Macy’s first Thanksgiving Day Parade occurred in 1924. It was created to celebrate the expansion of Macy’s flagship store and kick off the Christmas holiday shopping season. It featured floats, bands and live animals borrowed from the nearby Central Park Zoo. More recently, the commercial thrust for...

My first contact with Tom Kilcer was toward the end of my 63-month Cooperative Extension career. I met him at an Extension Conference in the Catskills in autumn 1977. My last year as an agronomy county agent was 1977-78, which was also Kilcer’s first year in that calling. Our contact over the follow...

Generally, most Northeast haymakers were satisfied with their 2026 first cuttings’ quality. At most locations, first-cut perennial forage tonnages were adequate to exceptional, except for much of Central New York: Utica’s TV weather reports showed June through August rainfall tallies ran about one-t...

Let’s flash back to 1966 and our family’s Greene County, NY, hillside farm where my dad wanted to purchase a new tractor. He was told he should expect to pay $100 per horsepower. He bought a new green 70-hp diesel tractor for about $7,000; he also bought a 250-gallon fuel tank and filled it up with ...

Let’s go back to late February 2026, when we saw military action between Iran and the U.S. Transportation of Middle East crude oil, through the Strait of Hormuz, was becoming very sluggish. Artificially reduced crude oil supply, destined for the U.S., forced oil prices past $100/barrel in early Marc...

In horse racing, the final stretch is the last straightaway of the track leading to the finish line. I like to compare growing seasons to horse races. Much of the corn in the Northeast has been affected by drought, suffering lower starch build-up levels due to less water during July. But, of late, m...

Ever wonder why it is sometimes possible to pull up mature corn plants with very little effort? In such cases, the majority of roots are in the top three inches. Soil testing – to maximize the efficiency of fertilizer inputs – often reveals soil’s physical limitations when probes hit compacted layer...

Throughout spring, the white or light pink, funnel-shaped flowers of wild morning glory graced many roadsides in the Northeast. With help from UConn Cooperative Extension, I’m able to provide information on this pretty flower. The scientific name is Convulvulus sepium (“of hedges” or “of fences”), e...

As crop growers enter late August, especially across the northern U.S., they become quite aware of night temperatures starting to drop. Such happening starts slowing the production of warm season crops (soybean, corn, sorghum, sudangrass, their hybrids and millets). As these warm season crops start ...

Dietitians tell us that a person consuming an 8-oz. glass of cow’s milk is ingesting approximately 232 mg of phosphorus (P), a nutrient vital for bone health, energy metabolism and cellular function. Taking these numbers further, I calculate that approximately 1 lb. of elemental P departs the farm i...

On July 23, I was invited by Uri to perform extensive soil sampling on his farm in eastern Chenango County, NY. I’ve been advising Uri in his organic crop program for a couple decades, taking lots of soil samples for him over the years. I met Uri in September 1964 at Cornell University. I was an ag ...

Baseball Hall of Famer Yogi Berra once said, “It’s déjà vu all over again.” This phrase linked the French term déjà vu, meaning “already seen,” to the English phrase “all over again,” creating a humorous repetition. Much of the Northeast has recently experienced a major wildfire smoke invasion, comp...

The Brassica genus boasts in its membership many of our most well-known vegetables: cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, rutabaga, turnips, kohlrabi, Brussels sprouts, collards, kale, mustard and more. My first contact with this genus as a source of soil fumigants occurred about 20 years ago. At the time...

Just as summer 2026 was getting started, I stumbled into three situations where cattlemen reported incidence of foot rot in their livestock. Two of the individuals I work with in an advisory capacity – one a dairyman, the other a beef (mostly Angus) farmer. A discussion of foot rot should logically ...

As I’m writing this column early on June 30, the weather forecast for the Utica area spotlighted this headline: “Dangerous heat to hit parts of U.S. ahead of July 4” – with worst hit areas being the Northeast. According to David Robinson, climatologist at Rutgers University, “A heat dome (hitting th...