Crop Comments
Posted on October 22, 2025
Northeast corn silage growers are currently about three-quarters done with chopping. Corn grain growers are about one-quarter done with combining. This is a good time to conduct a small experiment while the person doing the chopping or combining waits for an empty forage wagon or gravity wagon to be...
Crop Comments
jkarkwren 
Posted on October 15, 2025
On Sept. 8, much of Central New York received light frosts. Fearing that such might take place, I had covered my frost-sensitive crops with tarps. Doing so proved to be a wise idea, since, come dawn, the hood of our car showed a very thin layer of ice crystals. When those melted away, I removed the ...
Crop Comments
jkarkwren 
Posted on October 8, 2025
The last few days of September, I saw early plantings of winter rye sprouting nicely in some Central New York counties. Happily, I see more corn growers planting autumn cover crops. The more productive title for these late season plantings is “winter forage,” a mindset which acknowledges that someth...
Crop Comments
jkarkwren 
Posted on October 1, 2025
On Sept. 18, Jim, an organic dairy farmer, called me to discuss possible corn silage toxicity issues that worried him. He milks about 70 cows in Genesee County (NY), and his farm is “regular” organic (not grass-fed). I’ve been advising him on his crop program for several years. He grows corn for sil...
Crop Comments
jkarkwren 
Posted on September 24, 2025
On the evening of March 15, 2025, a fairly serious electric storm hit central New York and much of the Northeast. The flash-to-bang time for the first clap of thunder was seven or eight seconds. With the speed of sound at approximately 1,000 feet/second, this meant that the first lightning bolt stru...
Crop Comments
jkarkwren 
Posted on September 17, 2025
In mid-August, Pecos Bill (aka Wild Bill), a fellow Cornell ag graduate, sought my advice for a particular cropping situation on his Chenango County dairy farm. He said they usually harvest two cuttings of sorghum, in mid-July and late August. But this year, starting wet, then turning dry most of su...
Crop Comments
jkarkwren 
Posted on September 10, 2025
Over the last 15 years, I have become a super believer in winter forages. Winter forages – small grains planted during late summer or early autumn – have been selectively bred to go dormant over winter, then spring to life as soon as prolonged cold weather loosens its icy grip in March or April. Wha...
Crop Comments
jkarkwren 
Posted on September 3, 2025
Despite many historians believing that clovers have truly changed the world, these crops are surprisingly modest creeping herbs, rarely reaching knee-height. According to my textbook “ Around the World in 80 Plants ” (Jonathan Drori, Lawrence King Publishing), there are two common cultivated species...
Crop Comments
jkarkwren 
Posted on August 27, 2025
Three growing seasons ago, during the middle of summer, I took a few soil samples on a southern Herkimer County dairy farm. One of the fields sampled that I found particularly interesting had been planted to a mix of forage soybeans and brown midrib sorghum two weeks earlier. There appeared to be mo...
Crop Comments
jkarkwren 
Posted on August 20, 2025
Turn back time a half century, to my Cooperative Extension career as a dairy and field crops agent. I tried to get farmers to mentally break down their businesses into three parts: cows, heifers and crops. Perhaps an oversimplification, but this approach helped them home in on possible “weak links” ...
Crop Comments
jkarkwren 
Posted on August 13, 2025
From 1985 to 1992, ABC aired a detective show, “MacGyver,” which followed the adventures of Angus MacGyver, a secret agent armed with remarkable scientific skills, solving problems in the field using any materials at hand. The episode I liked best featured MacGyver hunkered down in a swamp, trying t...
Crop Comments
jkarkwren 
Posted on August 6, 2025
As an undergraduate at Cornell during the mid-1960s, I took a course titled “Marketing of Agricultural Products.” The textbook for the course bore the same name, co-authored by Max Brunk and Lawrence Darrah. When I took the course, Darrah was the instructing professor, and I paid $4.50 for a used co...
Crop Comments
jkarkwren 
Posted on July 30, 2025
The record wildfires of 2023 (compliments of our neighbor to the North) started gaining momentum in March of that year. Their intensity increased, starting in June, but Canada had been affected by an ongoing, record-setting series of wildfires. As the worst wildfire season in recorded Canadian and N...
Crop Comments
jkarkwren 
Posted on July 23, 2025
Regarding the “correct” seeding rate for sorghum and/or sudangrass, old-timers typically recommended 15 – 20 lbs. of seed/acre (or one bag for three acres). At this rate, seed drop/acre ran about 225,000. This means slightly less than one inch between plants on 30-inch rows. Advocates for this pract...
Crop Comments
jkarkwren 
Posted on July 16, 2025
Soil fumigants are pesticides that, when applied to soils, form gases to control pests which, if unchecked, disrupt plant growth and crop production. Fumigation suppresses weeds and soilborne plant pathogens in crops like potatoes, onions, sugar beets, tomatoes, mint, carrots and strawberries. Chemi...
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