CONSERVATION CORNER
A weekly blog for all things conservation
By: Miranda Neville, Agricultural Resource Specialist On the coldest, darkest, snowiest days – when most people are able to call in to work or take a snow day, farmers trudge through the feet of snow to their barns and carry on with their 24/7/365 jobs. Winter is setting in and the long months of harvest are now in the rear view. Farmers everywhere have spent the spring, summer and fall working tirelessly to ensure they had enough feed to make it through the cold winter months. Hearing “well your crops are all done, now you get to relax” couldn’t be further from the truth. The relief that crop harvest is over is a much-needed physical and mental break. (Now there may even be time to squeeze in a nap or two!) Winter is also time for planning, making decisions for the next crop year, tillage choices, selection of seeds to plant in the spring, cutting firewood, and ordering parts for the endless equipment maintenance. Winter is also a time for holiday celebrations and family. So begins the delicate balance of scheduling both worlds.
2 Comments
By: Nathan Dewing, Agricultural Team Leader Rest comes in sevens. We see a significance in the number seven from the very beginning of written history. Principles woven into the natural world’s design are affecting us, aware or not. Learning to work with them causes prospering. Rest is integral to success in any business, and in particular the farm. Sometimes it’s counter intuitive. By: Nathan Dewing, Agricultural Team Leader Conditions get tough for managing livestock in the winter. It can be stressful for animals, farmers, and our natural resources. Let’s consider steps to dramatically decrease cold snap stress. If a farmer can cut the wind and give his animals a solid place to land their feet, our winter temps will cause little stress. If relatively dry with a barrier against bitter wind, our animals like 15 degrees F, better than 90 degrees.
By: Nathan Dewing, Agricultural Team Leader, Bradford County Conservation District Life is drawn to water. We all can relate to that. Land bordering waterways and waterbodies is teaming with life. Riparian is a term literally meaning “riverbank”, or land beside the water. How we manage our riparian land has far reaching effects. Therefore, the conservation district gives considerable attention to equipping landowners to manage them well. Current focus on the Chesapeake Bay watershed is opening many opportunities for landowners wishing to improve riparian areas, including grant funding, plant materials, and more. An Excerpt from Pennsylvania’s Nutrient Management Program Nutrient management traditionally has been concerned with optimizing the economic returns from nutrients used to produce a crop. More recently, nutrient management also has begun to address ways to minimize the negative impact of nutrients on the environment. Programs such as the Chesapeake Bay Program and the Nutrient Management Act in Pennsylvania have focused attention on improving nutrient management on Commonwealth farms. By: Kevin Brown, Agricultural Resource Specialist, Bradford County Conservation District If you have, or intend to, plant cover crops, please read this column. We all hear the benefits touted about cover crops- less erosion, having a living plant in the ground at all times, alleviating compaction, retaining nutrients for the next crop, giving food and shelter to microbes in the soil, and so on. It is a great list and will do some miraculous things to the soil. Try it on a limited basis, if you haven’t already. Then get a shovel out and really look at what happened. There are some benefits that definitely go with cover crops. However, there are some things you should know beforehand that really can affect how those cover crops grow. We have two years under our belt now with our highboy planter. It has been a couple really wet years, so they haven’t been the best, but we have learned some interesting things that I think need to be shared. They are things that I have NOT heard in any other cover crop presentation. It’s like, “plant them and life will be good”. Well, not here. We have really struggled to get some good crops growing, but with the lessons learned, I think that will change. By: Kevin Brown, Agricultural Resource Specialist, Bradford County Conservation District There was a joke in school back in my day that went like, “Do you know how to keep a person in suspense? I will tell you later”. Well, I told you I would help you pay for some of these conservation practices, most notably fencing out streams, in the next column and yet I didn’t. I was keeping you in suspense. Miranda had such a good article that I just had to let her go first. I would like to remind you that even though we here at the District may be doing it for other reasons (clean water, and who wants that?), the real reason to do any of this is for the animals themselves. The happier they are, the faster they grow (for production), and the more they will love us back. By: Miranda Neville, Agricultural Resource Specialist Every spring all of the farmers I know start to get super antsy and excited to get planting done, only to roll right in to hay season (or whatever crops they grow), then followed immediately by corn harvest in the fall. There is no time for breaks, just a lot of racing to beat the next rainstorm and praying for good summer sun. When they’re planting those seeds, they are planting hope; hope for the future, but it’s important not to forget to take some time every now and then to admire the present moments. |
AuthorsVarious staff at the Bradford County Conservation District Archives
May 2024
Categories
All
|