This is my office today- Now what leads to smaller changes

The highway was slowed to a stop with orange barrels.  Because of the slow down I nearly missed my turn off on to a tiny, dusty gravel road.  Most my offices are down dusty roads, but pulling a u turn on a highway with construction to get there waaassss a litttlle much. 


So there, at a crest of a hill was the wheat farmer, and his equipment dealer. 
The question was kind of simple. 

This is what we do now
This is what we want to do
This is what the equipment dealer wants to do

What is best for the land. 

Sooooo, maybe we should start at the beginning. 

Wheat... Yeah... the gluten filled yum filled stuff.

Here, locally, it's typically planted in September/October, over winters and it's harvested in July. 
After harvest, your done.... right?

MMMMM nope.  See that is when the decisions really really start.

See that stuff still on the ground?  We call that residue.
Residue is problematic in the a Schrodinger Cat way.

Too much?
It gets in the way (plugs seeders up) , harbor pests/diseases, and can effect soil quality.
Too little?
You can have issues with soil erosion, and it is the proverbial "doggy bag" for nutrients for the soils. 
It is a balance.

Fast Forward, to our producer. 
Typically, in the area of the PNW, after you farm you would mow, bale, and sell off the straw. 
It's great because of the disease and residue plugging issues, as well as the added value of selling the straw off.  That straw gets used for tons of reasons from bio-fuels to decorations.

Then he had a tillage operation that he wanted to do.  Typically, tillage has it's own ups and downs. 
You get to break down that residue so that the "doggy bag" nutrients are available, and incorporates Oxygen into the soils... which is awesome healthy.... I'll get into that more later posts.


But they tried a couple of lower "minimal tillage" items side by side.
See?

Can see the difference?


Nope?










OK, look higher

THERE YA GO


crazy right?
(I have a drone flying license, just in case you didn't realize it).



Looks totally different!

But which is better?

That's how I come in.  Doing drone flights for NDVI/NIR (I'll explain what that means in another post) checking for moisture, weeds, residue management, and more.


So that will be my office once a month for the next year.
Measuring residue and know which of these systems works best

This is my office today- Forage Harvester and Corn Silos

It was 6:10 a.m.

I lived an hours and half away from the field so at 4:30 I was headed out the door.  My dog seemed more upset that he had been forced to do his walk a full 2 hours early than he cared about me leaving.

Meeting the farmer, we discussed the day.  He drives, I follow,  I record the truck numbers, I follow the truck to the silage pit, I collect samples, we repeat the cycle.

Chopping corn for silage seems like a craft of the ages.  A strange production vehicle with a spout out-stretched to fill large trucks with toppers to keep their contents from spilling on to cars as they go down the highway.

Forage Harvesters, behemoth machines, run back and forth with their trucks following along like Duck and Ducklings on a summer night.  Never far away, awaiting their turn are the trucks aligned in a row. 

Forage Harvesters are also used in production of "Triticale".  Triticale is a hybrid of wheat and rye that was bred in Scotland in the 19th Century.

Both are chopped in finite pieces, pulverized, and placed in silage pits for use in animal feeding operations. Silage is compacts, made air tight, and then fermented.  A process that has been utilized since the 19th Century and is the same process that you use to make sauerkraut.

I was here collecting samples of the different harvesters to compare the quality of the chopping.  Were they consistently sized?  Was the corn cracked? (Honest to God, Jimmy cracked corn and I cared and measured it).  Thanks, Jimmy!  My goal was develop an idea if the equipment was sufficiently (and statistically similar.

I sent most of the samples back fresh to a lab on the other side of the United States.  I kept some, sealing them, and making my tiny mini silo to test them in 90 days.  Peak of freshness right there!


The sad part?  By day 5 my samples exploded so I had to reseal them again, on a Saturday, sniffing each sample to make sure they hadn't gone bad.

All in the name of science .  This my office today, sniff, stuff, seal, stack.


THE WHY:

We forage harvest to allow winter feeding of livestock.  They cannot eat off grass year around if they wanted to.  It damages the grass, the feed quality of the grass is very low in the winter, and frankly it is bad for the environment for them to eat on the grassy lands in the winter.

Fermenting is actually better for the ruminant animals (You take a pro-biotic, so do these gals.)  It makes it easier to eat.

We choose the corn stalks and triticale because it has fiber and good nutrients (eat your veggies cows).  The forage harvester makes it easier to store, and makes it better for the animals to eat.

Now for the rest of the story....

I have been posting pictures on my social media for years with the one simple caption... this is my office today.


Some days it may have been a desk, or a road, or a vista.... now I will share (in the words of the late great Paul Harvey)  the rest of the story.

The struggles of agronomy in the new age. 
Technology vs. Tradition.
Tempests vs. the lonely hours in a dry highway. 

Learn how the crops really grow, the roads really lead.... and now for the rest of the story.