This Week in Ag #36

October 17, 2023 by

By Fred Nichols
Chief Marketing Officer,
Huma®, Inc.

#Harvest23 is in full swing. You probably have a sense of what farmers are currently doing. But what are farmers currently thinking about? Well, at this time of the year… A LOT!

Harvest logistics. Just as they do for planting, farmers prepare detailed plans for harvest. The two are carefully intertwined. Crop selection, varietal selection, field location and planting dates play a huge role in the “picking order” of what fields are harvested when. Field conditions also play a big role. Fields notorious for having wet holes could be moved up or down the picking order, based on current and expected weather conditions. You’ll want to get those fields out of the way if it’s currently dry, or delay them if they are currently wet. [Read more…]

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This Week in Ag #35

October 10, 2023 by

By Fred Nichols
Chief Marketing Officer,
Huma®, Inc.

Last week I was a guest on the TopSoil Webinar series hosted by Mitchell Hora of Continuum Ag (you can check it out here). I mentioned how western growers seem further along in their regenerative agriculture journey. That’s largely driven by regional attitudes and the food companies, who have pledged to sell products grown using regen ag practices. This has motivated growers of crops such as potatoes, onions, apples, and blueberries to hasten their adoption. But in the Heartland, where commodity crops fill the landscape, these growers have lacked many of the market-driven economic incentives. Until now. [Read more…]

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This Week in Ag #34

October 3, 2023 by

By Fred Nichols
Chief Marketing Officer,
Huma®, Inc.

Earl Butz, one of the most famous and popular US Secretaries of Agriculture, once told me that a key competitive advantage for US farmers in the global marketplace is our built-in natural infrastructure. [Read more…]

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This Week in Ag #33

September 26, 2023 by

By Fred Nichols
Chief Marketing Officer,
Huma®, Inc.

In commodity crop production, we talk a lot about bushels per acre. Because that’s how farmers get paid. But what exactly does bushels per acre mean? A bushel is the unit of measure we use in the USA (other parts of the world use tons or metric tons) to calculate yield, verify shipments and set pricing standards for crops such as corn, soybeans, wheat, canola, rice and sorghum. There’s a good chance your grandparents had a bushel basket laying around their house, garage, or barn. If you were to fill that basket to the brim with corn, you’d have one bushel’s worth. [Read more…]

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This Week in Ag #32

September 19, 2023 by

By Fred Nichols
Chief Marketing Officer,
Huma®, Inc.

Everyone remembers where they were on September 11, 2001. One of my most vivid memories was the week after. I was farming with my dad at the time. He had just started cutting soybeans in a field owned by my wife’s family, situated next to Interstate 74 in western Illinois. I was driving to the field to meet him and take a load into the elevator, but I couldn’t help but hear a steady cadence of horns blasting from the cars and trucks traveling along the adjacent interstate. Then I noticed several hands waving at him, from those passersby. As I drove closer to the combine, I felt goosebumps, then a sense of pride rushed over me. Instantly, I knew what all the fuss was about. Dad had affixed an American flag to the grain platform of our combine. And a brisk autumn wind waved Old Glory across the scenic backdrop of the family farm. This was truly a vision of Americana. At the perfect time. Today, you see a fair number of farmers displaying the Stars & Stripes on their equipment, which always brings a smile to my face and a memory to my heart. [Read more…]

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This Week in Ag #13

May 9, 2023 by

By Fred Nichols
Chief Marketing Officer,
Bio Huma Netics®, Inc.

Corn came screaming out of the ground in just five days on my farm at Agricenter International in Memphis. Other than the seed and herbicide, I’m using 100% Huma Gro® products. My belief is that you don’t just farm the crop, you farm the soil. These Mid-South soils have low organic matter levels, so the pre-plant application included Huma Gro® Zap® to help add life to the soil; Breakout®, Max Pak® and Calcium for fast, uniform emergence and sustained vigor; and for macros we applied Super Nitro® and Super Phos®, along with X-Tend®. Right behind the planter, we made another pass of Super Nitro®, Super Phos® and X-Tend®, along with Acuron herbicide. [Read more…]

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This Week in Ag #11

April 25, 2023 by

By Fred Nichols
Chief Marketing Officer,
Bio Huma Netics, Inc.

You shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but you can judge seed products by their bag covers. There’s lots of telling information on them. Just look at this bag of seeds going on my farm. The bag itself prominently features the brand name and logo (AgriGold), type of product (corn), the actual product name (A647-79VT2PRO) and weight (61 lbs. in this bag). Seed corn bags contain 80,000 kernels. The heavier the bag, the heavier the weight per kernel. While there are studies suggesting no link between final yield and the weight of the seed, many successful farmers ardently believe this to be true and prefer heavier seeds. Each bag also contains a tag that provides specific information that farmers will want to record. [Read more…]

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