A View From The Earth

Today as I was preparing the cornfield for planting and working in the garden. I started thinking about soil.  Yeah, soil, dirt, that stuff that gets under my fingernails.  I was just amazed at how this mixture of clay, loam, sand, organic matter, various elemental nutrients, microbes, and macrobes allows plants to grow and thus life as we know it to exist on Earth.  When I got the mail, I noticed that I received one of my 'freebie' magazines that talks about soil as being a dead medium that is to be completely controlled and not something that is alive and needs to be worked with to grow the crops and produce needed for our existence.  That, I believe, is the major divide in agriculture right now.  The two extremes are very large scale industrial operations and very small organic practitioners. But most of the farmers I know are somewhere in the middle of these extremes.  As a farmer, I try my best to grow healthy crops and as an extension, livestock, t...

How I love the rain. Especially when it means that I don't have to be working 12+ hour days, six days a week. But that is what I get for working at a farm cooperative during the spring field work season. This spring is a bit different in that I am mostly running a dry fertilizer floater. For all of you that are not familiar with midwestern US farming practices, a dry fertilizer floater is a large truck that has wide farm tractor style tires on it and a box on the back of it that looks like a dump truck box except it has a conveyor belt in the bottom which moves fertilizer out the back to a couple of spinners which throw the fertilizer in a specific pattern onto the field. It was rather unnerving to drive it at first because it is so tall. The floor of the cab is over five and a half feet off the ground and while driving down the road I can look down into the cabs of semis as I meet them. But I've become a bit more relaxed driving it in the last couple of weeks. I was hop...

On Friday of last week we had an unusual occurrence over our farm. A neighbor apparently was having some of their corn sprayed with a crop duster. I can only remember one other time when there was a crop duster in our neighborhood. That is when there was an outbreak of army worms about 25 years ago. I haven't heard what the reason was for the spraying but it must be some sort of serious infestation because the cost of employing a crop duster is very high. I know that the pilots that fly these aircraft must be crazy because they go very low over the fields and seem like they barely miss the electric lines and/or trees at the ends of the fields.