"Cleanse" is a popular buzzword these days. Everybody wants to sell you on the "clean" life. All over social media there are folks selling products claiming to "detox" your body and "cleanse" your system. Farmers like to be clean too. We like to have clean equipment and a tidy farmstead and shop. Most importantly we like to have"clean" crops. Clean from weeds and disease. That's where agro- chemicals come into play. We apply small amounts (ounces per acre) of pesticides for many different problems. Herbicides are used to kill weeds, insecticides to kill insects and fungicides to control leaf diseases and improve over all plant health. Many of the insecticide products we use are natural plant based products. We actually use some of the same insecticides on our farm that organic farmers use. Modern Agro Pesticides have very short persistence. This simply means the interval between application and harvest is short because the chemicals do not stay and accumulate in the plant. They do their job and wear off. If we did not control pests such as weeds, insects and disease our yields would be drastically reduced. This is why organic food has such a high price tag. Organics are expensive to raise and usually produce about half the yield. So if all farmers decided to become organic farmers we would need millions of more acres of land to be in production to produce enough food for the world. Big Organic would have you believe to live "clean" one must begin by eating "clean" food. I was looking at a field of our wheat the other day. (Which by the way is Non-GMO because there is no such thing as commercially available GMO wheat.) I noticed around the edge where the sprayer missed a few rows we had a bad
outbreak of "downey mildew" or powdery Mildew as some call it. The crop in this area was not "clean" at all! These 2 pictures show the diseased leaves on the plants. This mildew eats up the lamina of the leaves and prevent them from absorbing sunlight to make sugar to feed the plants that will ultimately make a head of grain. (Remember science class and the photosynthesis process, the teacher was right it actually matters and we need to understand it's importance!) We had added some fungicide to the tank mix when spraying herbicide for weeds in the wheat. And if we were wondering if the money we spent for some fungicide paid off all we had to look at was an area that was missed to see what might have been. The next picture below shows the healthy wheat a few rows over that received the fungicide treatment. This infestation of disease in this amount could be devastating to our crop and therefore it must be managed and controlled. Fungal diseases love warm humid weather just like we have been having lately. We are currently making another application of fungicide and insecticide to our wheat fields to protect the heads of grain as they are pollinating. The fungicide has kept the crop "clean" up until this point and now we have a chance to harvest milling quality grain for flour.
These two pictures show the wheat pollinating in the field. Wheat is wind pollinated. Pollen is produced and spread across the field from the wheat plants by the wind. Each grain is pollinated separately.
We are currently making a fungicide application to the pollinating heads to protect the grains from disease as they fill. We have applied fungicide earlier in the season to prevent leaf diseases from adversely affecting the plants. The product we are currently applying will continue to protect the health of the flag leaves but will also help to prevent septoria or glume blotch from attacking the grain seed itself. A healthy grain seed will have be heavier and make milling quality grain for flour. A diseased seed of grain will be lighter and not be suitable for milling. Diseased wheat with lower test weight will be discounted when we sell it compared to quality wheat.
