agriculture

Thursday afternoon I was out to the farm cleaning out the sprayer getting ready to spray corn for the second time. When you are changing crops you are spraying and herbicides the sprayer needs to be "triple rinsed." Most of the time I just use water but sometimes depending on the herbicide you also put a tank cleaner in with the water...

After a couple weeks of cooler than normal weather, this past week was the exact opposite. Yes, the other shoe dropped! Temperatures averaged 72.4 degrees and that was 7.2 degrees above normal. The wet turned to dry, too. Rainfall totaled only ...

The phrase always read and follow directions is well known to farmers when applying herbicides to our crops. That phrase also applies to homeowners applying herbicides to their lawn! I do not think the owner in the picture intended to kill all the grass in his front yard...

I am sure you recognized the phrase Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. I am not sure when the environmental phrase was developed, but it did come from the environmental movement that began with the first Earth Day in the 1970s. In the picture is a unique way of reusing herbicide boxes -- as a foot stool and television stand...

Corn closed Friday with gains of about 2 cents a bushel. For the week corn lost about 2 cents. The first corn crop condition ratings of the year were released by the USDA on Tuesday afternoon. Last year the first ratings were at 72 percent good to excellent...

This last weekend I was spraying my post-emergence herbicides on my beans. Earlier in the week I finished spraying my corn. I applied the same herbicides on my corn and beans: Glyphosate to kill the small weeds that had emerged and S-Metolachlor, which will provide residual control...

Loren Dahle of Morristown explains the different uses and unique features of the walking plows in the Rice County Historical Society’s collection. Some are breaking plows, used for breaking up the sod and others are more general purpose. They all would have been pulled by oxen or horses...

The weekly weather and crop update from the Southern Research and Outreach Center at Waseca did show some crop progress last week. The weather this last week was not as cool or wet as the previous week. Temperatures averaged 59.9 degrees, 2...

Always read and follow label directions. That is a phrase farmers are very familiar with. It is a tagline you hear on every pesticide commercial, or will see somewhere on every pesticide print ad. It is more than a phrase though, it is the law...

Saturday evening Birds Eye Foods planted my peas with a 40-foot air drill. A seed cart is pulled behind the drill with a fill conveyor on it. They swing the conveyor out and run the peas from a grain truck right into the cart. This sure beats the way I used to plant peas...