Thanksgiving 2015

Things are winding down on the southern High Plains; the corn and sorghum are in the elevator. But the cotton gins are running full speed on this Thanksgiving day; module trucks are hauling cotton to the gins as fast as possible ahead of a rainy cold front that will hit tonight.

It has not been a good year for agricultural producers; cotton and corn market prices are below the cost of production and sugarcane aphid decimated the sorghum crop (see previous post). But this is Thanksgiving and a time to reflect on the good things. Here are some photos taken on this Thanksgiving day. Times are tough but we always give thanks.

Cotton modules in the field; these are the new type made by John  Deere cotton strippers. 

Old style cotton modules (left) at the gin yard and the new modules from a John Deere cotton stripper.

Cotton modules at the gin yard as the first clouds of an approaching cold front arrive. 

Cotton gin southeast of Levelland, Texas on Thanksgiving day. The gin was running full speed and the module hauling trucks were almost causing traffic jams on the Farm to Market road. 

The year of the sugarcane aphid

Aphids are very small insects and some people might wonder what kind of threat a small insect could pose. Well, 2015 has been a stark example; sorghum production has suddenly become a very expensive endeavor. The sugarcane aphid made some kind of genetic switch to sorghum in recent years and has been a devastating pest in Texas since 2013. It reached the High Plains late in 2014, too late to do much damage. However, it arrived here in June of 2015 and most of my summer has been devoted to trying to stop this pest.

This aphid, like many aphids, is born pregnant and gives birth to live young. Thus the progeny begin birthing live young in 4-5 days. This reproductive potential means that populations can double in just a few days. Aphid colonies expanded and it is not long before thousands of aphids cover the bottom of sorghum leaves and extract plant juices. The aphids then excrete honeydew, a thick sugary substance that coats the leaf below and causes it to glisten in the sun. Aphids extract a huge number of calories from plants and kill leaves, and this in turn leads to significantly reduced grain yield. My trials indicate a 76 - 80% yield loss if insecticides are not used. In some cases the aphids lead to no grain yield, and it is torture to walk a field and realize that the grower had a significant investment but would not have any harvestable yield. To add to the problem the honeydew is pretty much like Karo Syrup and it may make it very difficult for a combine to harvest the sorghum kernels in fields that did yield. In August there were billions of winged aphids migrating from fields, and cars along the interstate would run through these clouds. Drivers suddenly found their windshields coated with aphids and they had to pull over and scrape them off before they could continue. Almost every sorghum field on the Texas High Plains had very high and damaging numbers of aphids.

Agricultural research requires detailed planning going in to spring and there is very little room to alter the schedule. This year, however, the magnitude of the sugarcane aphid threat caused many of us to shelve our carefully made plans and put all efforts toward blunting the effects of this pest. But that's what we do; the agricultural community comes first.

A sugarcane aphid colony with winged adults.

And a few days later.

The Apple Watch - Really?

I am an older person and I freely admit this might limit my vision especially as related to new technology. On the other hand my age allows perspective on new technology as I have used most of the computer technologies developed from 1975 onward. Recently my Apple Representative gave me a personal demonstration of what the Apple Watch could do and, as I stood there listening to him, I realized that my current wrist watch was 17 years old and has cost me around $7.00 per year to own and know what time it is. The Apple Watch is fantastic; it lets you check e-mail and texts, know your pulse rate and stock prices and weather forecast and generally be connected to all sorts of information. As the Apple Rep said, "You don't have to take out your iPhone."

There was a day when computer technology was work and was expensive. I still have my 1987 Macintosh SE, and it still works - as does the dot matrix printer that goes with it. I recall the Mac system update that allowed more than one application to run at a time (Multifinder), and this was magic. I still have my first external hard drive; 40 megabytes at a cost of $849 dollars in 1987. ($1,596 in 2014 dollars - all for 15x less information that will fit on the cheapest flash drive on the planet.) I would use it today except that it won't hold even one image from my digital camera and none of my modern computers has a SCSI connection. As strange as this sounds this was all good at the time, especially because my first computing was done on punch cards; run the cards through the reader, let the mainframe computer process them, walk across campus to get the dot matrix printout on that giant wide paper with holes in the sides only to realize I had made an error in the run commands - walk back across campus and correct the punch cards and then walk across campus again and see if I did it right. The personal computer was a revolution. There were growing pains of course and I remember reading an academic journal article that concluded that people who preferred a white background on computer screens (Mac computers) were less intelligent than people who preferred blue or amber screens (DOS PCs, soon to become Windows PCs). I was one of the less intelligent people and still am, and I can't help wondering why all screens now have a white background.

When the internet arrived I remember how speedy the 1200 baud modem seemed. Prior to the internet, personal computing was, well, personal. The internet gave us connectivity to/with others. Now let's fast forward to the modern age where we are all connected if we want to be. How we have changed; more connectivity and instant accessibility. And perhaps less thought in communicating and more communications of less value. More is not always better and faster is not always better. I read the Facebook posts of my friends and wonder why they wrote some of them. That being said, many of them do matter; the things of whole life and a way to tell many people at one time. This efficiency has its place although I would prefer an e-mail, but that's just me.

This brings me back to the Apple Watch. If I was a more connected person I might appreciate what it could do for me. And in addition to connectedness it could tell me my heart rate, blood pressure and the number of calories I had consumed. It could help me find my way to a destination without having to go to all of the trouble of looking at my iPhone or reading a paper map. In a few years it could help me remember to take all of my medications and Geritol on time. But for right now it seems like just another gadget, a conduit to more noise.
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Full disclosure: I bought Apple stock on the day Steve Jobs announced the iPod and iTunes, two disruptive and transformative technologies. I still own the stock.

Never say too much rain

My lab (right) after a recent rain

May of 2015 is coming to a close and the cotton crop is still in the seed bags. Spring 2015 has been a season of rain, lots of rain. This is the 5th wettest May on record in the Lubbock area, the wettest since 1949, and we still have 10 days to go in the month and it is raining again tonight. The probability of rain over the next five days is high.

My corn research plots were planted in April just before the rain started, and the plants are growing well enough in spite of the much cooler than normal temperatures. However, cotton, the staple crop of the southern High Plains, is at risk. Cotton requires soil temperatures of at least 60 degrees at planting and our soil temperatures are not there yet, in part because of the cold rain and in part because of below average temperatures. (The high tomorrow will be 60.) While some people might think this is not a big deal, it really is. Cotton requires warm temperatures to grow and yield, and cotton planted in the Lubbock area after the 5th of June cannot be insured under the crop insurance program because the odds makers have decided there may not be enough heat units before fall to finish out the crop. When planted in cold soil, seedling cotton can be decimated by diseases. If the temperatures remain cool (and sometimes even if they don't) it can also be decimated by insects (thrips). So cotton growers are faced with a rapidly closing planting window this year. More rains will mean an additional 4-7 days needed to dry the fields, and this pushes cotton growers inexorably toward the June 5th insurance cutoff date.

Cotton is the lifeblood of the local agricultural economy and some growers are starting to consider corn or sorghum if they can't get cotton planted on time. This is not like deciding to drive the Chevy Suburban because the pickup truck is in the shop, it is a very serious decision with plenty of downside risk.  Corn has the disadvantage of requiring far more water to make a crop than does cotton or sorghum, and if it turns dry later in the season then many farmers won't have the irrigation capacity for corn; they may lose most of the crop and the mycotoxin levels that are exacerbated by drought stress might make the remainder of the crop unmarketable. (Corn cannot be grown on dryland (unirrigated) acres here.) Sorghum is a good crop with respect to limited water, but the new pest, sugarcane aphid, might decimate it unless a lot of money is spent on insecticides. And all indications are that sugarcane aphid will arrive here early this year. To complete the picture, the prices for all of these commodities are down this year and there is not much chance of returning a profit from growing any of them.

Farmers on the southern High Plains are being squeezed by nature. Memories of the exceptional drought of 2011 - 2013 are still vivid and no one wants to revisit that nightmare. The interesting thing is that I have not heard one of them verbalize the thought that they wish it would stop raining. Yes they want an un-verbalized three week hiatus from the rain so that they can plant cotton, but no one is saying that they would like the rain to stop. In West Texas we know what rain means, and no one is going to use the word stop in the same sentence as the word rain. A vacation from the rain for a couple of weeks would be nice, but we never want it to stop.

Agricultural Research: The Summer in Retrospect

It was a long, hot summer. As this is written in late December the last of the cotton is being harvested on area farms and this year is almost in the books. We had more rain this year and the historic drought has abated somewhat.

This might be a good time to look back, not so much on the past season but on what agricultural research means. We focus our attention on things like new insect resistant crops, pest management, increased yields with better crop genetics and lower inputs and less water etc. There is a vast industry involved in these things and I am but a small part. If one looks at the yield per acre of all of our crops it quickly becomes apparent that we, the collective agricultural researchers in both industry and academia, have made enormous progress, especially in the last 80 years. Here are some historical corn yields from Iowa. This is something to be proud of but the progress must continue if we are to keep pace with increasing world population.

What we do in agricultural research today is important today, but in reality it will not last. We are like workers setting the lower stones in a pyramid that will take thousands of years to build; we set our stones as a foundation for those who come after us. They, in turn, will set their stones for those that follow, and so it will be for as long as people grow crops on earth. There will be triumphs and there will be challenges, but the one constant is that nothing in nature lasts and we must always continue to move forward. So at the end of a hard year it is good to know that I have made some little contributions to knowledge and have set one or two stones in the pyramid.

The photos below are from this season. The first is of my corn being augured from the combine to the truck that will take it to the elevator. The second is of USDA-ARS researchers harvesting cotton plots.

On The Edge of D-Day

 June 4th, 1944, and the ships and landing craft are loaded. It has been almost five years since the start of the war and the once invincible Nazis have finally been driven back by the Soviets and the campaigns in Africa and Italy. But the Germans are strong in France and ready to repel any invasion. This war has a long way to go and the third front, France, is almost here.

Bad weather would postpone the invasion for a day, but the gliders and paratroopers were on their way to their destinations on the night of June 5th. And on that night, the greatest naval armada ever assembled began its transit to the beaches of Normandy.

June 6th is, of course, the 70th anniversary of the Allied landings in Normandy, what we now call D-Day. But on that day the outcome was far from certain and there was going to be a terrible price to be paid for the liberation of Europe. It might be fitting to take a few minutes to reflect on the sacrifices of  the soldiers, sailors, and airmen who, seventy years ago, faced the greatest challenge of their time. These were our parents, and it is fitting that we reflect on them in the aircraft or ships or boats in darkness as they crossed the English Channel for the final assault on Hitler's empire. Their parents, our grandparents, waited by the radio for news of the invasion and wondered whether Western Union would be bringing them a telegram to say that their son or daughter had died bravely in defense of the country. Seventy years is not that long ago. Here is General Eisenhower's address to the troops, sent out on the eve of the battle.  Regardless of your political views, Ronald Reagan gave a poignant address on the 40th anniversary of D-Day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTLVIp1AjAg .

Rain, finally (5.26.14)

I don't remember the last time we had a significant amount of rainfall. A look at the drought map of Texas will show that we are in what is called "exceptional drought", the most extreme category. Exceptional indeed! On Friday we had 1.89 inches of rain, the most in any single month since 2010, and then an additional 4 inches fell on Saturday through Monday. Tonight there is flooding in south Lubbock and cars are floating in the parking lots of some businesses.

It is interesting that there is not much complaining about this; we all know that this is the fourth year of a record drought, one that is even worse than the historic drought of the mid-1950s and even the Dust Bowl days. These rains have done done wonders in terms of spirits and optimism, and they have had the very practical benefit of coming just in time to allow the dryland cotton crop to be planted before the insurance cut-off date, past which the crop would be uninsurable. So in spite of flooding and hail damage, West Texans are grateful for the rains; the most we have had in many years. The drought is not over, not by a mile, but at least we can plant the crops, the playa lakes are recharged and some of the small towns around here that are about to run out of water have extra time to wait for more rain.

Here are a couple of photos from my research farm.

Planting time again

It has started; pre-plant irrigation, experimental design, field marking and seed sorting. And so I begin another season of corn insect research. There is a certain kind of energy in this, perhaps as a reply to winter, but certainly in anticipation of learning more about corn insects in the coming year. Each year the work gets harder, probably because I am now 55 years old and still do my own field work. Other professors have crews of (young) laborers to do the field work, but I don't follow that path. I have found that being in the field and doing the work every day allows me to observe things that might be missed if I had stayed in the office. There is something that is right about working twelve hours in the heat and having the satisfaction of knowing that things were done throughly and well. Of course the downside is aching muscles, exhaustion and occasional back problems, but hey, I still have a few good years left, I hope.

The photo below shows the seed corn that will be in four experiments this year. I work with transgenic (GMO) corn and make no apologies to the Lunatic Fringe for that. This corn resists pest damage and lowers both insecticide use and losses to insects and has lower mycotoxin levels than conventional corn. Transgenics are the future, and this is how we are going to feed the increasing billions of people on earth in the coming years. (I have written about this in an older post here.) And yes, Monsanto and Pioneer are supporting my research; they are my allies in the goal to help grow more food for more people.

So it is on with the season. There will be many long, hot days ahead and I hope there are some important discoveries to be made.