Pivotal Issues Blog

By: Pam Fretwell Q: What are some of the steps you have taken to transition into a leadership role on your family’s farm operation? A: “Our farmyard, bins and shops aren’t worth a lot to anyone else except me, so I got a pretty fair price on that doing a contract for deed. The way […]

By: Gil Gullickson If you’re looking to merge the conservation and soil health aspects of no-till while preserving the soil warm-up perks of conventional tillage, strip-till may be for you. Under strip-till, farmers till narrow 6- to 12-inch-wide strips between rows. Fertilizer is often injected into the strip during strip-tilling. Tilled strips correspond to planter […]

By: Dave Mowitz If you are caught short on storage and can’t get a bin put up prior to harvest, there is another option besides taking grain to the elevator and suffering market-low prices. You can successfully hold grain outdoors for a couple of months until a new bin is ready. The key is creating […]

By: John Walter Jim Gibbs didn’t grow up on a farm, but he might have if tragic events had not visited his family. His great-grandfather was killed in a tractor accident. A lack of financial planning, Gibbs later learned, left the family with little choice but to sell more than half the land to pay […]

By: Laurie Bedord By expanding its existing partnership with Planet, Farmers Edge will equip its growers with comprehensive, high-quality field imagery more frequently. As a sole distributor, Farmers Edge will have the right to use and distribute high-resolution, high-frequency imagery from Planet’s three satellite constellations – RapidEye, Planet “Doves”, and SkySat – as well as […]

By: Gil Gullickson In 2014, Jodi DeJong- Hughes prepared a field day exhibit with other University of Minnesota (U of M) researchers. “We created a soil with alternating layers of sand and clay through which we ran a disk ripper,” recalls the U of M Extension soil scientist. As the disk ripper steamed through the […]

By: Laurie Bedord As NASA plans for its first manned mission to Mars in the mid-2030s, the humans who will inhabit the planet may not be considered astronauts but farmers. “The round trip to Mars generally takes about four and one-half years if you add in six months on the surface,” says Bruce Bugbee, a […]

By: Betsy Freese Geopolitical strategist Peter Zeihan helps ag industry leaders understand how the realities of geography, populations, and politics impact markets and economic trends. He recently spoke to an executive summit of Midwest farmers sponsored by Farm Credit Services of America. Here are 12 of the main questions and concerns he addressed. 1. How […]

By: Jodi Henke Take a good look at the buildings on your farm. If they’re showing their age, they may be draining your bank account. Outdated design and technology is prevalent in many farm structures, increasing operating costs. Making improvements to these buildings could save you lots of money down the road. Mark Greenwood is […]

By: Potato Grower As we progress through harvest, many of us are also evaluating the performance of the sprinkler packages on our center pivot irrigation systems over the course of the growing season. Checking for wear or failures in the devices, checking pressures and flows against the original package design and evaluating pumping plant performance […]