Upfront

Support Ag Unlimited
The 2008 Ag Unlimited silent and live auction, raffle and banquet are planned for Saturday, Jan. 26 at the Holiday Inn Expo Center in Columbia, Mo. It will be an evening event, which proved to be a success last year.

All proceeds from the silent and live auctions go toward scholarships for students in the MU College of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources.

Friends, alumni and other supporters of the CAFNR should plan to attend the event. Tickets are $45 in advance (before Jan. 18), and $55 after the early bird deadline.

To donate items or financial support for the auctions contact Tony Francis at (660) 327-4137 or by e-mail at tony.francis@mo.usda.gov or Dana Brown-Haynes at (573) 999-5749 or by e-mail at brownds@missouri.edu. Visit http://cafnr.missouri.edu/alumni/agunlimited to fill out a donation form and find out details on purchasing tickets.


Start next year’s crop now, get fall soil samples
Each crop year has unique weather and the crop year of 2007 is no exception. Some areas have experienced drier than normal moisture conditions and warmer than normal temperature conditions. In some of these areas ample soil moisture conditions early in the growing season resulted in excellent early crop growth, but ran short because of the lower than normal growing season precipitation. In some cases, that caused crops to ripen earlier and yield less than what was expected. Lower yields due to dry conditions usually means there is a higher than normal carry-over of NO3-N in the soil. If you were fortunate enough to live in an area where growing season moisture has been adequate and not excessive, the excellent crops grown will have removed most of the NO3-N in the soil and soil test N levels will be less than normal for the area. Either way, if the warm weather has encouraged the crops to mature faster, an early harvest opens the possibility to take soil samples in the fall.

Timely fall sampling gives you time to think about your cropping strategy. In that sense, the sooner you sample, the better, especially if fall nitrogen applications are considered. Fall nitrogen applications in this region are historically economically advantageous over spring applications because of lower nitrogen fertilizer prices in the fall compared to the spring. Soil samples will help target your plan.

Another reason to get your sampling booked as soon as possible is the threat of poor weather. Last year a beautiful November was followed by a big snow front the first weekend of December. After that, the ability to get samples was limited throughout winter.


Health Track blog informs and educates
Agriculture didn’t get much from the tech boom of the 90s. There were a few Web sites that claimed they would change the agriculture business. But they didn’t. Since then, companies have quietly made their sites better, but it is another phenomenon, blogging, that is pushing information to farmers.

Blogs (a modern-parlance contraction of “Web logs”) are usually focused on a particular industry or part of an industry. If you’re in the cattle business, MFA has a blog for you. The crew at MFA’s Health Track program has been plugging away to bring you information about selling calves in today’s market place.

The site includes a calendar of upcoming sales as well as a way for you to provide feedback to the program. Readers have the chance to discuss topics and ask question of the Health Track staff.

MFA Health Track manager Mike John said that the exercise in communicating directly with Health Track customers has helped staff consider the needs and concerns among cattle producers in the Midwest.

Join the “blogosphere.” Log in, have a look and leave a comment.


Agriculture’s efficiency through the years
While there’s some talk about the price rise of U.S. ag commodities, on the macro scale, food production in this country has been kept cheap through spectacular historic gains in efficiency. A recent report from the USDA’s Economic Research Service said that the greater use of agricultural inputs such as more fertilizer and more machinery per acre of land was one reason. But yield was also increased through the development of new technology, which made inputs more effective or allowed inputs to be combined in new and better ways.

To chart such intangibles, the ERS developed the total factor productivity (TFP) series, which shows technological production gains apart from production increases related to traditional inputs. The chart shows changes in total output (crop and livestock commodities), total inputs (land, labor, capital, fertilizer, feed and seed), and TFP from 1948 to 2004.

These changes are measured with 1948 set equal to 100, so when the value reached 266 in 2004, it shows that modern output is 2.66 times higher than in 1948.


Eight-trait stacked corn by 2010
Remember how there used to be a newly named mix of basic herbicides every year? You needed a family-tree map to track just what was in the product. Looks like that phenomena has moved from sprayer tank to the seed box. The good news is there is beneficial technology in the pipeline. The bad news is seed companies will run out of room on the bag to explain it all.

Most recently, Monsanto and Dow have reached a cross-licensing agreement aimed at launching SmartStax, an eight-gene stacked combination in corn. The agreement is expected to create a new competitive standard for stacked-trait offerings and present an expanded growth opportunity for both companies’ seed brands and traits businesses by the end of the decade.

Under the agreement, the companies will create a novel seed offering that combines eight different herbicide tolerance and insect-protection genes into top-performing hybrids. The product will include the companies’ respective above- and below-ground insect protection systems, including Dow AgroSciences’ Herculex I and Herculex RW technologies; Monsanto’s YieldGard VT Rootworm/RR2 and YieldGard VT PRO technologies; and the two established weed control systems, Roundup Ready and Liberty Link.

The basics:
• Monsanto and Dow AgroSciences will use SmartStax as the brand to serve as the commercial trademark for sales and trait licensing.
• Both parties will cross-license their respective above- and below-ground insect protection systems as well as the two leading weed control systems. The global agreements should pave the way for the introduction of the SmartStax brand in the U.S. by the end of the decade.
• Monsanto will represent SmartStax for both parties for joint third-party licensing. This will enable the joint licensing of SmartStax to independent seed companies through Monsanto’s Holden’s/Corn States business so that farmers can access the product in the brands they prefer to plant on farm.
• Both parties retain the right to independently stack additional traits and combinations with SmartStax.
• Both parties will cross-license germplasm to their seed brands for a 10-year period under royalty-bearing agreements to create exclusive new hybrid combinations, which would not otherwise exist.

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