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Howdy Allan, If ya haven't figure it out by my handle, I'm pretty partial to the "old fashioned" ways of farming. I'm not a big fan of the roundup ready stuff but it does have it's advantages. Now, on our farm I team up with the renter on his corn. He puts in the roundup ready stuff and has the local guys spray it early on. I go in later and run the cultivator and it usually does pretty good. He usually gets a pretty good stand of weeds in the field during the time between spraying and cultivating. Now, maybe this is just the fault of the guys spraying it (maybe dilluting the chemicals too much) or it could be that spraying isn't as effective as it should be. Don't know. But I do know that if you have to go spraying multiple times during a season it gets expensive. On alfalfa I really don't see a need for spraying. I have a stand that was double seeded three years back and it hardly has any weeds in it at all. If you get a good stand established then the alfalfa usually does the weeding for you. Now, my buyers aren't nitpicky so they wouldn't complain if they saw a weed in a bale anyhow. I'm really having a hard time understanding the whole economics of farming though. Ya got all these industries that are supplying the ag. industry with super expensive supplies (machinery, seed, fertilizer, spray, etc.) and they keep on pumping up prices as if they know they've found a market that will make them rich. Now, when I started in alfalfa I had big dreams of selling hay for 5.00 a bale to all this "rich" horse people who could afford it. I went after a market that could support that kind of price. So, why are these companies pursuing farmers when they know that most, if not all, are poor?? Does that really make economic sense? I just never could understand why agriculture is the only industry that is regulated to where the producer can't set his own price. Even the oil industry (which is supposedly on a market basis like ag commodities) can just push up their price when they want to. I mean, c'mon. Here in S. OH the last I heard corn was below 2.00 a bushel. I have an old ag book from 1909 and corn was somewhere around 1.00 to 1.25 or so. Sorry for venting but it's hard not to when ya got equipment dealers, seed companies, fertilizer distributors, chemical dealers, and even food distributors (grocery stores, etc.) raising prices and making money and yet here the farmer sits enjoying a good dose of nostalgia in the way of prices from 1960. God bless. --old fashioned farmer
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