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Monday was my aunt’s birthday.  It is our tradition that we take our first sugar beet samples on that day.  It’s a tradition that dates back to the early 70s.  We go out to each field, find a spot that looks about average and pull ten feet of beets.   The general assumption is that 10 feet of beets, multiplied by 1.1 and multiplied again by the number of weeks left before the start of harvest gives you a fair indication of what your final yield will be.

My personal history shows that all this test does is prove that the sugar beet crop is made in August and September.  It also shows if there are any disease issues in the crop.  And even if there are issues, there is nothing you can do about it except pray that they recover.

This year our crop is a little all over the board.  As our spring went, some of the beets were planted in good conditions, others were planted in muddy conditions.  Some fields were planted early, some were planted a little later than we would like.

This is a healthy beet. It has large leaves; as bigger than my glove. Sometimes big leaves don't mean there is a big root underneath. But a big leaf is the factory we need for photosynthesis to take place.

Overall, the field that was planted last and looks the weakest proved to be just that.  The beets are small, ten feet only weighed 3 pounds, and showed signs of disease.  These beets are healing over.  If the disease is active, the beets will be actively have brown spots on them that are oozing juice.  What we thought was our best field is now in the middle of the road.  In this field, the leaves look tremendous but the roots supporting them aren’t overly large.  A field with average foliage is currently the best.  Our earliest planted field, and therefore you would think, one of the best, had the most foliage but average beets, and it also had beets showing signs of disease.

This is a beet that has been infected with a disease. It has brown spots that are no longer oozing beet juice. If the field dries out this beet will be fine come harvest.

What this means is we need to stay dry.  The fields have ample moisture to produce a good crop.  The beets themselves have the infrastructure (big leaves) to convert sunshine into sugar.  Beets like heat and sunshine so lets hope and pray that’s what they get.

It’s the end of July and we just finished applying fungicide.  Normally, we are done with this by the Fourth of July at the latest, but, as with everything this year, we are a month behind.

As the wheat plant matures and pushes the head out of the stalk, it is succeptible to fusarium head blight, commonly called scab.  The fungus basically takes a healthy kernel and robs it of its moisture.  Therefore, a healthy looking plant can have kernels that are shriveled.

Scab came about in the early 90s.  We would have wonderful looking fields, but when you threshed out the heads, there was nothing there.  Sixty or seventy bushel straw would have 10 bushels of wheat in some cases.  I remember a few years where we burned just about every field we had.  Over time, the nations wheat growing groups funded research into this fungus found varieties that were resistant to the fungus and found a fungicide, that, if applied at the right time would protect the plant from the scab fungus.

The key to this is applying it at the right time.  You need as many plants as possible headed out and for 10-15% to have started to flower.  When the weather is nice, this can happen in a few hours.

The picture on the left shows wheat that is in the process of heading.  This wheat will probably look more like the picture on the right in a few hours.  The picture on the right is ready to be sprayed.  The yellow flakes on the head are the pollen.  They are yellow when they first come out and fade in the sunlight.  Since these are yellow, they more than likely emerged just a few hours ago.

Forecast also has to be factored in.  Last Friday we had 1000 acres of wheat that would be ready over the weekend.  Ideally, we would scout the fields in the morning and spray what was ready as soon as the dew evaporated.  However, the forecast for Saturday was for an inch of rain.  The experts say it is better to be a little early than a lot late so we sprayed everything on Friday.  it was a long day, we started at noon and didn’t finish until 10 at night, but we got it done, and sure enough, it rained early Saturday morning.

As with everything in farming, timing is critical.  In a greenhouse or a controlled environment this would be a simple task.  But our inventory is all outside and suffers at the blessings of Mother Nature.  And she sure does keep us on our toes.

While we have had an all around crappy spring, one of the things we have going for us is technology.  In the old days, like three or four years ago, we planted non-GMO sugarbeets.  These beets had a spray technique called micro rates.  As the name implies, we used a very small amount of herbicide in each application.  The goal was to basically stunt the growth of the weeds until the sugarbeet leaves would become big enough to cover the smaller weeds.  To make this work however, we had to spray frequently, about every week to ten days, or the weeds would start to grow, fast, and get out of control.  We’d end up spraying about 5 times until the beets got big enough to crowd out the weeds.  In addition, we would only spray the weeds in the beet row.  We would have to cultivate the ground in between the rows a couple of times a year to kill the weeds not touched with herbicide.

The frequency of spraying meant an incredible amount of luck had to be involved.  Besides the normal challenges of wind direction and humidity during spray season, we had to miss the showers for the fields to be dry enough to travel in.  At the same time, we also had to have enough rain to keep the beets growing.  If things didn’t work out we would have to hire airplanes to spray the fields.  Besides added expense of hiring someone to do your job, the planes didn’t always work the best.  For example, they may not get to the field in time, after all, if you need a plane, everyone else in the county probably needs one too.  Oh, and I almost forgot to mention, if the plane didn’t get the  job done, we’d hire migrant labor to hoe the weeds in the field.

The past few years we have been able to utilize Round Up Ready technology.  With Round Up, we spray twice a year.  We have a bigger window in how big the weeds can be before they get out of control so timing isn’t as critical.  This means if the field is to wet we can wait a few days and let it dry out before going in with a sprayer, and we don’t have to hire an airplane to do the job for us.  Also, the Round Up doesn’t affect the sugarbeet plant at all.   The micro rates affected everything it touched.  The beets would be stunted a day or two after an application.  This setback would cost a week or so of growth and negatively effect yield potential of the crop.

While this type of technology has its detractors, the reality is it saves fuel, saves headache, adds to the yield potential and quality of the crop grown, and does a better job all around than the old way of doing things.

Last Thursday, we got to go to work.  Between 9 am and midnight we got 400 acres of wheat planted and about 200 acres of soybeans.  Not a bad day but it made a horrible week as that’s all we got done for the week.  Rain on Friday put us out of work for the weekend, fortunately it was only a couple tenths.  Then on Sunday and Memorial Day Monday we had around 3/4 of an inch.  Now on Tuesday we have rain showers and a howling wind.  So its an all around crappy day and a crappy month, though it could be worse.  We are fortunate to have as much in the ground as we do.  We didn’t get the real bad storms other parts of the Red River Valley had last night.  We haven’t been flooded out like some in Missouri, Lousiana, North Dakota and Montana.  In fact, it seems most of the country has had its weather problems this year.

On the bright side, the market has started to take notice.  Last week Minneapolis wheat rallied considerably as buyers tried to convince growers to plant at all costs.  This week the market has started lower as the Russians have announced they will be back in the export market.  That’s fine and good but this country, and the world, is going to need high quality wheat that comes from this country.  If we don’t get planted, the world will be short of this quality wheat.  We’ll see what the market has to say as the growing season goes on.  Hopefully, we’ll be able to get something planted to take advantage of the high price everyone is talking about.

While most of wheat country is drying up and blowing away, a good chunk of hard red spring wheat country is floating away.  We had a pretty good week last week.  We finished planting our beets and started planting wheat and soybeans.  Unfortunately, on Friday and Saturday we had 1.3 inches of rain.  Sunday and Monday featured clouds and lousy temps, now on Tuesday we are finally seeing the sun again.

Once we get the sunshine and hopefully some wind, drying out doesn’t take a real long time.  Hopefully we’ll try to cultivate something tomorrow and maybe seed something on Thursday.  It’ll be slow going to start as we will have to be patient for fields to dry out, but once they do we’ll run whatever hours it takes to get done.  If we run non-stop it would take us about 4 days to finish.  So it won’t take long, we just need to get started and stay dry.

I just realized my last post was at the end of March.  I knew it had been awhile but didn’t think it was that long ago.

A lot has happened in the past six weeks, at the same time, not much has happened in the last six weeks.  Our perfect spring has turned cold.  The water came up and is slowly going down.  For the most part its been a frustrating time though I can think of ways that it could have been worse.

The flood that I knew was coming did come.  It will rank in the top 4 all time.  We put a device called a tube dike on top of our dike.   A tube dike is a big plastic tube that you fill with water.  The weight of the water seals the tube to the ground and holds water back.  See the picture below.  We were able to hold the water out.  It came to the top of the dike and fortunately didn’t go much higher.  In 2009 it was about 6 inches higher.  The 1979 flood was a couple inches higher, the 1997 flood was the all time record, it was about 18 inches higher than what we had this year.

The water came to the top of the dike around the farmyard this year.

While the focal point of any flood is what happens at the farmyard.  Most of our land also goes under water.  For the land that doesn’t go under, its also been to cold and damp to get much field work done.  We did start seeding sugar beets last week.  Hopefully, the forecast we have is for a week of sunshine and we will be able to really go to town in the field.  We need a good week., while we are not late yet, we are very close to the time when we will see yield reductions due to the late spring.

The three miles in this picture will be wheat this summer.

We need about 4 or 5 days to seed our sugar beet crop and the same for our soybeans.  For wheat it would be 10 but we might work around the clock.  In that case it would be about 6 days before we are done.  Of course, all this depends on the weather.

Recently, I’ve heard and read that part of the cause of the Egyptian situation is due to U. S. ethanol policy.  It seems that if corn wasn’t used for ethanol it could be used for food, even though very little field corn is consumed directly by humans.

Just thinking out loud here, let’s explore that argument.

Let’s assume we used zero bushels of corn for ethanol.  Then we wouldn’t have any ethanol to burn in our cars.  We’d have to replace that fuel with traditional oil, the majority of which comes from the Middle East.  Our energy independence would be in jeopardy.  And what would the price at the pump be for gas $5 or $6 wouldn’t be out of the question.  Instead of food inflation causing riots in other parts of the world, we’d have fuel riots in our part of the world.

Aside from the fuel argument, lets look at what ethanol has done for the ag economy.   Before ethanol got up and running in the 90s, agriculture was suffering through some tough times.  The 80s were not ag friendly.  Foreclosures were common nationwide.  The future of ag wasn’t bright.  I remember discussing this with my dad.  He wanted to know if I wanted to farm, I told him its tough to make a living with $3 wheat.  He told me people will always need to eat so there will always be a need for a farmer.  He was right.  I think its safe to say, in my area anyway, the poor farm economy of the 80s pushed most kids of the 80s off of the farm (myself being an exception).

Most of wheat research today is still being done in the public university system and funded by grower checkoff dollars or federal dollars in the form of (gasp) earmarks.  With the rising prices of wheat, that is starting to change and we are getting more private investment in wheat.  When ethanol got started, farmers could make money growing corn.  Realizing farmers actually had some money to invest in better seed, the ag companies started doing research into making that better seed.  That snowball really grew and now there is a lot of research being done in corn seed.  That research has resulted in national corn yields increasing by about 25% between 1992 and 2010 and an increase of almost 10 million acres planted.  A look at wheat yields over the same time would show an increase of 18% per acre but a drop of 15 million acres in production.

If we take corn ethanol out of the picture we have a number of disturbing results.  First, we import more oil from countries that don’t necessarily like us and export our hard earned dollars to them.  And who knows, maybe the national guard would be stationed at gas stations across the country.  Second, we would lose another generation of farmers.  And third, we would have no research dollars in corn, we would have corn yields that didn’t keep up with demand, prices of other commodities (like wheat and soybeans) wouldn’t have followed corn’s leadership in price advances.  Doesn’t sound so simple does it.

Just some food, and fuel, for thought.

This week Oprah had a show about the benefits of veganism.  I’ve been watching the discussion about the show with mild interest and have decided to throw in my two cents on a couple of topics.  Today I’m going to stick to our crop rotation.

One of the overriding topics of the anti farming crowd is that if it weren’t for government subsidies, farmers would grow a much larger variety of crops.  On our farm we stick to wheat, sugarbeets and soybeans.  We do this not because of the government programs but because its good for the land.  Some of our land has been producing for our family for over 100 years, why would we do something that was bad for the land?

Sugarbeets use a lot of moisture to grow.  With the amount of rain we’ve been getting around here that is a good thing.  The year after we have sugarbeets on a field we will have wheat.  Because the sugarbeets sucked moisture out of the ground the year before, this ground will be the first to dry out in the spring.  Again, in this part of the world with our short growing seasons, getting in early in the spring is very important.  Also, because we have been able to utilize the benefits or Roundup Ready technology in sugarbeets, the fields are very clean and free of weed seeds.  This results in having a cleaner wheat field the next year and having to use less herbicides on our wheat.

Following the wheat we will have either wheat again or soybeans.  This decision depends on the market dynamics in the fall.  Sometimes we can make more money growing wheat than soybeans and that will influence our planting decision.

Depending on what we do in year 3 will determine what happens in year 4 or our rotation cycle.  If a field had wheat on it, it may have sugarbeets again.  If it had soybeans it will go to wheat.  Some of the questions that have to be answered for this decision have to do with the likelihood of that particular field flooding in the spring (this would delay the planting of sugarbeets), if the drainage ditches  need work or not, and weed pressure in the field.

By year five, the field should have sugarbeets on it again.  We strive to have sugarbeets every four or five years.  By rotating our crops we break up the weed and disease cycles.  Also, much like a well-built stock portfolio, we are diversified in our crops and hopefully can benefit from changing market conditions.  Most importantly though, we can hopefully will benefit from the weather cycle.  Not every year is conducive to producing a certain crop.  Sugarbeets like when its hot outside, wheat prefers to be cool.  In the end, we don’t farm the program; we farm the market or the weather.

I’ve written here before about a lawsuit in California involving sugarbeets.  The lawsuit is ongoing and threatens next year’s sugarbeet crop.  Some articles I’ve seen estimate a reduction in planted sugarbeet acres in excess of 30%.  Undoubtedly, this would raise sugar prices.  Undoubtedly, this would threaten some farms.

A few years ago, we had the food versus fuel debate.  Sugar farmers have done something about this.  In the past 15 years, my sugar cooperative has reduced acres planted by 20% and produced the same amount of sugar.  We have been able to plant other crops, such as edible beans, soybeans, wheat, or corn on those 20% of acres that used to be planted to sugar.  The American food supply has benefited because of that development.

Since we have adopted biotech sugarbeets, we have reduced the inputs we have used.  In all honesty, biotech crops are better for the environment than conventional crops.  In the past, we have sprayed various mixes of chemicals 3, 4, or 5 times in a summer.  Now we are spraying RoundUp twice.  We also used to cultivate twice a year.  Now we don’t.  Because of the technology we are making at least three fewer trips across the field.  This reduction has reduced the amount of fuel used, conserved water, and been healthier for the crop and the environment.  Also in the past, we would often have severe weed problems in the field the next year and have to spray more on the next year’s crop.

There is a fear on the environmentalist side that biotech sugarbeets could cross pollinate with other crops.  It takes two years for sugarbeets to produce seed.  It is very rare for a plant to bolt and shoot a seed stalk in the field.  In fact, on our 1000 acres of sugarbeets planted last year, I did not see one.  Sugarbeet seed is raised in Oregon where they also raise table beets and other crops.  This is where they are concerned.  For as long as they have been growing biotech sugarbeet seed, I have not heard of one instance where the sugarbeet seed has cross pollinated with the other crops.

Seed for next year’s sugarbeet crop has already been harvested and is sitting on a shelf in a warehouse somewhere.  Currently, it is illegal to plant that seed.  That has me dumbfounded as there is nothing to cross pollinate with in the areas where sugarbeets are grown.  If there was a plant that bolted, a farmer could simply destroy that plant with a hoe.  Simple as that.

As a farmer, all I ask is that these regulations be based on sound science.  In 40 years, we are going to have 9 billion people on this planet to feed and clothe.  Modern farming techniques can do it.  The science is there, the tools are there.  Let us do it and feed the world.

I urge anyone that is interested to visit www.supportsugarbeets.com.  The USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service is taking comments on the issue until Monday, December 6th.  Please add your comments and support sugarbeets.