August 27, 2009
Did you know that corn is promiscuous? Don’t be too shocked. This monocot is very happy to out cross the very moment you fail to protect its innocence. Corn, as most of you know, is a monocot. Corn can self pollinate or it can out cross, or get pollinated by another corn plant. It does [...]
August 21, 2009
The four field days hosted over 90 attendees total! I was able to attend 2 of the 4 field days that I helped to organize: Warren’s off-the-grid systems on August 5 and Bondi’s solar livestock watering on August 6. I enjoyed meeting the hosts and learning about the systems myself, but the best part was [...]
August 20, 2009
It’s been a while since I blogged and I want to apologize to all. It’s been so hard for me to get used to living without internet in my new apartment, not to mention that the library is only open during my work hours and I never make it back from the field before it [...]
August 19, 2009
I haven’t meant to be absent from the blog for so long, but I’ll take it as a good sign that I’ve been too busy at work to update here. Let’s take it back to the end of July… The Organic Dairy Initiative and NOFA-NY co-hosted an “Organic Dairy Farming and Raw Milk Marketing!” field [...]
July 31, 2009
Volunteer corn (corn growing due to seed from the previous year’s crop) can be a serious problem, and according to a 2007 Iowa State University study one volunteer corn plant per 10-foot of row resulted in a 1.3 percent yield loss. I haven’t seen many fields worst than this one… Algona, Iowa – Corn is [...]
July 29, 2009
Everybody has heard of Round Up Ready technology and a lot of people think that it is great. And it is great. However, there are certain limitations to the technology that people should be aware of. Glyphosate (Roundup, Touchdown) is what is known as a burndown herbicide. The molecule is absorbed through foliage and is translocated [...]
July 28, 2009
No credit, no preliminary tests and no whatsoever final projects, just for the pure joy of obtaining new knowledge I am interested in— along with other studious Cornellians who spare no time crunching books in summer school during the day, I am taking self-learning courses “engineering statistics” and “Introduction to macroeconomics”, in the evening [...]
July 27, 2009
For the past two weeks the Nelson Lab has been filled with rust and tissue. But listen, don’t get this confused with the kind of rust from the bottom of your car or tissue you use to blow your nose! Tissue collection is a very important aspect of any genetic analysis. It is collected in [...]
July 26, 2009
I spent a half a day last week tagging along with two of MaxYield’s custom applicators as they sprayed soybeans. The first tractor I rode along in was AgChem’s RoGator. The picture below isn’t the actual tractor, but it is very similar. This particular RoGator was not the newest machine by any stretch of the [...]
July 21, 2009
There are few countries in the world like the United States, whose farming population is well below 2% while at the same time achieving astounding productivity. Ever since the beginning of the last century, this percentage has been going down dramatically in the New World, the adoption of modern technologies such fertilizers and machineries, which [...]