Planting one year after the derecho

May 03, 2021

The damage to the 2020 crop was the worst Marty Danzer had ever seen on his farm

By Diego Flammini
Staff Writer
Farms.com

As U.S. farmers continue with the 2021 planting season, many producers are seeding crops one year after a devastating storm caused millions of dollars of damage in crop loss.

Marty Danzer, a Carroll, Iowa cash crop producer, for example, wrapped up soybean seeding over the weekend and finished planting corn a week before that.

It’s his farm’s first crop after a derecho affected communities in South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan, Indiana and Ohio in August 2020. In total the storm traveled about 770 miles in 14 hours.

The storm and its 100 mile-per-hour winds damaged about 10 million acres of crops in Iowa alone – Danzer’s among them.

“We didn’t lose any buildings, but we lost a lot of crop. There was corn that was so flat you couldn’t get underneath it with a corn head,” he told Farms.com. “There was probably 30 to 40 bushels per acre of corn on the ground. We had some cattle clean it up, but they couldn’t get all of it.”

Seeing the damage on his farm was hard, he said.

“It was frustrating,” he said. “Farming is labor-intensive, we invest in our operations, and then to see (the derecho) happen, it fatigues you.”

But as the 2021 planting season approached, Danzer prepared to do his very best to give his crops the best chance to succeed.

He planted about 550 acres of soybeans, around 600 acres of corn and used the proper varieties and hybrids for this farm’s conditions.

“For corn we usually plant anywhere from 106-day corn to 110-day corn and we’ve had pretty good success with that,” he said. “And for soybeans we usually plant anywhere from a 2.4 to a 2.9 variety. Over the years the earlier-maturity varieties used to have a little more yield drag.”

With his planting season finished, Danzer is hoping Mother Nature will be a little more cooperative than she was in 2020.

“We got the seeds in the ground and now we need the timely rains,” he said. “We’re off to a better start than last year but we’re a bit dry.”

Video: Western Canadian Agriculture: Hard Times Made the World's Best Farmers

Western Canadian agriculture produced the most advanced farmers in the world not through abundance but through adversity. The crow rate fell. The wheat price went nowhere. The brown envelopes stopped.

When the subsidies disappeared, the bad farmers left and the good ones stayed. And the ones who stayed could not just grow wheat anymore. They started growing lentils and canola and peas and flax and faba beans. They built crop rotation. They got serious about agronomy because there was no government backstop. That process produced the Western Canadian agriculture Dennis Bulani describes in this clip: the most advanced, most educated farming culture in the world.

His contrast with Iowa corn and soybean farmers is sharp. At a DeKalb farmer meeting in Okoboji, Iowa, he asked what crop rotation they ran. Beans on corn stubble, corn on bean stubble. How do you fertilize? The co-op agronomist handles it. Have you considered other crops? No need. We make so much money on corn and soybeans. Western Canadian agriculture was never allowed that comfort. And now those Iowa farmers are watching soybean markets lock up with China and corn prices slide, and they do not have the agronomy knowledge or the research base to pivot. Western Canadian farmers adapted on a dime because they had done it before.

Dennis also makes the case that Western Canadian agriculture keeps adapting in real time. Low commodity prices over the past year have pushed growers to look seriously at precision spot-spray technology. He knows a neighbor who bought a sprayer with the seeing-eye system and sprayed only 80 out of 320 acres. As a chemical retailer Dennis acknowledges that will affect his sales. He supports it anyway, because if it advances Canadian agriculture and makes farmers money, that is a good outcome.

The lesson Dennis draws from the tale of two farms: continuous improvement is the only durable strategy. When canola was $22 a bushel some growers went to Arizona instead of the Crop Production Show. When the price came down those same growers came back to the research and the discipline. Products do not go on Rack Petroleum's shelves unless they pass a replicated trial first. That is what Western Canadian agriculture built through hard times: farmers who do the work whether the times demand it or not.

Dennis Bulani is CEO of Rack Petroleum and Ultimate Yield in Biggar, Saskatchewan. Dan Aberhart hosts GTF Productions, Western Canadian Agriculture's foremost live briefing platform and its foremost AI training platform for ag operators