Many dietitians (as well as sleep therapists) believe that a midnight snack helps the sleeper enjoy unconscious rest more peacefully and productively. The snacking endorsement also comes from plant dietitians, a group of scientists with whom I have frequent contact. When winter forages go to bed for...

Churchtown Dairy in Columbia Co., NY, hosted an all-day Real Organic Project (ROP) Conference on Oct. 14. Approximately 250 people attended. The booklet passed out to conference attendees explained a little about each speaker, as well as ROP’s mission. The mission statement says, “The Real Organic P...

The first few days of October, I saw winter rye sprouting nicely while I was driving through some Central New York counties. This encouraged me, since it appears that more and more corn growers are planting fall cover crops. The more productive title for these late season plantings is “winter forage...

Minutes before midnight on March 31, my peaceful sleep was interrupted by loud, rolling thunder. The next clap of thunder was preceded by lightning, with a flash-to-bang time (FTB) of two to three seconds. With speed of sound at approximately 1,000 feet/second, this meant that the lightning from one...

The fertilizer industry is flush with good news (as far as farmer customers are concerned). The supply/demand scenario has morphed into a different ball game compared to 12 months ago. Before delving into numbers, let’s review. Some fertilizer synthesis chemistry, addressing nitrogen, first. Ammonia...

When I studied high school biology five decades ago, scientists only talked about three life form groups (called kingdoms): animals, plants and fungi. Halfway through that half-century, another kingdom was added, called protists. Protist life forms are universal, almost all of them microscopic – tin...

For decades, Paul Harvey, renowned radio news journalist, aired a daily news commentary titled “The Rest of the Story.” He would open with a fairly well-known headline, then explain to listeners some of the nitty-gritty lesser-known details that added dimension to it. A bigger splash headline appear...

Before long, most corn growers will be combining and/or row-chopping their crop. This will be a good time to conduct a small experiment while the person doing the chopping (or combining) waits for an empty wagon to be returned. Pull up two or three randomly selected still-standing plants. This simpl...

Winter forages are something in which I have become a super believer in during the last dozen years. (Reminder: they are small grains planted during late summer or early autumn; they have been selectively bred to go dormant over winter, then spring to life as soon as prolonged cold weather loosens i...

On Aug. 18, Ken from Chenango County emailed me, seeking my advice for the following scenario: “We usually harvest two cuttings of sorghum, in July and August. This year, being dry and then wet all summer, our sorghum and Japanese millet didn’t do as well. We have about six acres of sorghum and thre...

Last growing season I took a few soil samples on a southern Herkimer County dairy farm. One of the fields being 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 more soybean seeds just sproutin...