s even being featured by the major TV networks. The Russia-Ukraine war had an impact on global potash prices, but supplies weren’t a problem for U.S. farmers because almost all our muriate of potash comes from Canada. The Iran war hasn’t had a big impact on potash prices or availability, but anything that affects natural gas has an impact on nitrogen prices. And with the exception of anhydrous ammonia—of which relatively little is used in the Northeastern U.S.—nitrogen fertilizers have had huge price increases even though we produce most of our own N fertilizers. Fortunately, many U.S. farmers had already purchased nitrogen for the 2026 crop year, but those that didn’t will be facing “sticker shock”. Corn Belt agronomists are calculating the impact of the higher prices on the economic return for nitrogen applied to corn; for dairy farmers it’s somewhat more involved since cow manure—both prior and current applications—greatly influence fertilizer N requirements.

This will be a great year to get stalk nitrate tests on your corn, especially fields with a history of manure application. If done at the correct time–shortly before N sidedress, when corn is 1 to 2 feet tall—the results of stalk nitrate tests are quite reliable. Talk to your crop advisor about having these tests done, and don’t wait until the last minute to do so.

I’d also think twice before topdressing grass hayfields with nitrogen fertilizer; manure is at least as effective as commercial fertilizers, and though it takes longer to apply manure than to broadcast fertilizer, it’s a great way to reduce fertilizer expenses. However, use some common sense, and don’t make deep ruts in grass fields by applying manure during wet conditions or on poorly-drained fields—especially if you intend on maintaining the grass stand.

Last month I provided a brief history of the “Barn House” which is on our property at Oak Point. However, I’ve yet to explain what Oak Point is, which is the name of my modest writing/consulting business.

Oak Point is a small community on the St. Lawrence River, part of the Town of Hammond. Ontario is about a mile or so across the river though it widens a short distance upriver and narrows a similar distance downriver. It’s close enough that during calm days and nights we can hear Canadian road traffic and trains. Oak Point was settled in 1819 when George Elliot purchased 50 acres of land and sold building lots to several people. By 1824 the Village of Oak Point was “settled”.  The first business was a tannery, built in 1825 to extract tannic acid from hemlock trees for use in tanning hides. Several other businesses were established at that time, including a shoe shop, a distillery, a grocery, a general store, a sawmill and an ashery. An ashery used hardwood ashes to produce potash which was used in the manufacture of fertilizer, soap, gunpowder and glass. Therefore, from its very start Oak Point had an agricultural connection.

In 1840 a Canadian gentleman moved to Oak Point and bought the grocery store. He soon built a warehouse and wharf on Zitka Island, which is only a couple hundred yards offshore and provided a deep-water port. A bridge was built from the island to shore, and large quantities of butter and wheat were shipped from the wharf to Oswego, NY and New York City via the Erie Canal. A number of ships used Oak Point as a port, and a customs house was soon established. The increased amount of river traffic resulted in a light house being built on Crossover Island in 1848. Among the keepers of the light house over the following years was my grandfather Harry Dake, who remembered passenger ships stopping at Oak Point to pick up and drop off their fares.

Oak Point was a lively community in the mid and late 1800s! But that was then, and this is now. Oak Point today is primarily a family vacation destination, with about 50 mostly seasonal residences, many which have been owned by the same families for several or more generations. My great-granddaughter is the 8^th generation of our family that started dairy farming in Oak Point in the years before the Civil War.  There are only a handful of people who now live there year-around, but over 250 family and friends assemble each year to celebrate the July 4^th holidays. The Bride and I return to Oak Point each March, the first of the “snowbirds” to arrive for the season. TB says that her wedding vows were to “Love, honor and obey, and to spend as much time as possible at Oak Point.” We’re still working on the “obey” part but are good on the rest.

Our home is on the shore of the St. Lawrence River in Northern NY. Our “estate” includes about an acre of land and just over 100 feet of river frontage. Living in a beautiful place as we do, we seldom need to visit family and friends–they come to visit us. That’s why, when we tore down the homestead that was built in the 1840s, we built a 3-story home that could accommodate quite a few guests. Even so, we sometimes needed more room, which is what we now call the “Barn House”.

In 1893 my great-grandfather built a hip-roof barn for dairy cows and hay storage, and our family milked cows there until the early 1950s. My grandfather then divided the first floor into a garage and built a 2-bedroom apartment that he rented to guests from Memorial Day through Labor Day. During the 1990s, after a new foundation was poured, we renovated and considerably enlarged the apartment. My father, my wife Katy and I tore out the interior walls and furred out the studs to accommodate 6” insulation. We relocated the bedrooms to the second level (which originally was hay storage). Katy and I did the framing and part of the electrical installation for the bedrooms and a bathroom, and I cut out window openings and installed two windows in each of the bedrooms. There had been no windows on the second level, so the window cutouts resulted in our first view of the St. Lawrence River from that level. We then hired a contractor to do the sheetrock, plumbing and final electrical hookups, resulting in a 2-bedroom, 1.5-bathroom apartment with bedrooms upstairs and the kitchen, livingroom, half bath and seasonal porch downstairs. We also added vinyl siding plus new windows on the first floor. My son Matt, his friend and I then built a large deck on the side facing the river; Matt would live in the apartment for about five years while operating a crop consulting business in the region.

Then Matt married and moved to Pennsylvania (his wife is a companion animal veterinarian), so the apartment became a guest house for family and friends. About 15 years ago, needing even more room, we added a third bedroom. But it’s still a barn, and we never removed the door from the back wall of what’s now the garage but once was the stable. The door provided access to the manure stack in back of the barn—we have a 1950’s-era photograph of the manure stack. When I painted the walls of what had been the stable I could still “smell cow”, and a milk can half full of molasses that had been used to topdress hay was a reminder of the barn’s initial purpose.

So we have a guest house, but we also have a 130+ year old barn. Thus, Barn House.

Amish farmers don’t read this blog since it’s online only and Amish avoid electronics in general. Amish formal schooling ends after the 8^th grade, but many Amish children can pass the high school GED (General Educational Development) exam, suggesting something about the quality of their education during those eight years. I try to keep the educational level of our readers in mind when I write for Hoard’s Dairyman or the Miner Institute Farm Report: Hoards has a circulation of over 38,000, while the Farm Report reaches a couple thousand or so, including some Amish farmers.

The need to pay attention to the KISS principal (“keep it simple, stupid”) was confirmed recently when I read a report indicating that over 25% of U.S. adults read at no more than an elementary school level, and less than half read at a level that would allow them to understand the summary of a research report. Americans’ math skills are even worse, with about one-third of adults at no more than an elementary school level. I wonder what percentage of Farm Report readers, or the attendees at a farmer meeting, can understand a simple graph let along the concept of statistical significance. During my former career as a regional Extension crop specialist, long before the days of smartphones, Waze and GPS, I was shocked to discover that some farmers couldn’t read a county road map! I wonder if these were the same farmers who bragged that they’d never taken a vacation…maybe it was because they didn’t know how to get to wherever it was that they’d consider a vacation destination. Or to get back home…

One reason the results of this study surprised me is that compared with a generation ago, most of the farmers I deal with are not only better educated, many with 2 or 4-year ag college degrees, but the Internet has greatly increased the extent and ease of “technology transfer” for farmers regardless of their amount of formal education. The internet and World Wide Web make the results of agricultural research available to farmers and others working in agriculture. The questions farmers ask me these days are more challenging than ever, because they already know the answers to the easy ones!

During the Thanksgiving holiday I was reflecting on what a lucky guy I am. For many reasons, including because I’ve been able to travel to many other countries via my Oak Point Agronomics crops consulting business. I’ve always been accompanied by locals who rightfully were proud of their country and wanted to show it off. My travels included two trips to China: On one trip, sponsored by the Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine (my job was to evaluate some land for potential corn silage production), we had dinner with a billionaire businessman—that’s U.S. dollars, not yuan.  Dinner included lobster, wine that was far out of my price range, and some foods that were unidentifiable (by me at least).  I’m still wondering if what was described as “frog fallopian tube soup” was a mistake in translation or if that’s what those little stringy things really were. Anyway, it was tasty.

My other Chinese consulting trip, this one sponsored the U.S. Feed Grain Council, included a visit to a farm in one of China’s “dairy villages”. These farms typically are very small, often a dozen or fewer cows. We were invited into the farmer’s home and met his family (through an interpreter, of course). This was about as far as possible from dinner with the billionaire in a palatial “clubhouse”: The fuel for the one-burner kitchen stove was methane gas piped in from a pit in the yard into which fresh cow manure had been dumped, and the bathroom was a “one-holer” in the side yard. But the family had a TV, their home was small but clean, and they seemed happy with what they had.

I’ve walked miles on the Great Wall of China, spent a wonderful day at the Australia Zoo (of “Crocodile Hunter” fame), watched locals hard-boil eggs on steam vents coming out of a rocky hillside in Hokkaido, Japan, visited the Casa de Mateus winery in Vila Real, Portugal and saw the building in Great Yarmouth, England where my great-grandfather used to operate his sail-making business. Yep, a lucky guy.

On another topic entirely: I just read that compared to 20 years ago, Americans are speaking about 3000 fewer words per day—from 16,000 down to 13,000. This is reportedly due in part to the increased use of texting. I report without comment that on average, women between the ages of 25 and 64 speak about 3300 more words per day than do men in the same age range, equivalent to 20 minutes of chin-wagging. For some women this difference doesn’t magically end at age 64, not that I have any particular woman in mind…