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.

New cameras, new possibilities

I have been taking pictures since 1965 and have had many cameras along the way. I still have the beat up old Minolta 101 that I used in high school, and perhaps 75 yards of the black and white film negatives that it produced. When the digital camera revolution arrived and I jumped in with a 1.3 megapixel Olympus. Today we have 24 megapixels or better and there seems to be an arms race among DSLR (digital single lens reflex) camera manufacturers like Nikon and Canon; they are adding more and better pixels. But there is a new technology that is gaining ground; mirrorless digital cameras. These have the advantage of not needing a mirror in them, which allows for a smaller and lighter camera with all of the image quality of the bigger and heavier DSLRs.

In the last year I have been experimenting with these new cameras and all of mine are made by Fuji. Wow! They are light and easy to carry and do many things that would have been thought to be miracles 40 years ago, but the bottom line is that the image quality is excellent. Back in the day (1974), my camera had two adjustments; shutter speed and aperture. Today one can alter any aspect of the four major contributors to the image; shutter speed, aperture, sensitivity to light and size and type of file created (.jpg or RAW). (The Photoshop wizards in the world like RAW files because they can make so many changes to them, but I have never learned to use Photoshop and don't really care.)

I am not ready to give up my big cameras, but I find this new world of mirrorless to be intriguing; it is the future. I took my Fujis to my local camera store and loaned them to the owner for a week. He liked them so much that he became a Fuji dealer. There is something to this mirrorless camera revolution. In the end, cameras are just tools and most of them can produce good images if the photographer does his or her part. But mirrorless cameras do it with much less size, weight and cost.

Here is a shot of my Intern building an insect trap. The shop was very dark, the light was flat and I had to push the Fuji pretty hard. I don't think my big cameras could have done any better.

Telephone Books: Time to Go

This photo was taken at the Post Office; telephone books delivered and immediately discarded by the recipients. I understand that some people still need telephone books, but why must we all get them? Why can't people who want a telephone book subscribe to one? The answers are obvious; the telephone book company sets its advertising rates according to the number of books distributed, whether or not people actually use them or leave them at the Post Office or throw them in the trash. One has to wonder whether the businesses that advertise in the telephone book have asked the sticky question of how many people actually use one. Businesses, and their fear of being unrepresented, are the only thing keeping telephone books afloat; note that the photo shows the yellow pages toward the front of the book and the personal listings toward the back. This is a reversal from years past.

Most people now use cell phones or computers to get information on local businesses. For me it is a quick question posed to Siri on an iPhone, or I can look up the business website. Each of these discarded books weighs on the order of 1.5 pounds and it would be interesting to know how many tons of paper are being wasted each year, even for my little town. Now extrapolate that for a nation of 315 million people, most of whom live in much larger cities with much heavier telephone books.

For many of us the value of a telephone book is less than the paper it is printed on. Telephone books are on their way out, and pretending they are more popular than they are won't extend their life for much longer. So perhaps it is time to push for a change in practice; those people who want a telephone book should be allowed to subscribe to one, but the rest of us should be spared this waste of resources.

Insulting the Electorate

Is it any wonder that we have no respect for politicians?

Election primary season is upon us here in West Texas, and the radio airwaves are filled with advertisements for Republican politicians. (Democrats are an endangered species, hence no advertisements.) Rather than a respectful discussion of issues, we are being subjected to a shameful display of lies and deceit wherein one politician is attempting to distort the record(s) or past actions of his opponent(s) in the hope that the voters will consider him (the liar) to be more conservative on the issues. One example is that our sitting Congressman has a radio advertisement that says his opponent has, for the last 16 years, contributed money to Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid (both of whom are, of course, stepchildren of Satan). This advertisement forced the opponent to create his own radio rebuttal wherein he explained that, as an eye surgeon, he contributed to his professional organization which in turn provided support for various political parties including the Democrats. The topics for which the misrepresentation is most vociferous are taxes, illegal immigration, Obama Care, Barack Obama and the Democrats.

The reality seems to be that any lie is fine so long as it helps win the primary. There is a whole industry that has been built up to create and perpetuate the lies, from the advertising agencies to the media outlets that profit from running the commercials. Yesterday I heard one rather ignorant host on one of the radio stations saying that these Republican candidates agree on 95% of the issues, so they need to draw sharp distinctions with their opponents on the 5% where they disagree, and the radio advertisements are acceptable because they do that. But they don't; they are lies and distortions that directly profit the station for which the commentator works. So I guess that is what makes it acceptable.

Truth is hard to find when candidates will twist their own records into what they think you want to hear and have no reservation about misrepresenting their opponents. So what is the truth? The only truth that I can see in any of this is that the politicians who would distort the record of their opponent(s) are showing their disrespect for the people of this state. Put the truth on the table, put your records on the table and let us decide. Lying to us is not only insulting, it shows us what you really think of us.

The Stereopticon Perspective

Let yourself go back in time to when land line telephones were uncommon and expensive, winter clothing was made of wool and cars were a luxury for many people. Airline travel was exclusively the domain of the very wealthy and most Americans had never traveled out of the state of their birth. Many households had only recently been electrified and connectivity meant fountain pen, paper and the U.S. Mail and the news of the world arrived by newspaper and/or vacuum tube radio in the living room. What most Americans knew of other nations of the world was what someone else told them through the media of the day.

One technology that peaked in this era was the Stereopticon. These devices first appeared in the 1860s and lasted until radio became common in most homes and people could go to movie theaters and watch newsreels of current events. The stereopticon was the way people saw images of the world around them and I have my Grandmother's stereopticon and five volumes of hundreds of image cards that show what the world was like from before WWI to the late 1930s. Each image card contains two photos, the horizontal axis of which is slightly offset so that, when viewed through two lenses, a stereo (or depth) effect is produced. The image is rendered as 3-dimensional, much like a modern 3-D movie. Photos are shown below.

For the U.S.A. there are images of African Americans picking cotton in Mississippi, early mechanized farm equipment, the new Empire State Building in New York and the most modern factories, trains and airplanes; modernization and progress seem to be the theme. The cards from Germany show the classic Oktoberfest scenes and famous churches, but also a rising Nazi Germany; Swastika-clad Zeppelins and monoplanes. The rest of Europe is represented as mostly the places American tourists would visit if they ever got to Europe. The world outside of the U.S. and Europe is mostly depicted as peasants working the fields or factories, and these are interspaced with classic buildings from the country in question. (See photo 3 below.) Japan is represented by cards that show women picking tea leaves, a group of farmers planting rice, and the most technology shown in any photo is of a stall full of Japanese sandal-style shoes. The subtle message was that the U.S.A. and Europe were better; more advanced and more civilized. But of course we were, and it was nice to see it affirmed.

This was the way it was, or at least the way the American consumer at the time was led to think it was. The thing that strikes me about the photos for the stereopticon is how easy it would be to believe that the "other" people in the world were as shown; I don't believe they were, but I believe the company that sold the photo cards gave U.S. citizens the view of other nations that their customers expected to see.

I can understand how when WWII broke out it was easy for us to be convinced to think of our adversaries as "Huns and Japs"; we had really only been exposed to media that presented things as the audience wished them to be ("we are better") or as the media source wished to present them ("all of them are our enemies"). What harm could that do?

One example of harm is one of our great national disgraces; the internment of U.S. citizens of Japanese ancestry in WWII. We allowed our fellow citizens to be denied their rights as citizens, taken from their homes, stripped of all property and moved across the country to be put in detention camps. How could this happen, and with so little objection? Were these people, to most Americans, neighbors and fellow citizens or the people depicted on stereopticon cards and labeled as dangerous by the newspapers and radio? The answer would seem to be obvious. I am not in any way attempting to excuse the treatment of our fellow citizens by the U.S. Government (us), for it will always be a source of great national shame, but I think I see how it could happen; one-way filtered perspectives make it easy to believe only what we are shown. (Take a few minutes to read about the 442nd Infantry Regiment in WWII. It was composed of U.S. citizens of Japanese ancestry, many of whom had family in the internment camps. The law that started the internments was signed 72 years ago tomorrow, Feb. 19, 1942 - not that long ago.)

But we are beyond that now, right? Be careful if you only listen to media outlets that tell you what you want to hear, or that only tell you what they want you to know. To some extent we are just looking at modern versions of the stereopticon cards.

 The stereopticon illuminating a slide of a U.S. Mail biplane.

Typical stereopticon card from the U.S.A.

Stereopticon card from Russia. The caption reads, "Interesting Peasant Types in the Street of a Rural Village in Russia".