Some of you may be wondering who else, other than you, reads my farming and agriculture blog. 

My web savvy friends over at HotPress Web recently installed some cool tracking software on my blog to help me understand where my readers come from. (we do precision agriculture, why not precision blogging?)  Anyway, I was impressed and I thought it would be interesting to share the results with you.  So here are my web visits over the past few days. 

National: By Major City

National: By State (Darker color indicates more traffic)

As expected the majority of my readers come from the Midwest US, but I get plenty of “city slicker” traffic from both coasts and lots from other places in between.  Unfortunately I haven’t had any readers from NV, UT, NM, ME, VT, or NH in the past several days.   

State Level, Regional

The two states where I get the most readers are Iowa and Illinois.

Iowa

Illinois

(Colorado rated third, but I think I’m skewing my numbers there because I login to my own blog account pretty frequently.)

I am also really proud to say that I also get quite a few international readers.  I guess they are interested in finding out what is going with agriculture and farming in the US.  Recent international visits came from Canada, India, United Kingdom, Croatia, Australia, France, Philippines, Italy, Ireland, Netherlands, South Africa, Brazil, New Zealand, Norway, Malaysia, Israel, Singapore, Sweden, Russia, Japan, Mexico, United Arab Emirates, Ghana, Bangladesh, Iran, Vietnam, Ivory Coast, Spain, Hong Kong, Poland, South Korea, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kenya, Switzerland, Hungary, Jamaica, Latvia, Indonesia, Belgium, Denmark, Bulgaria, Greece, Puerto Rico, Serbia, Kuwait and Turkey.

International

I want to personally thank all of you who take the time to read my blog and I especially appreciate the comments and emails. 

-Alex Tiller

There were poor weather conditions earlier this year, particularly in the central Midwest, and that means that a lot of soybean planting was delayed until late into the season. This is a good time to check for fungal diseases among soybeans, particularly on fields that have been continuously planted with soybeans over multiple seasons – the fungi that cause a lot of these diseases can really build up on acreage that doesn’t have a crop turnover now and again.

There are a number of diseases in particular that soybean farmers should watch out for – white mold, brown stem rot, and sudden death syndrome in particular. If your crop shows signs of any of these, take remedial action as soon as you can, usually by spraying fungicide.

White mold is scientifically named “Sclerotina stem rot”, and comes from a fungus that lives in the soil. The fungus bodies in the ground are actually black, and form hard nodules called sclerotia. They can survive in soil for years, are highly resistant to heat (no heat level on your farm is going to kill them, unless you’re burning off fields), and don’t mind freezing and thawing one bit – you can see how they might make a home out of your soybean field. The infection of growing plants occurs at the time of flowering, and infection potential is made worse with high levels of moisture in the ground and in the air, cool temperatures, and lots of rain. White mold shows a white, fluffy growth that appears on the stems, along with wilted leaves and bleached stems.

Brown stem rot comes from a fungus that lives in crop residues (usually the stem) and in the soil as well. The fungus strikes when the plants are in the reproductive portion of their cycle, during cool weather, causing interveinal chlorosis (a yellowing of the leaves between the veins). This symptom of brown stem rot is worse when there is heavy rainfall keeping the plants wet all the time. Under dryer conditions, interveinal chlorosis is reduced or eliminated, and instead the leaves turn brown and dry up, but remain attached to the plant. The vascular tissues and pith of a plant with BSR are infected and have a dark brown discoloration all the way from the roots up.

Sudden death syndrome occurs a lot when the weather is cool before flowering and pod set. The fungus lives in the soil, and flourishes when the soil is wet. SDS is often found in plants growing on low spots and where the soil is compacted. Small yellow spots develop on the upper leaves, and eventually get larger and have a rotting appearance. However, the pith stays clean and white and you can definitively distinguish SDS from BSR by checking the pith.

None of these diseases are fun or easy to deal with, but early detection is the best way to keep on top of them.

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about the 2008 farm bill, and how there’s now an income cap on farmers who can receive payments through the Conservation Reserve Program. Critics of the program deride it as paying farmers not to farm, but the ecologically minded farmers out there know that the program simply provides an incentive to take land which is environmentally fragile out of production. CRP land protects soil and groundwater and provides wildlife refuge that helps keep rural areas ecologically healthy – and even economically productive, since CRP land and the wildlife it attracts makes things like hunting leases more attractive.

Unfortunately it looks like a lot of farmers may be making the decision to pull their acreage out of the CRP. The rates paid for CRP haven’t adjusted much over the years, and even though the government paid $1.7 billion in 2005, the cash rents on land are so high now that some farmers report they could be earning twice as much on their CRP land. 3.8 million acres will be up for renewal next year, and 4.4 million acres in 2010. Some farmers will pull their land out because they won’t be eligible any longer under the new income cap provisions of the 2008 farm bill; others because the economics simply don’t make sense for them anymore. A third group may pull out because the program has become less flexible; for years, farmers have been able to participate in CRP but request occasional waivers from the Department of Agriculture to use the acreage for animal feed. A recent lawsuit by the National Wildlife Federation put a stop to that, and so USDA’s hands are tied.

In addition to existing participants opting out, fewer new farmers may be opting in. Enrollments declined 21 percent from 2006 to 2007, with many farmers stating that the subsidies for ethanol production just made it impossible for them to leave the land out of production. Overall, it’s a shame – this is a good program that has improved the land quality of the US farming base, and if it falls apart because of conflicting subsidies and ill-advised restrictions, we’re all going to be worse off for it.

I read an interesting story about a hypothetical agricultural management question: could the city of San Francisco feed itself using only crops grown within 100 miles of the city? The answer, perhaps surprisingly, is that yes, they probably could – and in fact, they’d still be exporting most of what’s grown locally.

Farms and ranches within a hundred miles of San Francisco produce about 20 million tons of food each year – while the entire Bay Area consumes only 5.9 million tons. There is one problem with this thought experiment: while there are more than 80 different crops and animal products produced locally, a number of San Francisco’s favorite foods aren’t produced in adequate quantities, or at all, in the local “foodshed”. Eggs, citrus fruit, wheat, corn, pork and potatoes are the big missing links. -So local farmers would have to change some priorities in order to feed San Francisco locally. Still, it’s somewhat reassuring to know that at least for one major US city, the local farm market is adequate to meet nutritional needs for the population.

Interest in local food has grown with increasing awareness of the environmental impact of transporting food from one place to another, and the market is weighing in on the practice - $4 a gallon gasoline has a way of making people ask, “is this trip necessary?” The local food movement is in its infancy, however – less than three percent of US retail food sales can be called “local” in terms of where the food was produced. However, local food is growing rapidly as producers see the wisdom in selling to local buyers when they can.

There are limits to the localization of food. San Francisco would be a great candidate for a local food push, but that is because it is located within an amazingly productive agricultural zone. Denver isn’t going to feed itself locally anytime soon, or anytime at all, for that matter. Still, as food prices rise and people begin to have a stronger desire to eat food produced nearby, farmers can look for significant marketing opportunities by selling their products into local markets where possible.