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Mike Howell (00:08):
The Dirt, with me, Mike Howell, an eKonomics podcast where I present the down and dirty agronomic science to help grow crops and bottom lines. Inspired by eKonomics.com, farming’s go-to informational resource. I’m here to break down the latest crop nutrition research, use, and issues, helping farmers make better business decisions through actionable insights. Let’s dig in.
(00:39)
Well, hello again, everyone. Welcome back to The Dirt. Harvest is in full swing; I hope everybody’s bins are busting already this year. We’re always keeping an eye to the sky and trying to figure out what the weather’s going to do to make sure we can get this crop in and get ready to start next year’s planting process. To help us look at this weather and figure out what’s going on, we have Eric Snodgrass with us again today. Eric, welcome back to The Dirt and if you would reintroduce yourself to all of our listeners.
Eric Snodgrass (01:04):
Yeah, you bet, Mike. I really appreciate being back on. I’m a Nutrient Senior Science Fellow. I focus a lot on weather and its impacts on production ag, really here in the States but also around the world. And we just try to understand what curveball Mother Nature’s going to throw next and what we can do to predict it and then deal with it when it gets here. And certainly this has been a year where I feel like I’ve been at the batter’s plate, got hit more often than anything else because the pitches have been coming wild at times, and it makes for a fun day for me to try to forecast. But what a crazy year in terms of trying to grow a crop here in the U.S.
Mike Howell (01:31):
It has been crazy. Fortunately, everybody seems to be having a good crop this year. Eric, I want to start close to my house. We’re always worried about the tropics this time of year. We just had a tropical system came in a week or 10 days ago, and we got plenty of rainfall out of that one. Fortunately, we didn’t have a whole lot of damage. I know in some places there was some rice that got blown down and things like that, but we’re a little further into this season and we’ve got cotton that’s popping open now and some beans that are still out there, and we just don’t need a lot more water and wind on these crops. I know there’s a system out there that everybody’s keeping their eye on. What can you tell us about that?
Eric Snodgrass (02:05):
If I step back and just put on my hydrology hat, I loved Hurricane Francine, and that was because so much of the lower Mississippi River Valley and the Midwest, even though Francine’s moisture didn’t get up there, but so much from the Mid-South all the way down to the Gulf was dry, and the Mississippi River at Memphis was down about seven feet below low stage. Francine comes along real slow mover, does some wind damage south, there’s no doubt about that. And then moves a bit farther north but doesn’t get past the Bootheel of Missouri, then makes a turn back toward Alabama and gives you multiple days of heavy rainfall in that area. And here we are in the middle of this hurricane season. In fact, we’re past the peak of the hurricane season by one week. Today’s one-week past the peak, knowing that we got the whole second half of this thing to go.
(02:45)
And we’ve known that the Gulf of Mexico is capable this year, right? We had Barrel; remember that back in July, went through parts of Texas, came all the way up to my home state of Illinois. Barrel, by the way, for Illinois, put the crop to bed. I mean, getting that much rain in July is key for us, and we hit it. We had Debby that went up the southeast coast that was back in August, absolutely hammered parts of Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina. In fact, they did get, I don’t know if you saw this, but the USDA made an announcement on crop insurance payouts for Debby. A lot of counties were included, which I’m always happy to see that. Debby broke a long-standing drought there. And now here we look at this, and we go, “Ocean temperatures are still really warm. We have a La Niña that’s brewing.”
(03:21)
And if you told those two things to any meteorologist worth his weight, he’d say, “Hey, we got to prepare for what could be an active hurricane season.” Now those aren’t the only two things we think about, and this hurricane season probably hasn’t lived up to the hype that a lot of us thought it was going to be back in April, May, June, July, where we thought we’d be by this point. We’ve not had nearly the number of named systems. And there was an interesting lesson that we learned in the front half of this season. We did have some big, dry, dusty plumes of Saharan air just getting blown across the Atlantic. That doesn’t work in the favor of developing hurricanes, but the thing I missed that I will learn from this is yeah, the ocean temperature was hot. Plenty of heat in the ocean to support any hurricane.
(03:57)
Shoot. The Gulf of Mexico right now is about 90 degrees. It’s ready; it could make anything, but you’ve got to have a hot ocean, cold aloft. And we didn’t have the cold aloft; it was too warm aloft to support big storms. So as a result, we just never got anything really, really going. And here we are now looking at mid-September to late September going, “Is anything coming?” And the issue here is, I think if anything’s coming, it’s going to be homegrown, not coming off of Africa, it might come out of the Caribbean, out of the Gulf. And back to what you originally asked, there’s something called the Central American gyre, and it is just this area that, in September and October, is notorious for creating low pressure, and it’s just this time of year; it doesn’t do it any earlier. It’ll do it a bit over winter, but right now is when it does it.
(04:37)
And we’ve been paying attention for the last seven days to this risk of something coming out of the Caribbean, getting into the Gulf and then heading north. Now, my biggest concern about it is where’s it going to hit if it does develop, and I don’t want another one up the gut of the Mississippi right now. I don’t want it for you. I actually want it for the drought that’s in the Eastern Corn Belt, but I don’t want it to come up the Mississippi. Honestly, I need it to be very weak and just put down some normal rains to not ruin this cotton crop to not come through during harvest, but it has the potential for being something a bit more concerning. And when is it? It’s the end of the month. It might be 10 days from now before this thing comes out into the Gulf of Mexico.
(05:11)
But some of the forecast models take it over Florida. One of them took it over Texas yesterday. Most of them take it up the southeast, and it’ll be a big rainmaker because if you start pulling from the Western Caribbean then through the Gulf, what do you have down there? You just have unlimited access to moisture. And so what I’m concerned about is the main flooding threat out of this after a landfall, if it forms. I say if because, as of today’s September 19th, when we’re recording this, the National Hurricane Center’s only given it a 40% chance of developing over the next seven days. But like I said, it’s 10 days out from now that I think we’ll really be looking at something big. You ask a short question, Mike, but it’s written a lot of space in my brain. I’m thinking a lot about where this hurricane season can go, especially given the drought updates we’ve seen across the United States.
(05:51)
There are people right now, Mike, that are praying for a hurricane. They’re like, “I don’t want to go into fall with drought stress that I got to worry about all winter that only spring rains can undo.” That puts a lot of pressure on spring rains to deliver what they’re supposed to deliver. So we’re thinking a lot about these things this time of year. I think it’d be fair to say we have another 60 days of the hurricane season. In other words, I think we could still be talking about tropical systems in through the first week or 2nd of November.
Mike Howell (06:15):
Eric, that’s not what I want to hear. I know we need some rain, but we don’t want to see all these tropical systems coming.
Eric Snodgrass (06:21):
Yeah.
Mike Howell (06:21):
You kind of alluded to it. The Mississippi River is at some low stages, and I think that’s happening all the way up and down the Mississippi River. Any of these tropical systems that come in through the Gulf, that’s going to dump a lot of water down here in my neck of the woods, but that’s really not going to help the river. We need some rain up north. Any prospects of rain up north to help get water back in the river?
Eric Snodgrass (06:40):
There is, but here’s our problem, Mike: when we get into this time of the year, you could put down four inches of rain on Iowa and probably see no change in the river levels as it comes down there between Iowa, Illinois, and Missouri. Just no change at all. The crop is still in; it’ll take on water; it’ll store it in the soil; it’s just not there. It’s a problem. So we have this issue of building fall drought being always a problem because of where our crops are; now when they’re out, if we get heavy rains late, then that gets into the river system, but I don’t see any chance of recovering water levels in that river without a catastrophic flood somewhere. Now we have rain coming. It’s coming this weekend for Nebraska. It’s going to hit parts of, maybe clip Northern Kansas. It’s going to hit Missouri, Illinois.
(07:17)
I got to get it to Indiana and Ohio, still trying to see if it’s going to push over there, but Wisconsin, Michigan, and Minnesota, we’re going to get rain. There’s probably going to be a spot in Iowa that gets two inches of rain, and we need it because the whole of the Missouri Basin, you start in St. Louis and go all the way up to Great Falls, Montana, I just follow the whole thing. It’s really really low subsurface soil moisture. You go the other direction through the Ohio River, really, really low. In fact, I watched a guy over the weekend. He put out on Twitter a video of him digging a 12-foot, eight-foot, I don’t care. It was deep eight-foot-deep trench to lay a piece of tile. It was dust all the way down in the middle of Central Indiana. And so we got really dry over these last two, three, four weeks.
(07:55)
Some places were drier before that, and we have questions as to whether or not those estimates we had on the size of this corn and soybean crop that were made back in August are they really that high. And if they aren’t, and they come down a bit, is the market even going to react to it? I think that’s a bigger question, I think, for a lot of folks. We know the USDA often, at this point, doesn’t make those big adjustments up or down once they’ve got that September number in. We may have to wait until January before we hear anything about it or start getting some reports off the combines. But this is the story right now, where I think the fall fire risk is high unless we get this rain to sneak across the Corn Belt, because if it doesn’t, you’re going to have guys out there…
(08:29)
You get a hot belt, anything, just something to kick off a little flame, the winds come up and you start spreading out, and we have a whole new host of problems. So Mike, you’re asking me these hard questions that I’m having to worry about right now just with the weather pattern. It got pretty extreme here this fall after what seemed like a summer of just big storms, right? We just had storm after storm, after storm, and now here we are worried about different things in falls. So yeah, I appreciate the questions.
Mike Howell (08:51):
Well, another thing you mentioned was this developing La Niña. Talk us through that and what that means for conditions this winter and maybe out into next spring into planting season. What’s that going to look like?
Eric Snodgrass (09:01):
Let’s go back over the last four years. Last year was an El Niño winter. Nobody remembers last winter because it only lasted for a week, and during that week, I think the only thing we talked about was Taylor Swift wearing some heavy coat, watching her boyfriend play football in Kansas City. Remember that game? It was like minus 30, then it was warm for the rest of winter. The three previous winters were all La Niña winters. We’re going back into a La Niña right now. In fact, this morning I checked the ocean temperatures. They were a full degree Celsius below average in this area we call Nino Region 3.4, that’s right in the middle of the equatorial Pacific. So that’s there; that’s a threshold we’d like to cross to say that the atmosphere’s behaving like a La Niña. How long does it last, and what does it even mean?
(09:37)
So when we have a La Niña, what’s going on here is that the trade winds, they get going real fast out of the east to the west. What they do is they steal momentum from the westerlies, which are to the north of them, where we live. So here’s the big problem. If that La Niña really starts to influence the pattern, I mean, takes over and starts to dominate the whole of the southern tier of the United States, their drought risk increases. Doesn’t mean there’s going to be drought, but you said historically, Eric, what does a La Niña do? I would just tell you that it increases drought from California all the way to South Carolina during winter, and that’s an area of the country that you can recover from drought in winter because your soils don’t freeze. Up here, we can’t. Once the soil freezes, everything’s locked in place.
(10:17)
We got to wait for March, April, and May rains, and that’ll be something we’re going to have to look out for in the Corn Belt, in the Northern Plains, Canadian Prairie is that when there’s a La Niña, the south tends to be warmer, more warm days than cold, not every day, but more warm days than cold, and you tend to have less precip. You go just north; I mean, put a line right in the middle of the United States, west/east, you get north of that North Kansas, you see better chances of having more frequent colder outbreaks. So not just one like we had last year, but four, five, or six of them, and therefore we tend to get a good hard freeze on the soil. We tend to have storm systems that entered the Pacific Northwest and leave through the Ohio River Valley, which means farmers in the Corn Belt, we love La Niña.
(10:54)
Farmers in the Cotton Belt hate La Niña. And that’s it; that’s what we would have if La Niña dominates the whole pattern. Now I make it sound as if there’s just one thing that controls it all, and that’s not true. There’s all these sub-seasonal things that fluctuate, but if the background state is La Niña, that’s the typical pattern we tend to endure during a winter time period. So there’s a better chance this year of a legitimate winter if you live in the northern half of the United States. I don’t think we’re going to get too cold too often across the south. You’ll have your normal cold air outbreaks, but how many is the question? I think there’s fewer this year than in a normal year. So yeah, La Niña is critical to that whole pattern and our forecasting of it.
Mike Howell (11:30):
Eric, you’re just full of great information today. We got more hurricanes coming; we’re not going to get the river filled up, and now we’re going to have a drought this winter.
Eric Snodgrass (11:37):
That’s why I live here far away from you, because when you guys all come out with your pitchforks, I’m a thousand miles away, thank goodness. To be honest with you, Mike, I’ve been forecasting weather for the ag sector alone for 14 years, and before that I was doing this all over the country, and what’s funny is I’ve just had to become comfortable being the guy that is going to at least anger somebody in the room every time I talk. I’ve got bad news for somebody at some point, and what it is, Mike, it’s just there’s so much risk in agriculture because we can do everything possible to maximize our efficiency and maximize our yield potential, even do the best we could possibly do with marketing. And what can come along and ruin that is Francine. If you were open bowl, or you’re trying to harvest your soybean, whatever, you’re trying to harvest up the Delta, and then here’s four inches of rain.
(12:23)
Now you’ve got lodging, you’ve got bowls laying on the ground open and muddy, you’ve got ruined rice cultivation. I mean, it could really be a problem, and that’s what Mother Nature does, but what’s funny about it, Mike, is that where we live in the world, it is actually the adversity of the weather that makes us successful with agriculture. And that’s a hard thing to balance. The atmosphere is continually trying to give us exactly what we need and occasionally trying to destroy us. But hey, welcome to the Central United States, the best ground on the face of the earth, and we’re growing some crops that we outproduce nearly in every spot around the world because of it. So it’s a tricky thing to balance.
Mike Howell (12:56):
If it was perfect all the time, nobody would have any fun doing it, that’s for sure. How much potassium should you be applying? What’s the best form of nitrogen for sandy soils? Should you be applying sulfur? Sometimes you just got to ask an agronomist. eKonomics has an entire team of agronomists ready to answer all of your questions for free. Find your answers with the Ask an Agronomist feature at nutrien-eKonomics.com. Eric, we’ve kind of hit the United States a little bit. Let’s go around the globe and talk a little bit about what’s going on in Europe. Anything of interest happening over that part of the world?
Eric Snodgrass (13:32):
Yeah, Eastern Europe has been an interesting thing all year. So think Ukraine and then get into Western Russia. I was talking about drought in that area back in spring. I looked at it all summer long, more dry forecast than wet. We just looked at the NDVI values today. That’s a satellite-based measurement of plant health. They’re the lowest they’ve been in 20 years, so this is a huge growing area. If you take a look at where Western Russia is, and you add in Ukraine, that area itself, it’s the size of the Corn Belt, if not a little bit bigger. It’s a huge area, and it looks terrible, and nobody cares. I’ve not heard a single bit of marketing that has discussed that that’s going to cause an issue with our markets. It’s been surprising.
(14:09)
Now, China’s been a bit of a black box for me this summer. I actually saw better rains than not across key growing areas; they flip-flop on flood drop, but they just seem to get the right time, it breaks away from the flood, or the right time they break out a drought. And we’re not going to get, I don’t think, very good information about what their total stocks look like and how good their crop is. I think they’re playing that pretty close to the chest given where prices are right now and what’s going on. And I understand that that’s what they do, so we just have to think that through. But it’s interesting; you come into India; they had a halfway decent monsoon season this year. That’s one of the reasons why cotton looks the way it does in terms of price. If it rains on the eastern side of India, where they grow all their cotton, they’re going to have a pretty good crop.
(14:46)
Australia, some places this past growing season, remember they’re winter; there are a lot of winter crops. They did okay; they got just-in-time rains. You have other places that slipped a bit into drought, but there’s not a whole lot of negative chatter that I’m hearing out of big geographical areas in Australia, and they’re about to get a whole bunch more rainfall, big time surge of moisture coming across Australia. But it’s spring for them going into summer, so this is more about pasture health than anything else. This is for their livestock industry now and the harvest efforts that are going on for some other winter crops. But then the big one, of course, is South America, and South America is going into a growing season because they of course grow huge crops of corn, soybeans. They have a winter wheat crop that’s in Argentina right now, and they’ll plant cotton there as well.
(15:25)
And this is it. La Niñas, here’s what they tend to do, Brazil; most of it, the northern growing areas tend to do just fine on precip. But December, January, February, La Niña tends to hit southern Brazil and Argentina with dryness. Right now that’s not happening; it’s soaking wet in southern Brazil, very wet in Argentina. So this is becoming a problem for their winter wheat harvest and slowing them down for planting of their spring crops. The northern part of Brazil is just waiting on the monsoon, and they typically do a lot of waiting in September; they typically go hard in October, where they plant 80% of their soybean crop, and all of the long-range forecast models that I look at every day plus my own analysis suggest that this is not going to be unlike a year ago, a spring for them that has drought developing across their main growing areas.
(16:08)
But I’ll tell you something, Mike. I know I keep going on here, but listen, last year, what did Brazil have? Driest spring, driest October, November, December going back to 1940, but it rained in January and they had a huge crop. So this year I think they’re going to get off to a bit of a better start. What I would be concerned about for Brazil is, in January and February, when they’re trying to harvest first crop soybeans, LA Niñas tend to make them wetter. That keeps the crop greener in the field longer, makes it difficult to harvest, and then follow that with planting of a safrinha crop. But I just say it makes it more difficult. They’ve always been able to get one crop out in another crop in, so it’s not as though it’s going to stop it, but it’s something I think to be watching.
(16:45)
But that’s my quick trip around the globe. Oh, I guess I should talk a bit about Canada. I got some really happy Canadian farmers and some that are really mad at me. The ones that are happy grow canola, the ones that aren’t grow everything else, because we just dumped a bunch of rain across the Canadian Prairie, and if you grow canola that puts on the very tail end of the season yield, actually tends to help with the condition of the stock easier to harvest. I was talking to a good friend of mine, Matt, about this, Matt Fanio, and he was just explaining it to me. Some of the other serial guys, they don’t want rain this time of year. So yeah, that’s it. There’s your global trip.
Mike Howell (17:15):
Okay, well, it looks like you’re getting people mad all around the globe.
Eric Snodgrass (17:18):
I’m universally angering as many people as I can.
Mike Howell (17:21):
You mentioned some of the struggles that they may be having in Brazil this year, and I hate to wish bad luck on anybody, but it would sure be nice if they had some trouble down there to maybe help some of these grain prices here at home. We’ll have to wait that out and see what happens. So Eric, we always appreciate you taking time to come in and visit with us. I know we went around the world in a hurry today. Is there anything else we need to talk about before we wrap this up?
Eric Snodgrass (17:42):
You did ask about spring, and I’m just going to tell you something about next year. There is going to be a lot of discussion next year about drought, and there’s plenty of reasons for it, but I want to tell everybody that’s listening to us right now as we think about next year, anything we talk about at this point in the year is very speculative. There’s no concrete evidence of anything; we have to get through winter and get into spring. And then the big thing: is La Niña still kicking by next March and April, or did it fade and get out of the way?
(18:08)
And once we get into that next spring time period, I’m going to tell you the number one thing I’m going to be watching. Next spring, if we’re going to have a major drought episode in the middle part of this country, the riding on the wall will be in the early spring position of the Bermuda high, which is normally between the Bermuda, the Azores, and Cape Verde Islands. If it goes north into Canada or goes north into Europe, so it leaves the Central Atlantic, then we have something to talk about. But until I know where that Bermuda high is going to be, I can’t make a solid call at all on what next summer’s drought situation could look like. So I’ll just tell you that, just as a answer to a question you asked earlier on some of the stuff, I think we all need to be watching carefully.
Mike Howell (18:43):
Well, Eric, we always appreciate your timely information and letting us know what we can expect coming down the road. I know our growers really like these episodes. Listeners, we appreciate you tuning in. If you’ll hang around for just a few minutes, we’ll be right back with segment two.
(18:57)
Listeners, I hope you enjoyed the first segment of today’s show. If you did, please take a minute and give us a rating on your favorite podcast channel or app and give us some feedback as well. We want to hear from you to help make the show even better, and don’t keep it to yourself. Please share these episodes with coworkers, family, friends, anyone you think may benefit from the information we’re sharing here. Don’t forget to visit our website, nutrien-eKonomics.com, to help find the latest crop nutrition news and research information, as well as market updates, a growing degree day calculator, a nutrient use calculator, a rainfall tracker, and much, much more. It’s all at nutrien-eKonomics.com. Most episodes of The Dirt are now available for CCA credits. Visit our website and click on the agronomics tab to find these CCA credit opportunities. And if you have a question, you can ask one of our agronomy team members; simply ask your question, and one of us will get back with you. Thanks for listening. Now segment two of The Dirt.
(20:05)
Well listeners, welcome back for segment two. You’re probably familiar with it by now, but we are continuing our tour around North America, looking at our different research farms that are associated with our land-grant universities. Today we’re going to be traveling to West Virginia to talk about a research farm there. To help us do that today, we’ve got Ben Walsh with West Virginia University. Ben, welcome to The Dirt.
Ben Walsh (20:26):
Thanks, Mike; it’s good to be here.
Mike Howell (20:28):
Ben, if you will introduce yourself to our listeners, let them know what you do and introduce the research station that we’re going to be talking about today.
Ben Walsh (20:35):
My name’s Ben Walsh. I’m the Associate Director of Farms here at WVU; I’ve been here in this role for about eight and a half years, and I oversee several research stations here. But today we’re going to be focusing mostly on the Stewartstown Road Research Educational Outreach Center. That’s the center that’s closest to campus and gets a lot of use.
Mike Howell (20:55):
Ben, if you will, tell us a little bit about the history of the research center there.
Ben Walsh (20:59):
The center here, just a little background, the total system, we have a little over 12,000 acres of farms and forests. West Virginia is nearly 80% forested, so a lot of our research stations are forest as well. We have about 3000 acres of farms, and some of those have some additional forests on them. But here at Stewartstown, this is the center that has about two miles from the AG school here on campus at WVU Morgantown. And this particular property is owned by the university since before 1900, and we’ve got about 440 acres in this particular farm. And we have three farms right in Morgantown; like I said, this one’s the largest of the three.
Mike Howell (21:41):
And what type of research is going on there at the farm?
Ben Walsh (21:43):
We have a lot of varied research. West Virginia’s largest cash receipt crop in agriculture is poultry, broilers. In the eastern part of the state, we have a very large broiler industry, so we do a good bit of poultry research. We have a researcher who is very active in feed manufacturing, and so they look at all different aspects of… We make pellets, and then we break them up and see how they feed. We use poultry as the end use for that feed because it’s such a quick turnaround. We get a lot of information very quickly with poultry, a feeding period on a broiler just over 30 days, so we can get a lot of research done quickly. But that work is mostly on the actual feed manufacturing itself and how we can be more efficient and how we can grow better livestock. Also, here on the farm we have a vitality feed efficiency system.
(22:35)
That used to be called Grow Safe; now it’s by TeleSense. And so, the function of that system is in our beef cattle facilities, and we fill the feed bunks, all the cattle in the facility where an electronic identification tag, and as they go to eat, we can measure intake. Those bunks have scales on them that are really accurate. And so we record average daily intakes for individual animal, which allows us to do a lot of different research. We also have that same system for water intake now. There are, I believe, four facilities now in the world that have both feed and water, and two of those are at West Virginia University. So we’re looking at water intake as well as feed intake. A lot of the work being done there is on feed efficiency. Your listeners will probably know that say 30, 50 years ago, we did a lot of work across the country and probably around the world on animal performance and performance testing of animals.
(23:32)
And so, generally, you take a couple of hundred bulls, or whatever number you can fit, and you put them all in the same barn. You feed them all the same ration, and you see which ones grow the best, and then those are the ones you’re selecting from. Well, what this system has allowed us to do is to continue that process, but also look at how much they’re eating. So we’re not just interested in which ones grow the best, but which ones grow the best while eating the least amount of feed. About 60% of the water used in producing meat is actually used in producing feed for livestock, irrigation. And so, anything we can do to cut down on the pounds of feed that an animal eats is going to really improve water usage and carbon footprint of those animals. So we have a lot of work here around that concept of creating more efficient animals.
(24:18)
And then we’ve continued that work now on pasture. We’re developing algorithms now to predict dry matter intake of animals on pasture based on the amount of water they’re drinking. And we can do that with Vitali’s IPW system, which measures individual animal water intake, very similar to feed intake. We also have a flock of chickens here that is important genetics that are used in research in a lot of different facilities to study immunity to poultry diseases. We have a service dog training facility here on the farm where we train service dogs for veterans. Part of that’s through the Department of Defense, and some of it’s through some other programs. But we train service dogs for veterans and place them. And also, we teach through that program. Students take a series of courses, and students learn to become dog trainers. And that’s been a very popular program, especially, you get a lot of pre-vet students. And that program also has a partnership with a federal corrections facility here in town, and they involve the prisoners in the training, and it’s been a very successful program. So that’s some of the stuff we have going currently.
Mike Howell (25:24):
Ben, that’s a lot of research, a lot of programs going on there at the farm. You probably don’t know this, but I grew up on a research farm as part of the Mississippi state system. We had a lot of cattle on that farm, and I’m a little bit familiar with the feeding system you were talking about. So you can measure the intake of each animal there, measure what they’re eating. I did not realize that they had that same technology for water now. That’s quite an interesting development. Ben, I know the station’s been there for over a hundred years, and everybody I talk to always wants to brag about their station and talk about what they’ve done. And you did that a little bit, but what are some of the most significant contributions that have came off of that farm?
Ben Walsh (26:00):
Well, a lot of early work on seeders was done here. Dr. Keith Inskeep and Dr. Bob Daley did a lot of work on seasonal breeding of sheep, especially Dr. Inskeep, and breeding sheep out of season and synchronizing estrus. And then Dr. Daley, his work was in dairy cattle more, but the two of them did a lot of work here on reproductive physiology early on in seeder development and different protocol developments for synchronization in cattle and sheep. So that was some remarkable work that was done here, probably in the latter half of the 20th century.
Mike Howell (26:31):
And all of this work, we’ve talked about this numerous times on the program. This is all to benefit the producers there in the state of West Virginia or whichever state the research farms happens to be in. And we can tell from what you’re talking about that this is definitely some relevant work that’s going on, something that’s definitely going to benefit the farmers there in the state of West Virginia.
Ben Walsh (26:49):
Especially in the poultry and the beef efficiency work. So by acreage, beef cattle is our large producer. West Virginia is not a state that grows much cash crops. We don’t have much crop land, so our biggest agronomic crop is grass. And so, whether we harvest that as hay or with ruminants, with beef cattle and a few sheep. So the work we do on feed efficiency here is really applicable to farmers of West Virginia and Dr. Moritz’ work in poultry; over the years, he’s done some real applied stuff as feed prices change, feed availability changes. He can very quickly develop rations and look at. For example, they did a project several years ago when the price of corn really skyrocketed. They looked at how much wheat can we put in a poultry ration without having issues, and they were able to do that real quick and turned that around.
(27:37)
And that kind of applied work, that’s the stuff I really enjoy being involved with. And that was before my time here, but I do like anytime we can do stuff that we can directly talk to farmers about. That’s our whole goal in this system and in most land-grant systems, I think, is that we have to find ways we can continue to bring the next generation onto these farms. And whether that’s by diversifying revenue streams, if it’s becoming more efficient in what we’re doing, whatever ways we can find to try to do that and educate these kids, students, as well as the people we work with through extension and a lot of other… Like next week, we’ve got a state FFA contest here and all those kind of things. Just whatever we can do as our little parts, try to educate and bring these kids back to the farm for another generation. That’s our main goal at the end of the day.
Mike Howell (28:26):
Well, Ben, you kind of led me into my last question there. It’s a question I’ve been asking all the people that are representing these research farms on the program this year. We know the face of agriculture is changing; we’ve got a lot of autonomous agriculture on the forefront these days, and that seems to be all we hear about. We also know that urban sprawl has taken over, and a lot of our farms are getting pushed out because of this. We have to be able to make these farms work with people around as well. But given all these changes that are going on in the face of agriculture, what are the research farms going to have to do to keep up with the pace of agriculture so they stay relevant to these producers?
Ben Walsh (28:59):
It’s a difficult thing, and it’s one of the things I really enjoy about this position is that, as a manager, it’s always a challenge because we don’t know what’s coming next, right? So a faculty member may get a grant or have an idea and need some preliminary data, or somebody could get a grant to study something we’ve never studied before, and we have to figure out how to make that happen and work with them and work through the process of what we can and can’t do on the farms. And like you said, everything’s changing really quick, and it’s a big part of what we do to try to educate students not only how to do the things we do but how to be prepared and be flexible, and be able to move, because if you’re doing stuff the way your dad did them, probably not going to work out well for you in the long run.
(29:42)
We’re in a state that we don’t have a lot of big farms, a lot of automation. We’re pushing a lot of niche marketing, local food, that kind of thing, direct markets. Especially in the eastern part of the state, the eastern end of West Virginia, you can be in DC in an hour and a half. So we’re within a four-hour drive of over 50% of the country’s population, I think. That’s our advantage over people in the Midwest. We never have three feet of topsoil, but we’ve got markets. And so we have to learn to use those to our advantage. And the other big thing that we’re seeing more and more of and we’re not really involved with on the research farms, though, is agritourism. And that’s something that is becoming a big thing as fewer and fewer people are tied to farms. More and more people want to get on the farms. Not something we deal with a lot here on the stations, but as a university, it’s something we’re being involved with quite a bit.
Mike Howell (30:33):
Well, Ben, we really appreciate you taking time to visit with us today and share a little bit about West Virginia University and the research farm. Listeners, we appreciate you tuning in, and we hope you’ve got a lot of information from these segments today. And as always, if you need more information on anything we’ve talked about today, you can visit our website, that’s nutrien-eKonomics.com. Until next time, this has been Mike Howell with The Dirt.
