To provide South Dakota farmers and ranchers with access to data in the field, South Dakota State Cooperative Extension’s iGrow has created free mobile applications providing on the go information available on certain smart phone and tablet devices.

These applications instantly deliver assistance to growers whether it’s identifying pests or keeping grazing records. Having access to  information allows producers to reference the available data when faced with important management decisions in the fast-paced world of production agriculture.  Making these mobile tools available will not only allow farmers to yield more, but become better stewards of the land.

The available iGrow mobile applications are:

Thistles of South Dakota

Soybean Diseases of South Dakota

NPIPM Soybean Guide

Grazing Records

Noxious Weeds of South Dakota

Click on the following link for a complete application listing:

http://www.sdstate.edu/sdces/store/MobileApps/index.cfm

Do you care about clean water? Assuming you said yes puts you into the same boat as farmers. While farmers need water to grow their crops, they also understand their role in lessening the amount of applied nutrients that excess water can carry away.

Researchers at South Dakota State University are working with farmers on a new project which will enhance the quality of water leaving tiled farmland, lessening the amount of nutrients carried downstream. These projects are called denitrifying bioreactors, which are basically giant filters consisting of wood chips which will absorb the nitrogen from water exiting the field through drain tile.

Just how much can these projects remove? Similar projects in Iowa and Minnesota show nitrate reductions of between 50-70%.

The advantages of these bioreactors would be that very little land would be taken out of production, they can be retrofitted to current drainage projects, they require very little maintenance and there is no reduction to the effectiveness of the drainage.

Construction of four to six separate projects in South Dakota will begin this spring. To learn more about the denitrifying bioreactors project, please visit the following site:

http://www.sdstate.edu/abe/wri/research-projects/bioreactors.cfm

Corn Comments Podcast with Jim Woster.

No-till acres continue to grow in South Dakota by leaps and bounds, from 30,000 acres in 1990 to 5 million in 2010. Their are multiple benefits to no-till including reduced runoff and erosion, increased organic matter and carbon sequestration in the soil.

Because of no-till’s growing popularity, South Dakota Corn has dedicated one day of GrowingOn Part 2 specifically to no-till and strip-till practices with Kevin Kimberley of Kimberley Ag Consulting on February 15th at the Sioux Falls Convention Center starting at 9am and running until 4pm. The seminar is FREE but you must pre-register either online or by calling the office at 605-334-0100.

According to today’s crop production report from the USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service, South Dakota farmers produced the second largest corn crop in the state’s history totaling 653.4 million bushels. That number is up one percent from projections in November’s report and up 15 percent from the previous year. Extreme weather conditions led to a lower than projected average yield of 132 bushels per acres, down three from 2010. However harvested acres were up 17 percent from 2010.

“Despite the challenges of the wet spring and dry summer, South Dakota producers raised a significant crop that will continue to meet our demands for food, feed and fuel,” said South Dakota Corn Utilization Council President, Chad Blindauer. “Advancements in seed biotechnology and other farming practices will continue to allow our growers to prevail in the future when faced with adverse weather conditions.”

Despite media outlet, Bloomberg’s recently released story titled, “Ethanol Eats More Corn Than Cows,” cattle, chickens and the rest animal feed industry still rank number one when it comes to consuming corn.

Bloomberg uses the direct corn use numbers showing that ethanol will consume 5.1 billion bushels and livestock will consume 4.6 billion bushels making a 500 million bushel difference. But they don’t take into account the amount of distillers grain being consumed (ethanol’s co-product which displaced the need for 1.2 B bu of corn) and the amount of exported corn being consumed by cattle (around 1.5 B bu).

It’s important for people to remember that corn ethanol production only uses two-thirds of the kernel. The rest is retained as DDG’s, a high protein and highly efficient animal feed which can be fed to cattle, hogs, poultry and aquaculture. The ethanol industry is expected to produce 42 million tons of it in 2012.

So let’s add up the overall usage of corn produced in America.

Ethanol = 3.4 billion bushels

Livestock = 7.3 billion bushels

Investigating just a little further clearly shows that livestock still eat twice as much of America’s corn when compared to ethanol making Bloomberg’s piece just another short-sighted folly by the mighty media.

Ag Phd’s Brian Hefty shares some insight on the benefits of drainage tile after speaking at the South Dakota Corn Growers 26th annual meeting. Proper drainage can benefit both the environment and the economy through a reduction in runoff and higher yields.