By DOUG GRAVES
Ohio Correspondent XENIA, Ohio — The U.S. Army is always looking for a few brave men.
Those at the Greene County, Ohio Agronomy Board are looking for a few brave - and ad-venturous farmers.
No time in the past 30 years have commodity markets been so volatile.
Input costs are changing daily due to world shortages. And hay and forage prices are unusually high.
With those scenarios facing farmers, the Greene County Agronomy Board sought farmers willing to try new planting and cultivating techniques for 2008 on no more than one acre.
“Some of the ideas are designed to improve soil fertility, utilization of soil nutrients, reduce erosion, improve forage production and much more,” said Greene County OSU Extension Coor-dinator Gerald Mahan. “We’re not asking these farmers to use up a lot of land, just about an acre or so. We want to compile a list of 50 farmers who will buy into this project, using from one to five acres.
“We need them to give some of these ideas a try.”
After attending a few seminars the past few months and taking in some recommendations from local farmers, a list of ideas started to grow.
Such ideas included the use of cover crops such as radishes, annual rye or cereal rye.
“We’re out to see the benefits of keeping a cover crop on the ground 365 days a year and if we do this we’ll have more organic matter there for another crop,” Mahan said.
Mahan and company are looking for farmers to test thermal imaging, designed to show nutrient shortages.
“Thermal imaging has been around a while but some farmers haven’t picked up on it,” Mahan said. “Thermal image of a crop will let them see if there is a nutrient shortage.”
Mahan is looking for volunteers to test vertical tillage, high management wheat and testing the results of adding sulfur to soybean production.
“We hope to get some takers for these new projects,” Mahan said.
“We’ve been doing some test plots for a number of years. We felt that since there is a volatility of agriculture going on now we felt we needed tome buys to push the envelope to look at new things that are being talked about.”
Other test projects include testing the cost of additional crop inputs versus returns and taking a close look at high population corn stands.
One farmer has come forward to test population planting of soybeans, another will test corn. Two farmers have agreed to see results dealing with high management wheat.
And there are many other tests Mahan and his crew wants to examine, like supplemental forage production, low population soybean production and the addition of lime to low pH soils. Mahan also wants to examine the results of double crop involving sunflowers, soybeans oats and hay. Finally, best management practices (BMP) encourages producers to fine-tune fertilizer application with producers compensated for crop loss when fertilizer is applied at BMP nutrient rates.
According to Mahan, many of the ideas came out of the No-Till Conference held in Cincinnati in January and others arose after attending the Conservation Tillage Conference in Ada in February.
“We’re also open to any ideas our local farmers have,” Mahan said. “We are looking for a variety of tests so that we might see some increase in yields in some tests while seeing if we can have high yields of corn with less use of nitrogen. The Ohio farmer uses too much nitrogen and phosphorous and it ends up in the Mississippi River and into the gulf region.
“We need to fine-tune that fertilizer application.”
Most of the techniques have come from Mahan’s office, but he’s hoping Greene County farmers can chip in.
“I know there are farmers doing some wild things out there on the back 40 and we haven’t learned about them yet,” he said.
“We’re hoping they share some of their ideas with all of us.”
This farm news was published in the April 2, 2008 issue of the Farm World, serving Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, Kentucky, Michigan and Tennessee. |
