Pivotal Issues Blog

By: Jessie Scott After city girl Lauren Arbogast married her farmer, as she lovingly refers to her husband, Brian, she became tremendously interested in the workings of the Virginia farm she now called home and the agriculture industry as a whole. “I was asking no less than 800 questions a day in those early years,” […]

By: Jeff Caldwell Though the existence of the Internet precedes its widespread consumer use by several decades, the medium as a way to communicate, find information, entertain, shop, network, and more has only been around for a couple of decades, a time in which its utility and general role in everyday life has been nothing […]

From: AgWeb Farm Journal Equipment can be one of the largest investments farmers make on their operation. And with today’s lower grain prices and tighter budgets, many are considering used machinery as an alternative to buying new. However, the hours logged on a piece of machinery are not always a reliable indicator of the health […]

By: Brad Haire Southeast peanut growers plan to plant more acres than last year in an effort to supply a market that wants more peanuts. In Georgia, where almost half of the nation’s peanut crop is produced annually, growers indicate they will plant more than 700,000 acres for the third straight year, said Scott Monfort, […]

From: Southeast Farm Press Pioneer brand corn products provided National Corn Growers Association Yield Contest participants with big wins in 2016. Overall, the NCGA awarded seven national and 199 state titles to growers who used Pioneer brand seed and entered the annual National Corn Yield Contest. “Our 2016 NCGA title winners demonstrate that our continued […]

From: Southeast Farm Press “Everyone was shocked at how good their cotton crop was. Overall, I am going to average 2.6 bales per acre with only 360 irrigated acres out of my 1,325 acres of cotton. My dry land cotton averaged 900-1,000 pounds per acre but my irrigated cotton averaged 3.4 bales per acre,” said […]

By: John Hart Education over regulation is vital for developing and maintaining a sustainable tool box to manage weeds, said Stanley Culpepper, returning to Williams Hall on the campus of his alma mater, North Carolina State University. “We as weed scientists need to be much more aggressive with education over regulation,” Culpepper said in his […]

From: Southeast Farm Press If you spend much time out in the field, it is commonplace these days to see the new fighter-jet-like pesticide applicators that have become very popular down on the farm. With 80-foot to 120-foot booms, GPS guidance systems and dilithium crystal-powered warp drives (another geeky Star Trek reference), growers can quickly […]

By: John Hart The clear takeaway message: Farmers can’t rely on herbicides alone to control tough weeds. Farm journalists from across the country received a short course in managing resistant weeds during the Syngenta Media Summit held Oct. 28 at the Umstead Hotel and Spa in Cary, N.C. In a panel discussion at the summit, […]

By: Brad Haire At 30, Chad Gainey found out he could do things with a chainsaw few other people could. He proved his skill on the grounds of the Sunbelt Ag Expo one year, and his life changed. Gainey can look at a log or hunk of wood and from it carve most any image […]