Three growing seasons ago, during the middle of summer, I took a few soil samples on a southern Herkimer County dairy farm. One of the fields 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 mo...

Turn back time a half century, to my Cooperative Extension career as a dairy and field crops agent. I tried to get farmers to mentally break down their businesses into three parts: cows, heifers and crops. Perhaps an oversimplification, but this approach helped them home in on possible “weak links” ...

From 1985 to 1992, ABC aired a detective show, “MacGyver,” which followed the adventures of Angus MacGyver, a secret agent armed with remarkable scientific skills, solving problems in the field using any materials at hand. The episode I liked best featured MacGyver hunkered down in a swamp, trying t...

As an undergraduate at Cornell during the mid-1960s, I took a course titled “Marketing of Agricultural Products.” The textbook for the course bore the same name, co-authored by Max Brunk and Lawrence Darrah. When I took the course, Darrah was the instructing professor, and I paid $4.50 for a used co...

The record wildfires of 2023 (compliments of our neighbor to the North) started gaining momentum in March of that year. Their intensity increased, starting in June, but Canada had been affected by an ongoing, record-setting series of wildfires. As the worst wildfire season in recorded Canadian and N...

Regarding the “correct” seeding rate for sorghum and/or sudangrass, old-timers typically recommended 15 – 20 lbs. of seed/acre (or one bag for three acres). At this rate, seed drop/acre ran about 225,000. This means slightly less than one inch between plants on 30-inch rows. Advocates for this pract...

Soil fumigants are pesticides that, when applied to soils, form gases to control pests which, if unchecked, disrupt plant growth and crop production. Fumigation suppresses weeds and soilborne plant pathogens in crops like potatoes, onions, sugar beets, tomatoes, mint, carrots and strawberries. Chemi...

There’s general concern among doctors that as we age, our bodies become less efficient at regulating temperature. This puts such people at greater risk of heat illness. To avoid such problems, health professionals recommend that aging folks in hot weather drink plenty of water before going outside –...

That’s the title of Tom Kilcer’s June 2025 monthly newsletter, available at advancedagsys.com . Kilcer is a Certified Crop Advisor who served for 28 years as a field crops agent working for the Extension service in Columbia County, NY. He then managed the Cornell agronomy research farm in Valatie, N...

That’s title of the article written by Heidi Roth that appeared June 16 on the Offrange website . The introductory paragraph reads, “In the Pacific Northwest, a region of the country known for abundant rainfall, decades of droughts and resource battles are forcing farmers to learn about ‘dry farming...

According to the New Orleans Times-Picayune ( nola.com ), “A large Saharan dust plume will soon blanket Gulf Coast.” That was the headline on June 6. The brown haze over the central and western Caribbean is a Saharan dust outbreak that left the African coast on May 21 and was forecast to reach the G...

We just hit the two-year anniversary of the runaway Canadian wildfire smoke epidemic, the one engulfing America’s northern states in early June 2023. At that time, ABC Online news headlined “Canadian wildfire smoke live updates: Air quality alerts issued for 13 states.” Canadian officials said firef...

During Memorial Day weekend, my wife and I spent a half day with my son Peter’s family in Columbia County. I can’t drive anywhere without looking at other people’s crops. After crossing the Hudson River, I was hoping to see distinctly formed green rows of nicely emerged corn seedlings compared to th...

Before delving into the big four fertilizer macro-nutrients – nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P), potassium (K) and sulfur (S) – I’ll address a trace element that often gets under-publicized: zinc. In his “Eco-farm,” Charles Walters wrote, “Zinc is only now [1996] joining the crowd of elements required fo...

The first wild plant in the Northeast welcoming winter’s demise is marsh marigold, also called cowslip. Part of the buttercup family, this plant isn’t related to garden variety marigolds. Marsh marigolds are commonly found in very damp soils – even upland marshes – hence their name. They grow up to ...