From the day you start planning for a crop, you make decisions to increase the opportunity to have a successful crop with a strong probability it will create more revenue than expense… profit!

As a young child I remember the doctor’s kid wearing bell bottom pants to school. The style trend slowly moved towards mainstream and then went away. The other day I saw a gal in the airport wearing bell bottoms so broad a toddler could easily hide in there. I’m not sure there is much usefulness for this style. It has taken about 50 years for bell bottom pants to be “groovy “again. My grandpa used cover crops back in the 1950’s and they began to make a comeback in the early 2000’s, about 60 years to be back in “style”. Grandpa may not have known all the benefits, but he had a few good reasons to keep his soil covered in the harvest to plant window; erosion protection, cattle feed, and green fertilizer. Much research has been done at Michigan State University to help us understand the many ways cover crops can benefit our farms today…

Many dairy farms in Michigan have grown substantially over the past few decades in order to gain the economic benefits of scale. Regulations have followed, along with the acronym CAFO, concentrated animal feeding operation. One of those regulations is a required reservoir to capture runoff from outdoor surfaces that could carry nutrients from manure into ditches and streams, as well as effluent from fermenting silage piles. The result is a significant amount of “dirty” water that needs to be field applied…

When our forefathers began mapping out the land in this great country, they chose square parcels instead of round ones. When center pivot irrigation was developed, walking around a fixed pivot point in a circle was more efficient. Since then, we have been trying to figure out ways to water the corners. Although linear or straight-line systems have been developed, they are generally more costly than the center pivot system…

A CID or Certified Irrigation Designer is uniquely qualified to help with the layout

and design of an irrigation system for your farm. Because they have completed

additional training and testing in this area, they have another level of

understanding and expertise. While common sense and experience are valuable

tools, going the extra mile to complete the courses and certification enables a CID

to add performance and efficiency to an irrigation system designed specifically for

your field…

Capitalism can be a great thing. We find a market for something we can produce, then we get more

efficient at production. Once we get good at producing, we produce more units to spread out our

overhead and improve our profitability…