Cover Story
Declining numbers are bad news for agriculture.
Ag Tech
Refining knowledge to farm successfully in a margin era.
There’s been a lot of buzz in recent years about declining bee populations, but thousands of other insect species are facing a similar fate. From ants to butterflies and wasps to weevils, insect numbers are steadily declining—and that’s not good news for agriculture.
“Farmers are often surprised to learn that the vast majority of insects are not pests and if you don’t have them your farm can’t be as productive and profitable as possible,” says Jonathan Lundgren, an agroecologist from Brookings, South Dakota who advocates for more biodiversity in agriculture.
“The point past max efficiency is much, much less efficiency,” says Tom Conklin, one of four Wittman Farms partners. Locating that sweet spot and navigating to it has to be one of the primary goals, says fellow farm partner Cori Wittman Stitt, when farming in what she calls a ‘Margin Era.’
Since buying into the Lapwai, Idaho, cattle, small grain, oilseed and legume farm in 2015, the young farmers have looked to data to find and walk that fine line.
Conklin looks at data through the lens of agronomic management while Stitt, the general manager, focuses on real costs and profitability. Their challenge is finding the Goldilocks farm management software that’s just right for serving both their needs.
Many of California’s most productive almond orchards can trace their roots—literally—to the windswept slopes and wild forests of the former Soviet Union, and to two generations of close ties between two plant breeding families that reached across the fallen Iron Curtain 25 years ago.
The Krymsk 86 rootstock—hybridized from wild cuttings by Gennady Eremin at the Krymsk Experimental Breeding Station in southern Russia—was a game-changer for almonds, especially in the heavy soils of the northern San Joaquin Valley.
Agriculture, Education
Watershed approach seeks solutions at the source.
Agriculture
Minnesota’s Landscape Arboretum expands into ag education.
Agriculture
Winter wheat growers look within the family for alternative crops that fit.
Agriculture
Internships help urban ag students gain practical farm experience.
EDUCATION
Precision agriculture conjures up visions of satellites, computers, sensors, and other wonders of the electronic age. But a new fungicide application technology rolling out across the America’s main berry growing regions uses a slight variation of one of the world’s oldest agricultural practices, beekeeping. It’s possibly the most precise application technology yet.
“The process is called bee vectoring,” says Dr. Sue Willis Chan, manager of the University of Guelph’s 2020 Bee Vectoring Project. “Bees pick up small particles that contain biocontrol agents as they leave their hive and disseminate them to flowering crops. It works for strawberries, raspberries, apples, coffee, cucumbers, and potentially sunflowers and some canola too. Essentially, it can be used with any flowering crop that uses bees for pollination.”
Agriculture
How Midwest growers are dealing with aftereffects from the derecho.
The Furrow was first established by John Deere Company in 1895 as “A Journal for the American Farmer.” The goal of the magazine remains the same - to tell stories that people enjoy reading and provide them with knowledge that they can apply in their operations.
