Pivotal Issues Blog

By: Marcia Taylor Steve Hess may be the grandfather of nine, but when it comes to farming, he is a millennial at heart. In fact, Hess, his wife Phyllis and their son Marcus are adopting cutting-edge technology this season they hope will help lift their Bushnell, Illinois, grain yields and profit margins through 2016 and […]

  By: Victoria G. Myers Some Midwestern corn and soybean producers may want to get into the cattle business, but with land still averaging more than $8,000 an acre, it’s impossible to pencil in a profit using traditional methods. Jeff Morse, Council Bluffs, Iowa, did that math a few years back, and he couldn’t make […]

By: Farm Progress,Nebraska Farmer Farmers markets in Nebraska are a great opportunity for vegetable and fruit growers in the state to sell to consumers seeking locally produced products. “We continue to see considerable growth in the number of farmers markets in the state, and don’t expect that trend to end anytime as consumer demand for […]

By: Rosalie Trump Last week, I wrote an article about the racoon problem we’ve had on our farm and the live traps we’ve used to catch some of them. We have been using marshmallows as bait, which some people have great success with, but so far the only thing I’ve caught using marshmallows is barn […]

By: David Ekstrom In recent years, the popularity of storage has grown as farmers have taken advantage of higher commodity prices. Yet, only a small percentage of today’s bins are equipped with technology to protect a farmer’s investment. Laurie Bedord talks with IntelliFarms about its current automated bin technology. Then Dave Mowitz heads to an […]

By: Agronomy Insider How Resistance Spreads Surprised at how a field full of herbicide-resistant weeds results? It had its origins years earlier. Birds do it, bees do it, even educated fleas do it, as the old Cole Porter song goes. So why can’t waterhemp (or weeds) do it? That last line probably isn’t funny if […]

By: Ray Bohacz Successful Farming Engine Man Ray Bohacz has engine grease and field dirt under his fingernails from a life spent repairing vehicles and running a farm. When he’s not busy in the shop, he’s working on maintenance articles and videos for Successful Farming magazine and answering questions from readers. The following is a letter […]

By Dave Mowitz Kendall DeJonge’s mission is to take plants’ temperatures. But the crops, like corn, that he is working with don’t have to open up and say, “ahh.” Instead, DeJonge employs an infrared radiometric thermometer (IRT). This is a simple point-and-detect tool that any farmer could own. The USDA Agriculture Research Service (ARS) engineer, who works […]

By Daniel H. Smith and Paul Mitchell Crop insurance policies include various rules with guidelines on the use of cover crops. Recent changes in these rules provide an opportunity to review their application to cover crop practices.  Farmers should always communicate with their crop insurance agent to determine whether or not a specific practice will affect […]

By Tyler Harris In the last 30 years, there haven’t been any new modes of action (MOAs) introduced from chemical companies. However, recently, growers have some new tools available to them to mix up their MOAs using existing technologies, notes Debalin Sarangi, weed science postdoctoral research associate at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. “Many of them […]