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AdvertisementAnything growsAnything grows here, if you can get it planted. I realize that I now live north and east of most of the people who may choose to read this. From youth in Oklahoma, to agricultural broadcasting in Kansas, and now to this perspective in the Corn Belt state of Iowa, I've had a wonderful opportunity to observe the growing season from hot and dry to rainy and cool. In all of this landscape there is no "normal" year, only averages of extremes, but through a lifetime they result in conclusions that are heartening and somewhat reassuring. When conditions get right, things start to grow. It seems too simplistic to say, but we can't force nature to move in our direction on a large scale until we figure out how to build greenhouses that cover square miles. Such an undertaking is really not necessary as the warm soil, combined with moisture and moderate weather, only requires a seed to start the process. Farmers exploit this more each year as most of the planters ran with their marker booms pulled in this spring, utilizing an integrated global positioning system (GPS) to keep the rows parallel while decreasing the workload on the operator. The result was many more hours logged each day. It is not uncommon to see 50 percent of the corn acreage in Iowa, Illinois and Indiana seeded in a single week. The problem is finding that week! In the western Corn Belt, we had excellent conditions in early April with every farmer putting down nitrogen fertilizer, tilling and planting in just a few days. To the east, conditions were not so good. Coming off the historic floods of last year, eastern Iowa was saturated even though rainfall was light. Across the Mississippi River to the east, the world changed with heavy rains all during April and wel l into May. Corn planting is finally 90 percent done but almost three weeks behind a "normal" year and still painfully slow. One joke going around in Illinois is that a farmer was looking for something green to emerge from a field. He finally saw it. but it turned out to be his neighbor's John Deere tractor that was badly stuck several weeks earlier. The two main differences between my native Oklahoma and Iowa are water and soil. In Iowa, there hasn't been a drought since 1988. That means we are due for one as ISU's climatologist Elwyn Taylor says they come in 18 to 23 year cycles. That is opposed to my memory of Oklahoma where we'd have a minor drought almost every year. The major droughts had about the same frequency, however. (Mid-1930s, mid-1950s, 1980s, etc.) How can they grow such a large crop in this region, year in and year out? It comes from the soil and climate that produces a bounty of vegetation in the months from May to September. The key to fertility is that in the fall the temperature plunges and the land freezes, therefore locking in the organic matter for the coming year. Over the eons the topsoil has become deep and rich and holds moisture well. They also had a glacier run over much of the region, but that's another story. The rainfall is uniform and will support a summer crop without yield loss, in most years. All in all, it is an agriculturalists' dream to farm the lands from Iowa to Ohio and Minnesota to Missouri. When you have good dirt under you and cooperative skies above, the question is more likely to be "How big a crop?" rather than "Will we make a crop?" A large yield is not guaranteed but every year there is a measurable level of technology introduced to maximize the chances. In anticipation of a coming drought and to expand the region where summer crops can be grown, the biotechnology companies are scaling up "drought tolerant" corn that will wait for moisture and mature a larger harvest than traditional varieties. Combined with insect resistance from the "Bt" gene, crops have a greater chance of holding during a dry month and then continuing to grow to maturity when the rains return. The first test came in the dry spell in 2005 as enough insect resistant corn was in the fields to measure results. Comparing corn yields from the drought year of 1988 that were no better than 70 bushels per acre, the crop averaged 145 bushels under similar stress. Almost 20 years of plant breeding attributed to some of the gain but the ability of the plant to resist stress and then respond says a great deal for the inserted genes. The challenge in common for all farmers is marketing. Last year, as the floods came and global demand soared, growers were so afraid that they wouldn't produce a crop they couldn't bring themselves to forward contract. Soybeans for this year could have been sold for $19 per bushel and corn for $8. Very few are delivering at those prices. Now the market is showing strength following a period of high input costs and low output value that had many farmers "upside down" until early May. Still the desire to catch the top of the market, or only sell after the harvest is in the bin, has farmers following prices closely but hesitant to act. A grower in southwest Iowa says things have been so easy this year that his corn crop looks "scary good." He reflected further: "This is the best year since I've been in farming, but we just sit too close to Kansas to expect to get by without a dry spell sometime this summer."
Editor's Note: This is Ken Root's 35th year as an agricultural reporter. He grew up on a small farm in central Oklahoma and started his career as a vocational agriculture teacher. He worked in Oklahoma, Kansas and Missouri as a broadcaster and was the original host of AgriTalk. He has also been the executive director of the National AgriChemical Retailers Association in Washington, D.C. and the National Association of Farm Broadcasters in Kansas City. Ken is now the lead farm broadcaster at WHO and WMT Radio based in Des Moines, Iowa. He has been a columnist for HPJ and Midwest Ag Journal for eight years.
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