agriculture

When a pesticide is approved by the Environmental Protection Agency, it receives a registration for 15 years. After 15 years it must be approved again. Even though I use pesticides, I do not have a problem with this process. After 15 years of use it is a good idea to look at new research to see if there are any unforeseen environmental concerns with its use...

The Southern Research and Outreach Center at Waseca released the weekly weather and crop update for the week of May 11 through May 17. Warm and wet pretty well describes the weather last week. Temperatures averaged 66.4 degrees, 8.3 degrees above normal...

The demand for organic food is increasing every year. There are some consumers that are willing to pay a premium for food produced in a certain way. I am a conventional farmer and I have no experience being an organic farmer. However, I have done many interviews with organic farmers and organic organizations...

It was about April 10 when soil conditions were fit to plant corn. However it was very early and many farmers decided to wait. Farmers with a lot of corn acres to cover did start planting. It then rained and soil conditions were not fit until the weekend of April 24...

Sunday afternoon I was working over a field that will be planted to sweet corn later this month. I grow sweet corn under contract for Bird Eye Foods in Waseca. They have farmers scheduled to plant sweet corn from early May until about the middle of June...

There was a little bit of back and forth trading in the corn market last week, but by the close Friday new crop December gained a quarter of a cent. Bullish traders were disappointed we did not see a rally after the flooding rains in a major portion of the Midwest...

Kevin Ernst is a commodity broker with Chiodo Commodities I talk with each day in the noon report. A few days ago, he mentioned that beef prices were sharply higher because of talk that soon the U.S. would be able to export beef to China...

After a couple of weeks of cold, wet weather it was nice to see great planting weather this week. Temperatures averaged 59.8 degrees, which is 4.2 degrees above normal. Rainfall totaled .26 inches, and that was .6 inches below normal. Growing degree units totaled 78, which was 22 percent more than normal...

As a former dairy farmer I am amazed at the technology that has been developed just in the past few years. Being a dairy farmer one of the most time-consuming parts of your day was the actual milking of the cows. Today robotic milkers have been developed that allow the cow to go into the stall and be milked when she wants to...

It has been known for quite some time that soybeans grown in Minnesota and North and South Dakota have a slightly lower protein content than beans grown in South America. In addition, beans grown farther south in the United States also have a higher protein content...