Re: Iowa Farmers

Posted by Larry EC-OH on July 26, 2013 at 11:03:09 from (108.72.99.196):

In Reply to: Iowa Farmers posted by NY 986 on July 26, 2013 at 10:55:28:

Funny that this appeared in the New YORK times;

Francis Childs, 68, Dies; Sage of High Corn Yields

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By DOUGLAS MARTIN
Published: January 20, 2008

Francis Childs, a third-generation farmer who studied, schemed and tramped his fields with a spade to become the most productive corn grower ever, died on Jan. 9 in Marshall County, Iowa. He was 68.
Darrell Smith

Francis Childs, the first corn farmer to top 400 bushels an acre.

Carolynn Childs, his daughter-in-law, confirmed the death but declined to give a cause.

Mr. Childs shattered old notions of just how much corn could be coaxed from an acre of ground. He was the first farmer in a controlled contest to exceed 400 bushels an acre, achieving 405 in 2001 and 442 the next year.

Neighbors on land similar to his were getting yields just a third this size. When he passed 400 bushels, his nearest competitor trailed him by 85. In 1999, an Agriculture Department official watching the weigh-in of his 394 bushels likened the event to breaking the sound barrier, The Wall Street Journal reported.

The National Corn Growers Association ruled eight times that Mr. Childs’s yield per acre had won his category of its hotly contested annual competitions. He won the Iowa contest 18 times and the Nebraska one twice. He displayed the awards with pride on the bug screen of his pickup.

Max Starbuck, an official of the corn growers’ group, said that no one had yet broken Mr. Childs’s 442-bushel record in a contest and that he knew of no proven superior corn yield anywhere.

"Every farmer back in their heart somewhere has a dream to accomplish something like this," said Tim Burrack, who farmed near Mr. Childs.

In 2002, Mr. Childs told Iowa Farmer Today that he had recorded yields above 500 bushels an acre — the highest was 577 — in strips of less than the 10-acre crops required for contests. He envisioned getting more than 600 bushels from one acre.

Over the years, average corn yields have climbed steeply, to 153 bushes per acre last year from 26.5 in 1932. The growers’ association said that if yields had remained the same as in 1932, a farm more than twice the size of Texas would have been needed to harvest last year’s crop of 13.07 billion bushels of corn.

In addition to making less land produce more corn, higher yields mean that soil that is more vulnerable to erosion need not be farmed. Also, the growing demand for corn for use to make ethanol to power cars might be met by higher yields.

Mr. Childs’s crops were so jungle-like that his combine had to move at a crawl to harvest the corn. A green thumb and luck with rain only partly explained such success: he strategized constantly, enlisted experts to give advice, and changed direction each of the many times he walked through his corn patch.

He plowed deeper than other farmers (many of whom no longer plow at all), planted genetically modified seeds very densely, used lots of chemical fertilizers and pesticides and tested the tissue of plants at different stages of growth. He often lectured on these techniques, and he was aggressive in his corn-crop methodology. “I like to push it,” he once said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal.

Francis R. Childs was born on Aug. 30, 1939, in Delaware County, Iowa. His father, Ross, entered crop-growing contests, and Francis followed suit when he took over the family farm in 1966. The next year, he won the Iowa corn contest.

But he did not win again for 20 years, attributing the dry spell to an unwillingness to innovate but not to his interest in competing in demolition derbies and tractor pulls. He operated a Polaris snowmobile shop for many years.

Environmentalists criticized Mr. Childs for his heavy use of fertilizer, saying it washed into the water supply. Others, including farmers who thought his achievements impossible and a former wife, accused him of cheating in contests.

These charges seemed to gain credibility in 2003 when he was disqualified from the national contest. But corn association officials attributed the problem to a procedural mistake by officials. He came back to win three national competitions, and five state ones. Mr. Childs, who lived in Falls City, Neb., and suffered a stroke last spring, is survived by his sons Kirk, of St. Anthony, Iowa, and Sam, of Manchester, Iowa; his daughters Kelly Childs, of Manchester, and Hannah Childs, of Marion, Iowa; and three grandchildren.

Fast-growing corn was not his only fascination with speed: he ferried visitors around his fields in a souped-up golf cart at 20 miles an hour. But he could be slow as a snail when it counted: he planted at just 2 m.p.h., to avoid mistakes.

And his calculations were meticulous. Mr. Childs figured that a three-day stretch of 90-degree weather in 2002 had cost him precisely one and three-tenths of a bushel of corn per day.

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