Making Things Productive

   One of the things we try to balance is pushing the cotton plant to produce. If we water too early the plant goes to stalk, producing vegetative growth and not cotton bolls. I don't get paid for stalk, I get paid for bolls. So, we manage the plant for boll production. The first step is holding off the first irrigation until the plant starts setting fruit. This year the conditions have been so good and the plants are so vigorous that this week we have been applying a plant regulator to control height.

   As you can see the plants are  growing strong. Just four ounces will do the trick. That will keep them focusing their energy on growing fruit instead of bolting and growing tall. Next week we will cultivate and reform the beds. Then we will be ready for the second irrigation in a few weeks.

   In other news- this week the harvesting crew will come and cut the wheat. In the almonds we are irrigating and killing weeds.

Here are some thoughts from a recent radio bit-

We Need to Grow A Lot More Food- Fast

By Paul H. Betancourt

Copyright May 2012

At a recent regional economic summit, Ryan Jacobsen, Executive Director of the Fresno County Farm Bureau said, that in the next forty years we are going to have to increase the global food supply by 70% to meet demand. That’s a lot of food! Jacobsen’s estimate is we will have to grow more food in the next forty years than we have in the last five thousand years! You heard right-more food that we have grown since we began farming as a species.

As I have said before- we have a lot more people on this planet and we are losing farmland all over the world every year.

 We need to make each acre more productive not less productive. Even famed Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson, a hero of our enviro neighbors, would agree. Wilson sees this century as a bottle neck century. Our environmental problems have been caused by technology, so as Wilson sees it we have this century to leverage technology to solve our problems. The problem is his environmental disciples are working hard to make farming less productive. This has got to stop. We need to use the tools of technology to increase farm productivity. There are going to be a lot more mouths to feed in the coming years.

You can find the audio version at the link below-

http://www.940kyno.com/index.php?c=68

Click on June 4th.

I hope Y'all have a great week.!

P