We are slowly slipping into the winter season. Luckily the first ten days of abnormally cold days of two weeks ago have been canceled by two weeks of abnormally warm shirt sleeve conditions which have given us a chance to get outside chores and tasks completed before true winter with its snowy and below freezing conditions become the rule.
First of all, I wish you all a very good Thanksgiving holiday break and time with your families and kids or grandkids. Most of them will get a short vacation if they are in college, high school or grade school. For those in Ag it is close to the time when nighttime temps get colder and the ground gets closer to freezing up in northern climates. The holiday was first started by the early colonist who were saying thanks that they had not starved or froze to death in the northeastern states which were colder than in the parts of Europe where they had come from.
My German ancestors were still in their native country until the Queen of Russia changed her mind and told the German farmers they had invited in one hundred years earlier to improve the size of their crops that she was going to start charging taxes from them and she was also going to draft their sons into the Russian army. Most of them responded by saying “We’re outta here” and emigrated to where they could live free and there was ground they could settle. They loved to play in the dirt.
Summing Up the Immediate Tasks
So now with harvest mostly complete, much of the fall fertilizing done and soil samples pulled to be analyzed it is time to move into meeting and conference season. There are a few on the calendar. I am still making up my mind on which one to attend. The large ICM conference is scheduled to be held Dec 4th and 5th in Altoona, IA. The crowd sizes have grown and more capacities were needed than what Sheman Auditorium offered. The next one up will be the Big Soil Health Conference in Cedar Falls with Mitchel Hora and his Soil Health team of Liz Haney and Russell Hedrick. This group has gown in size and list of supporting companies. You will know most of them. One I forgot to mention in an earlier column was Organisan headquartered in Georgia.
Organisan with their national sales director, Mark Nichols, and western U.S. manager, Tom Wood cover the state of Iowa. Both the Organisan and Pacific-Gro/Tidal Vision companies produce products made by processing shrimp shells into what is called O2YS or Chitosan. That product acts as an insecticide, nematicide and fungicide capable of controlling those crop problems. It’s application causes plants and soil microbes to produce an enzyme called Chitinase. This enzyme dissolves the chitin based hard exoskeletons, mouth parts, eggs and beaks (stylets) of nematodes or the mycelial strands of damaging fungi. The residual activity of the chitosan is typically longer than most synthetic pesticides and is harmless to humans and non-target organisms. There are now high levels of SCN reproduction on formerly resistant Fayette soybean varieties, so help controlling SCN in needed. In recent seasons Gall midge larvae have been damaging soybean plants in the western 2/3rds of Iowa. The infected states now include NE, IA, SD, MN and recently discovered in MO and KS(?). Members of the four state SBGM task force have concluded that hard chemistry is not effective against this insect and it is time to use biologicals or natural products. One caveat is that chitinase works best in fields that have higher Haney soil health scores.
Ernie Flint, a renown Mississippi State Univ nematologist compared the control results provided by Chitosan products with that of Telone. That Dow hard nematicide is applied in the fall at cost of $300 per acre to sterilize the soil and kill existing cyst nematodes. Most potato, peanut, sugar beet, strawberry, veggie or nut growers in warmer climates and infected soils follow up with a spring application of Vydate (a harsh carbamate) in the spring at another $200/A. When those crop growers compare the costs of those CL and FL based $600/A pesticides with their skull and cross bone placards to the $50 to $60/A chitosan product with no health risks, they convert their programs very quickly even though they may require two or three applications. When the same producers hear about our control challenges in soybeans with SCN and SBGM they ask why we don’t use the chitosan products instead of soil sterilants. Trial data from within the U.S. and in other countries, including China, over decades and centuries tell us it might be time to be using these products.
Chitosan can also be effective in controlling fungal diseases since fungal mycelial strands contain high amounts of chitin. Slime molds like Fusarium, Pythium, Rhizoctonia and others are also susceptible.
In recent years Japanese Beetles have devoured any ripening fruit on our fruit trees at our farm place This year I applied a mix of Chitosan, Big Shot (an essential oil mix of sandalwood, cinnamon and peppermint oil) plus a small dose of organic pyrethroid. It offered great knockdown and decent residual. The beetles detect that the treated plants are no longer edible plants. Use of this mix allows you to control pestering insects using safe products that work and leave no harmful residue.
The Big Shot is the perfect product to use when they hold an event in a building or area where house where flies or spiders would be pestering guests. It is also effective against spiders in dark basements. An industrial hygienist from the Atlanta developed the Big Shot and companion products.
Remaining Conferences
Concluding the list of conferences which command large attendances are the Acres U.S.A. Eco-Ag Conference which is held Dec 4th to 7th in Covington KY. Acres is usually worth attending and was promising to vary the locations across the farming Mid-West and Mid-East. Many of the attendees and sponsoring companies were dealing with microbes when microbes were not cool. How prophetic. I don’t plan to attend as driving 600 miles in a day when bad roads and blizzards can be a problem. As far as moving the venue across the country the 2022 conference was in Cincinnati which is nine miles away. We believe they are catering more to the Amish who find traveling long distance is more difficult than for us.
The other conference which is vying for the title of Acres of the Northwest is being held in Coeur ‘d Alene, Idaho. It is the Soil Craft Regenerative Ag event. The list of speakers is extremely good with Sap Testing specialists, the top research entomologist Tom Dykstra who still conducts secretive U.S. Air Force research, a well-known Ag Teacher//MPH/Biophysicist/MD & DO and soil health professionals who will be teaching about Biomimicry to reduce input costs. It will be held Jan 17th -19th. This should be all full of cutting-edge topics.
Soil Sampling and Soil Analysis
October and early Nov were prime times to get soil sampling tasks taken care of. The challenge now is figuring out how much you can trust the results when the soils were so dry. In past decades it was typically the western Iowa part of the state which was the driest. This year the drought map has the northeast corner of the state as being the driest. In extremely dry soils the clay components composed of Si and Ox sheets shrink down trapping minerals between those layers so tight that plant roots and attempts in the analytical process are not able to free them so they can be measured.
One other thing I need to discuss is that fields that have lots of glyphosate on them directly, or in manure from animals fed GM grain having a moderate to high chance of loss in productivity or heavy disease pressure, Tar Spot included. The herbicide was patented as a broad-spectrum chelator of minerals important to plant growth and plant immune function. Testing for residual levels in each or representative fields has been possible for several years. The cost for MASS Spec soil analysis using very expensive instruments with exactness down to 60 parts per trillion makes the per sample cost of $325 at the RHI lab in Fairfield, Iowa. Until now there was no field test accredited microbial product able to degrade the compound. Now there is such a mix. It was developed by a very good biochemist and microbiologist who used deep sea soil cores and sleuthed ancient amber to find ancient species of Lactobacillus bacteria. These bacteria are capable of degrading the primary metabolite referred to AMPA or amino-methyl-phosphonic-acid. Martha Carlin presented info on this product at our December 2022 conference.
There was field testing done by several Ag scientists at a recognized research farm in Wisconsin to determine what % of the residual herbicide was degraded in 60 or 90 days. The Yield and Shield alone and with Kraut juice to was applied at varying rates and sampled at set intervals. Kraut is normally made by allowing airborne lactobacillus spores to land on open-to-the-air ground cabbage. The results were very positive. The documentation can be found in a report called “The Saga of Soggy Sauerkraut”. Trust the Germans to find another use for sauerkraut. It’s not just for putting on your bratwurst anymore.
Now that your pesticide application season is over it may be the time to discuss the effects of pesticide residue on the crops and critically important to your personal health. It could be very important to discover what the level of the same herbicide might be in your body due to previous accumulated exposures. Urine testing can be done at the RHI lab in Fairfield, IA. RHI Lab can test down to 60 parts per trillion for about $100. Any level above one half parts per billion can lead to chronic or acute health problems. Think about this issue, and ask if you owe it to yourself and your family. There is a plan and series of remediating products to use if your levels are above .5 parts per billion from a medical company in Idaho which deals with decontamination. Carol and I both took it without any hassle a few years ago. There were no needles and no time off required if needed. A patient from Edmonds, Oklahoma named Joe Tippens racked up a medical bill of $ 1.2 from MD Anderson for being included in a trial for a new experimental pharma product.
Bob Streit is an independent crop consultant and columnist for Farm News. He can be reached at (515) 709-0143 or www.CentralIowaAg.com.