Farm Resource Guide Available

Jan 18, 2018

By David Bau

The Farm Resource Guide for 2018 is now available at many University of Minnesota Extension County offices across the state. This resource guide includes a wide variety of useful farm business management information including the following items:

Custom rates
Average farmland rental rates by county
Flexible Rental Agreements
It includes lease forms for Cash Rent and Share Rent arrangements
Farmland sales information for all counties in Minnesota
Information on charges for custom feeding, commodity storage, leasing buildings and various bin rental rates
Current information on pasture rental rates, tree timber values
Marketing information along with recent cost trends for Minnesota
Commodity price probabilities for corn, soybeans, alfalfa hay, straw, grass hay, hogs and cattle
Corn and soybean yields by county
Feedlot Rule Highlights and information on Manure Agreement and Easements
Examples of Manure Spreading Lease and Land Application Agreement forms

This Resource Guide is available for a $25 fee plus postage and sales tax if you would like to have your own copy. I can provide you the information in your preferred format: e-mail cost $25 plus sales tax; CD cost $28.50; or hard copy cost $30.00.

If you would like your own copy of the Farm Resource Guide, please e-mail me at bauxx003@umn.edu or give me a call at 507-372-3900 ext. 3906 and let me know what format you would like. I will send out the materials and an invoice as soon as possible. I hope you find the Resource Guide useful and would welcome your feedback on what you would like to see included in next year’s Guide.

Source: umn.edu

Video: Wheat Yields in USA and China Threatened by Heat Waves Breaking Enzymes

A new peer reviewed study looks at the generally unrecognized risk of heat waves surpassing the threshold for enzyme damage in wheat.

Most studies that look at crop failure in the main food growing regions (breadbaskets of the planet) look at temperatures and droughts in the historical records to assess present day risk. Since the climate system has changed, these historical based risk analysis studies underestimate the present-day risks.

What this new research study does is generate an ensemble of plausible scenarios for the present climate in terms of temperatures and precipitation, and looks at how many of these plausible scenarios exceed the enzyme-breaking temperature of 32.8 C for wheat, and exceed the high stress yield reducing temperature of 27.8 C for wheat. Also, the study considers the possibility of a compounded failure with heat waves in both regions simultaneously, this greatly reducing global wheat supply and causing severe shortages.

Results show that the likelihood (risk) of wheat crop failure with a one-in-hundred likelihood in 1981 has in today’s climate become increased by 16x in the USA winter wheat crop (to one-in-six) and by 6x in northeast China (to one-in-sixteen).

The risks determined in this new paper are much greater than that obtained in previous work that determines risk by analyzing historical climate patterns.

Clearly, since the climate system is rapidly changing, we cannot assume stationarity and calculate risk probabilities like we did traditionally before.

We are essentially on a new planet, with a new climate regime, and have to understand that everything is different now.