No-Till in the Spotlight

Not often do soil management practices get the attention of big name newspapers like The New York Times... Neither do North Dakota farmers. 

However, this week was different. Both were featured in the NYT in an article titled "Farmers Put Down the Plow for More Productice Soil." (http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/03/10/science/farmers-put-down-the-plow-for-more-productive-soil.html?smid=tw-nytimes&_r=3&referrer=) 

Adoption of this soil management practice is spotty throughout the United States. Despite its benefits, there are hang ups to the practice. One of those hang ups is the comfort of continuing to do what has always been done. 

A quote that stuck out to me in the article about this subject came at the end. "You can’t no-till because you haven’t buried your father yet.”

Change can be hard but it isn't always bad. Unfortunately, change is even harder to accomplish in the agriculture. However, if we want to accomplish our goal of feeding everyone on the planet, change will be required, uncomfortable as it may be.  

Transgenics: More Common Than We Think

The use of transgenic technology in agriculture has been an unwarranted point of contention in the eyes of the general public since their introduction to crops in the early 1990s.

Transgenic organisms, or organisms that carry foreign genes inserted deliberately (source) are not used exclusively in agriculture. Insulin used for sufferers of diabetes is produced through a transgenic process and many biological experiments involve transgenic animals for scientific purposes.

A recent article from The Economist suggests, with research from Cambridge University, suggest that transgenic organisms are more ubiquitous that we might think; their research suggests humans contain genes from organisms other than our ancestors.

If transgenic crop plants are as "bad" as many say they are based on their "unnatural" genes, us humans are just as "bad".

"Useful Mutants, Bred With Radiation"

I read an interesting article this week about the use of radiation in plant breeding.

In a nutshell, radiation is used to expose seeds and randomly mix up their genetic material. This mixing causes random mutations; some of these mutations can be useful, some cannot.

Some beneficial mutations that have been found through radiation include tougher shells for peanuts, higher yielding varieties of barley, dwarf rice varieties, and the famous Ruby Red grapefruit. Many more commodities and produce have been created through this process.

Read more about it here. 

Metallica and Dying Weeds

Late last Saturday night, as I was sitting in the Minnesota State University Moorhead planetarium watching a laser show coordinated to Metallica music, I realized something. I had completely forgotten to write three blog posts for last week.

Because of this, it is my goal to finish six blog posts by the end of this week. (Not because I think I'll get my points back) but because I agreed to write three blog posts a week for my Business and Professional Writing class.

To start off this week's set of posts, I want to share some beautiful videos.

The Ohio State University Department of Weed Science released a set of time-lapse videos showing the effect different modes of action on weeds they are effective on. The fourteen videos can be found here.

Weeds dying? That's a wonderful site.

Besides aesthetic pleasure, these videos are useful for farmers to see and understand how different herbicides make plants look after the initial application. They also provide a great visual for farmers to understand how long an herbicide might take to have a visual affect on the plant. 

My favorite part of the videos? Moving the time slider back and forth to show the plant go from dying to living and back again.

Check them out. The videos are wonderful.