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Martinsville, Ohio | Trying to respond to all your ideas.
No swathing here.
My pictures are near as bad as it really is, just where I was when I took them.
Tillage is not a good option here for many farmers, cost, belief, erosion, we lose soil on flat ground, it is that silty.
The point is grandpa was right. Rotation. Crop rotation, seed rotation, chemical rotation. You can put all your eggs in one basket every year, well, if you put all your eggs in one basket every year you are going to lose a few baskets.
Cover crops seem to make up for all those tillage passes with greater benefits. We have the tools to use them grandpa never had. NoTill drills, big combines, herbicides etc.
A quart of 2,4-D in the fall often helps greatly but this year they already went to seed and it is so dry there is nothing out there to kill. Good practice many miss and works most years.
Gmo crops seem to be the culprit because of the reliance on one chemical and limited rotation. We made it fail. We need more common sense but we have to operate off economics but if we do that then we reduce our profit. The dog is chasing his tail.
Those fields should be in corn next year with a program that will hammer the resistant weeds but farmers hate the hassle of late planting, high moisture and all the problems that go with it. You Iowa and Illinois guys learned to master this long ago because of your soil. You can grow corn. We are more marginal and we can make soybeans outprofit corn.
I don't blame these farmers for what they are doing one bit. They have been sold a lot ideas that have failed. You have to be luckier or smarter than the next guy.
Maybe southern Clinton County is the only place there is this problem but it proves to me it could happen anywhere.
Ed Winkle | |
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Resistant weed pictures I promised
