In my last farm computing column I anointed DAIRY-L king of farm Internet resources. No one has yet suggested I am informationally deprived, at least on this subject, so let's press on with a few more listserv observations.For those of you whose eyes glazed over, or who tuned out our original Dairy-L discussion because you raise ratites or swine, listservs and major domos are simply mailing lists. Once you subscribe, you receive everything posted to the list in your e-mail box. Any response you make is automatically posted to everyone else on the list unless you choose to reply to someone privately.
I'll try not to disappoint you swine and ratite enthusiasts if you read the entire column today.
Hastings Federation of Agriculture operates Farm Chat, a general discussion listserv involving a few dozen subscribers. Some of the exchanges will remind you of truckers on their CB radios.
There are news tidbits, weather and market reports. I've seen several interesting exchanges between farmers in different countries comparing growing conditions and technology.
The other day a Hasting's subscriber posted a joke which you wouldn't normally hear in Sunday school and it was followed by another. That's one reason I came up with the CB analogy. This interaction sparked my curiosity about the potential down side of listservs.
Anonymity has long been one of the lures of CB radio but you can't hide on Internet. The politically incorrect message you post today could stop you from becoming Prime Minister someday if someone runs the proper search on your remarks.
Search engines known as spiders constantly roam the web filling their databases with every piece of information in their path. One of the best examples is: http://altavista.digital.com.
There are probably more than 24,000 listservs and major domo lists, but once you know which lists someone belongs to, you can usually search the list archives for everything they have ever written to the list.
There is probably even a way to combine these two searches but I haven't found it yet. A number of search engines will do this automatically for the more than 15,000 news groups.
Many lists allow you to issue a "conceal" command. This means you can prevent other users or spiders from detecting your presence as a list member.
Hometown is a western Ontario based list similar to Farm Chat. You can join it by sending an e-mail to: Majordomo@hometown.on.ca
GRAZE-L is a joint project of the Taranaki Polytechnic, New South Wales, Plymouth, New Zealand and the University of Wisconsin in the United States. The list is little more than a year old and relatively small compared with DAIRY-L.
Farm & Country Dairy Editor Don Stoneman is a subscriber. He says list members, most of whom are farmers, harvest top-quality technical information about management-intensive rotational grazing. Discussions have included: pasture supplementation feeding, cropping, breeding, and stockpiling. At press time there is still no charge for subscribing.
As the name suggests, BEEF-L is focused on the beef industry. It is a relatively low traffic list with little to offer at present.
I think cattlemen will prefer: beeftoday-l@angus.mystery. com. It's been more active than other beef lists all along but volume really began to explode earlier this month when Britain's BSE scare hit.
If you are intrigued by what is at the very least the top agricultural story of the year, you can subscribe to BSE-L. SWINE-L won't overload your mailbox. There are only a handful of postings most weeks. This surprises me because, in earlier years, the swine industry led the way in farm computing.
Recent postings have come from someone with two sows on an island as well as veterinarians dispensing and receiving advice. There have been queries about the future of swine genetics and what to do about savaging sows and boar taint. The Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, a U.S. lobby group working to stop dumping of subsidized food in The Third World, operates a free list called Food-Security. There are only a few postings a month.
Results were announced March 22 for the Usenet vote on setting up two new news groups for the feather industry.
sci.agriculture.poultry passed 363 votes to 19.
sci.agriculture.ratites passed 327 votes to 26.Information about listservs mentioned above and most others is available, through the search page, Liszt, at this site.
Robert Irwin is Farm & Country's computer guru.
Tomorrow is today
For pork farmers wanting a peri-scope peek at their future, here's a quick study of United States Department of Agriculture's (USDA) December, 1995 Quarterly Hogs and Pigs Report, which offers a black-and-white view of a massive change in agriculture.Here are some snapshots:
- 24,280 U.S. pork producers left the hog sector in 1995, a whopping 12.1-per-cent drop in producer numbers in one year and a 19-per-cent drop versus December, 1993;
- Small-sized hog farmers, defined by USDA as those raising fewer than 1,000 head annually, in big hog producing states, are in full retreat. In 1995, Iowa lost 3,500 of these operations; Illinois, 1,300; Indiana, 1,600; Minnesota, 2,100; and Missouri, 1,800;
- Despite 20 per cent of producers emptying out their barns in the last two years, current hog inventory of 60.2 million head is the highest since December, 1980;
- 4.8 per cent of all U.S. producers market 43 per cent of all hogs, a big boys' marketshare increase of six per cent versus December, 1994;
- USDA forecasts a similar washout in 1996.The industrialization of the pork industry is not a trend which continues to evolve. It has evolved. The evolution is over. Today is pork's tomorrow.
A look at plummeting pork profits helps explain why. According to University of Missouri research, pork producers garnered US$29.25 per head profit making bacon during the decade of 1966 to 1975. Comparative data from 1986 to 1995 shows only a US$8.72 profit per pig - a drop of 70 per cent.
Agricultural economists will study this shift to uncover all its pregnant market impacts for years to come. But rural sociologist William Heffernan is uncovering its effects on farm communities now. The University of Missouri professor is blunt in his early assessments.
As the industry is grabbed by fewer and bigger outside concentrators, outside management and capital not only flows into farm communities, but out as well. "Profits flow to the home office in New York or North Carolina," notes Heffernan, "and not into the local community.
"Typically, profit earned by farm owner-operators is spent locally and those businesses which benefit are owned by local folks, also. So the multiplied effect of this local spending, about four or five times the original expenditure, is eliminated from the local community when industrial farms move in."
An often-overlooked element in this redefinition of 'agri-culture' is the role played by outside management in these 'factory-type farms', says Heffernan.
Independent producers take their profits as return to labour and management - they work and make the decisions. As a contract producer, however, return (profit) is based largely on labour. The contractor makes few, if any, decisions and therefore foregoes the rewards - or failures - of decision making.
"What we find then," relates Heffernan, "is a slow decline of the decision-making ability in the community. There are fewer people in the area who are experienced enough or willing to use their knowledge and comfort in making decisions in leadership positions" - like the school board, township board or drainage district.
Also, adds Heffernan, since labour is a simple cost in the profit equation - like feed or concrete - there is a relentless drive to acquire it ever more cheaply. "When you examine the meat processing industry, for example, a segment of agriculture that has been highly concentrated by three giants in the last decade, you are struck by its low wages. "Other parts of agriculture, as they become more industrialized, will see this happen, too. Indeed, we see a side effect of this already in the explosion of rural poverty rates in the last 10 years."
Yet is it not just the industrialization of meat production that will change farm communities in the next decade, forecasts Heffernan. The rise of specialty crops and laws which permit the patenting of basic genetic material will extend reach of global corporations into every farmer's life and future.
And unlike many of today's hog farmers, those boys won't work for free.
Alan Guebert is a farm writer from the Corn Belt.
Dairy producers feed the hay as well
By JOHN M. MUGGERIDGE
Oxford county farmer Glenn Buchner uses a "hormonal stimulant" in his cropping operation. It's contained in a fluid fertilizer product he applies behind the sickle bar while he's cutting alfalfa.For Buchner and a handful of other farmers applying fluid fertilizer to hay stubble, getting a good stand of alfalfa is a science, and takes more than throwing on some NPK. As well as the "macro-nutrients", they believe crops need lesser amounts of secondary and "micro-nutrients" such as magnesium, calcium, boron, zinc, molybdenum, sulphur, manganese, copper and iron.
Buchner, who milks 77 cows with his two brothers at Elmwold Farms Ltd., Brownsville, and Murray Cornwell, who milks 190 cows with his two brothers at Norwich, both apply a fluid fertilizer product containing nitrogen and phosphorous as well as micro-nutrients. The product, from Can-Grow Fertilizers in Alvinston, is dribbled on behind the sicklebar on Buchner's 12-foot New Holland Haybine. Two 150-gallon tanks on the tractor allow him to run for 25 acres at six gallons an acre before refilling.
New hay fields get fertilizer at all three cuts, and established fields get less. In the hay-corn-soy-wheat-hay rotation, ground is usually rotated out of hay after three years. Potash is broadcast after the first cut, up to 350 pounds an acre depending on soil test. Most ground is zone-till.
Cornwell runs with two 70-gallon polyethylene tanks mounted right on his John Deere Discbine. A squeeze pump dribbles product onto the alfalfa stubble behind the cutter blade at five gallons per acre, and the swath is laid on top.
While both farmers say documenting yield or feed improvements is difficult with so many variables, they both see the benefits in the field, and plan to stick with the product.
Buchner, who heard about the idea from Cornwell and crop consultant Allan Spicer of Harbour Lights, Port Burwell, has been using it for three years. He says a stronger stand has allowed him to cut back his alfalfa acreage from 200 to 125 acres without sacrificing tonnage. He also cites "quicker growth and a healthier stand....We're feeding the same number of cows on less acreage."
Most goes in the silo, and some of the alfalfa-grass is round baled. For cutting dates, Buchner aims for the end of May, July 1 and towards the end of August.
While fluid fertilizer costs are double the cost of his former program (3-17-40 split with no micro-nutrients), his land needs have been almost cut in half. Alfalfa is "an expensive crop to establish to start with and you want to maintain it as long as possible, reduce health problems, increase yields and maintain production," Buchner says.
Also part of the plant dynamics is a "hormone stimulant" product called Nitro Plus GA, which is supposed to help keep a healthy balance of plant hormones, which new research indicates are responsible for everything from plant vigour to ripening. The idea behind the Folizyme is to stimulate root growth, preventing an overbalance of hormones in the upper level of the plant, says Buchner.
Furthermore, he says, there's research pointing to micro-nutrients helping distribute macro-nutrients (NPK) throughout the plant: "If the plant is short on micros, it will be short on macros. You change the macros trying to get the right balance. Some years are perfect, and others it doesn't work no matter what you do."
Buchner is the first to admit it all sounds a bit futuristic and says he takes everything "with a grain of salt....But the more I look at the results we're getting, the more I think we're on the right track....There aren't a lot of people to talk to about this."
The transition to fluid hay fertilizer hasn't been entirely smooth for Elmwold Farms. Cutting hay becomes a stop-and-go affair, and Buchner says he'd like to devise a way to get the tanks on and off the tractor more easily. The ideal solution would be permanent tanks on a self-propelled harvester, but that would be expensive.
The product is also low-pH and must be handled with care, he says. "It's not the nicest stuff to work with for us. It's almost an inconvenience because you have to take the tanks off the tractor."
Murray Cornwell, who has been applying the product for five years to his alfalfa, says it helps keep a healthy stand in a four-cut system. The Cornwells aim to cut every 28 days at the early bud stage: May 20 to 22, June 25, the end of July and Aug. 26 to 27. Most goes in the silo with some round baled. Cornwell says the first year he tried four cuts, he killed the hay. Since then, the fluid fertilizer has helped keep a healthy stand. "You're really pushing your hay, doing four cuts," he says. "It isn't going to be in flower, the root reserves are low, and disease moves in really quick. "In a four-cut system, cutting every 28 to 30 days, you have to have good, healthy hay, or your stand is going to disappear pretty quick. I think [the product] helps keep the stand there.
"You have to feed the hay when cutting four times - it will die on you if you don't."
Cornwell has also noticed that the magnesium count in his feed is higher, and he hasn't had to supplement as much in the mineral. "We had a magnesium problem and this is one way to get magnesium back on the ground," he says. "Before...we had to feed three times what we would get in a standard mineral" - 10 per cent versus two to three per cent.
Like Murray Cornwell, who also farms with two brothers, Glenn Buchner concentrates on the cropping side of the business. Both farmers say they will continue to use the fluid fertilizer on this year's hay crop. For Buchner, it's a constant learning curve: "A lot of people have looked at the traditional methods of fertilizing hay, but haven't looked at the micronutrients and dynamics of how the crop operates....We're not only fighting Mother Nature, we're fighting nutrients. It's a whole picture."
Cows walk all over new alfalfa variety
Haymakers aren't likely to be impressed by one of the new entries in this year's lineup of newly- approved alfalfa varieties. But graziers will like it because it pops back up after cattle tramp and chew on it.It's called Alfa-graze, and sponsor Pickseed Canada of Lindsay considers getting it approved by the provincial forage committee a major victory. It's the first variety identified in Ontario as having superior persistence and yield under pasturing situations, even though it doesn't make the standard for normal hay varieties.
Alfagraze doesn't meet the normal criteria for a new alfalfa variety. Under hay-type management, its yield numbers aren't impressive, notes Harvey Wright, Fergus-based soils and crops adviser. In two years of standard hay variety testing, its plots yielded 94 and 99 per cent, respectively, of standard varieties. See Table One. Furthermore, it lacks resistance to verticillium wilt.
But it does stand up despite tramping of cattle's hooves. Trials show that it has greater ability than other varieties to stay in the stand after three years of heavy grazing. The brochure published by the Ontario Forage Crops Committee says that Alfagraze yields 10 per cent better than the check varieties Arrow and 120 in bromegrass mixtures, and produces 13 per cent more than the yardstick varieties when it is planted in mixture with orchardgrass.
While it comes from the American Deep South, Alfagraze shows no signs of shirking bitter Canadian winters.
Wright finds it interesting that Alfagraze was selected in the southern U.S. state of Georgia for its ability to survive under heavy grazing. But it also rates high for winter hardiness under Ontario and Manitoba conditions.
Jay Hackney, research scientist for Pickseed Canada Inc., Alfagraze's Canadian distributor, says Alfagraze jumped through some extra hoops to get approval here. As well as standard hay management registration trials, it underwent extra testing to prove its grazing characteristics.
The Ontario Forage Crops Committee set up special protocols to evaluate the grazing tolerance potential of the variety. Plots were seeded in 1992 at the Agriculture Canada plant research centre in Ottawa and at Pickseed's research site at Bethany, south of Lindsay.
Intensive grazing by beef animals was carried on in 1993, and through 1995, with cattle being put on the pasture when it was 10 inches high and taken off when it was grazed down to just over three inches. Last year, the end of the grazing cycle was machine harvested instead to determine yield, and plant stand counts were made.
"We proved that Alfagraze has the grazing tolerance and hay production characteristics needed to fit into various pasture regimes," Hackney says.
He predicts that both dairy and beef farmers will find Alfagraze useful if they are looking to cut down their input costs by making use of pastures.
Wright warns farmers that while Alfagraze is intended for grazing "it is still an alfalfa" and the normal precautions against bloat must be taken.
Hackney echoes Wright's warnings about putting hungry cattle out to pasture on alfalfa for the first time. He recommends feeding dry hay prior to pasturing, and controlling the time spent on pasture. As well, bloat preventatives may be used, either a single bolus or a feed additive. And since some cattle are genetically prone to bloating, selective culling will help. All the other rules of alfalfa management also apply to Alfagraze, Hackney says.
He adds that Alfagraze has deep-rooted crowns, allowing it to store more root carbohydrate reserves to get through the winter, and recover rapidly after frequent grazing.
Hackney says the plants also form more crown buds in the fall that produce more new stems in the following spring.