My cousin started putting on anhydrous ammonia today on our grain farm. This is for the corn crop. Last year dad had the largest crop in his 93 years on this planet. He was anticipating first ever corn yields over 200 bushels/acre.....it way surpassed that but unfortunately dad passed away before the final grain was harvested. Our ground is prime cornbelt soil and its amazing how the yields have steadily risen over the years...except of course during drought years.

Here's to you dad.....may you look down and watch the corn climb out of the ground.

Yes Stan.... Here's thinking of your dear ol' dad.... I bet he is still proud of you mate

Stan, great stuff
I have an interest to understand why you think yields continue to increase.
What type of corn varietal - I ask because I am interested in all this ant-GMO stuff and wonder if you use GMO corn, what your thoughts are on pest control etc, etc.
My perspective is that I am pro GMO, but want to really understand if there are any pitfalls etc, so I can have an educated discussion.

Ditto Lofty. I hear so many things that are pro-anti GMO my head spins....
I'd love to hear an unbiased factual report.

Jeff- It is GMO seed. The steady yield climb is due mainly to genetics....more drought resistant genes, genes that are resistant to certain insects and chemicals. Very tolerant to chemicals that would normally harm the crop...actually allowing LESS chemical application. Another reason for yields going up is the satellite monitoring of every acre of ground ..what its yield was last crop...and this is fed into the fertilizer applicators that are computer controlled to spurt out more fertilizer on the leaner yielding acres, and save fertilizer in the premium yielding acres. This maximizes savings per acre....and the size of dads farms, this results in thousands of dollars saved. Lean, efficient farming with super genetics....

You can't believe everything you hear on TV. The liberals are out there shouting at Monsanto while the American farmer is far out in the lead for feeding the world, increasing total USA on production on an ever decreasing number of acres......and doing it with far less fuel per acre......making our so called carbon footprint smaller.

I farmed for 15 years for my dad, but just never appreciated having a farm operation given to me....and I wasn't interested in farming anyway. So, to my dads disappointment I went and made my own shadow. It took dad about 3 years to realize I wasn't coming back to the farm and that he then realized I made the best choice for myself.

Dad was hard to work for as we both were independent as hell.....

But now my sister and I will be the stewards of the farm ground my dad worked so hard for buying.

ooooooooooo!
You and my wife would not get along at all. She is on Monsanto like a tick on a dog.
It's GMO this and GMO that. She believes they are the cause of so many illnesses despite the fact people are living longer.

I've tried to read a bunch on GMO, and I think the stuff about being unhealthy, causing sickness etc is all totally BS. Actually makes no sense considering it's all broken down by gastric juices etc. Where I get a little confused is the pros and cons relating to pesticides etc.
Where I get a little down on Monsanto are some of the business practices like the reports of them going after people if Monsanto seeds land up on their land, and things I read about some seeds only being good for one crop - so farmers become committed to continuously purchasing Monsanto seeds. I'm not sure how much of all this is BS, because it's really hard to know how much one reads on the internet is BS, and what studies to believe.
Interestingly the US orange crop may only be saved by a GMO option.............

Ray- I don't have to live with your wife...so just slap her! Ha

Jeff- You are well versed on this topic and I share some of your beefs about Monsanto kind of controlling things. They have strict proprietary controls on their seed. Get caught planting your own soybean seed...And big fines!

I have no problem with GMO seed...

I don't like chicken houses packed beak to beak or confined cattle and hog operations...and then pump the poor cramped animals with anti-biotics.
But growing corn with high populations is where the yields are.

But.....I am a stair builder and not a farmer!

Apparently the Florida citrus greening disease could be the thing of the past by using Spinach genetics crossed into the orange. The plants are resistant to the disease.
I am still battling it on the one tree I have remaining.
Every tree has already died on my street except mine.
It sux. This was a healthy tree with lots of sweet fruits on it.
I also noticed the lack of honey bees.
California is regulating water now.
WHat a disaster? We are looking at some hard times ahead I would say.....

GMO is a double edged sword, it has some good, but also bad, yes it increases the yield and makes crops more drought resistant etc. BUT by combining the dna of other plants and animals, yes animals, you are creating foreign protiens that the body does not recognize, and this has been linked to autoimune diseases.
If the plant is able to produce its own pesdicide, where do you think that pesdicide goes when you eat it? Same with chicken and beef being fed hormones, antibiotics, tranquilizers etc.

Ray, this is the first generation to have a shorter lifespan than their parents...Girls as young as 8 years old are starting puberty.
More peole than ever are getting Chrones disease, ! in 60 children are autistic, 20 years ago it was 1 in 6000...
Like anything else follow the money. And the lobbyists.

This interests Me very much and I have been doing my research over the last year + since I was diagnosed with a digestive condition.

Do not misunderstand me, I am not a liberal save the planet alarmest, But 50 years ago the food we ate was not the food we eat today.

I also do believe that we have way too many undesired effects of the chemical misuse and the genetic mess ups.
THings that we manipulate because we know just enough to be dangerous.
But the same thing had happened with medicine when they started experimenting back when.
Today we look at some of that stuff and ask ourselves "what were they thinking?".
Soooo what we experiment with today can have adverse effects that we have no way of foreseeing right now.
I am also an eyewitness to thimerosal triggered autism.
A perfectly healthy baby 3 hours after the shot went into a total system shut down.
I would never let them give a baby the "convenience" shot.
In Europe you take your kid for the Di/Per/Te 3 different times and there is no one inclusive shot.
I also find it interesting how the media had attacked the character of Jenny McCarthy instead of attacking the claims of hers.
They still haven't provided one single independent (not pharmaceutical sponsored or conducted) study about thimerosal's mercury content and it's health effects on newborn babies with 0 immune system.

You are mixing up a lot of different things here. GMO , early puberty probably hormone fed cow related, really no such thing as eating a foreign protein - your body breaks them all down into peptides before absorption. We eat vegetables and animal proteins, so why not eat a vegetable that has animal proteins in it?
Where do you get that this generation has a shorter lifespan than their parents?
Many of the diagnoses made today are not new, just recognized more -ADD is a perfect example, always existed, except before we got caned for it instead of Ritalin.
Unfortunately there's tons of junk science out there, and it's becoming impossible to sort out the junk from the real science.
I think we have to worry a lot more about pollutants in our environment than we do about GMO food when it comes to the effects on our health.

Gabor, so you have witnessed a baby get a shot and three hours later become autistic - hmmmm, I'm calling BS on that. How do you know it was the thimerosal that caused the shutdownl? Sounds a lot more like an allergic reaction than thimerosal related toxicity unless they gave the kid 1000x the normal dose. Allergic reactions happen all the tie to antibiotics, yet no one is banning antibiotics.
Anyway in the US thimerosal is no longer used in any childhood vaccines except it is present in trace amounts in the flu vaccine. The amount of thimerosal (mercury) in a vaccine dose is 1/100 -1/10000 of the amount required to demonstrate toxicity.
Bottom line with vaccines is the benefits WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY outweigh the occasional adverse effects - yes even including the occasional death. Have you ever seen a kid die of measles meningitis - I have.
The vaccine causing autism theory has been clearly debunked, unfortunately many children have died as a result of the junk, no criminal, science that started the myth.

No I sad 3 hours later the baby went into a total system shut down.
He stopped breathing. And suffered from lack of oxygen to his brain.
You don't have to believe me ask my wife.
There was nothing wrong with that baby.
Nothing for 3 months. After the shot he became a vegetable.
Undeniable fact that we witnessed.
The hospital didn't know what to do but asked about the vaccine he was injected with.
They did have that look on their face as if this wasn't the first time they were seeing shit like that.
Call as many BS on it as you wish it doesn't change the fact.
It has happened exactly as I wrote it.
Again the pharmaceutical companies did the "debunking".
I don't buy it. I saw what I saw.

Well exactly - obviously very unlikely it had anything to do with thimerosal, but an allergic reaction to the vaccine is much more likely. And yes it could have been a reaction to the thimerosol - but do you know why thimerosal was added to vaccines - because people were dying of fungal and other infections from vaccines that did not contain preservatives in the early part of the 20th century. The benefit vs risk ratio of vaccines is overwhelmingly in favor of vaccinations, despite the occasional adverse reaction. And yes this does unfortunately happen, just like people can have an anaphylactic reaction to any antibiotic or other medication. Everything in medicine is unfortunately a calculation of risk versus benefit of the treatment, and vaccines are no different. And yes if one works in a hospital, it's not that unusual to see bad reactions, and so yes they had seen it before.
People are peculiar, they want to be treated when they get sick, they don't want to die from cancer, they want antibiotics for their pneumonia, but yet they refuse to accept the risks of adverse reactions. And yes medical people do take note of the adverse reactions, and that's why treatments continue to change and improve.
Today endoscopic cholecystectomy (gallbladder removal) is routine, but in the early part of my training there were many complications with the procedure, which was unfortunately the cost of progress. I could go on and on, but yes all treatments carry an element of risk.
If you get a staph infection of your leg you could chose to get it chopped off, or you could choose to get treated with antibiotics and maybe have a chance of dying of an anaphylactic reaction to the antibiotics - before 1940 you never had a choice.

Some facts from the world Health Organization:
Measles is one of the leading causes of death among young children even though a safe and cost-effective vaccine is available.
In 2013, there were 145 700 measles deaths globally – about 400 deaths every day or 16 deaths every hour.
Measles vaccination resulted in a 75% drop in measles deaths between 2000 and 2013 worldwide.
In 2013, about 84% of the world's children received one dose of measles vaccine by their first birthday through routine health services – up from 73% in 2000.
During 2000-2013, measles vaccination prevented an estimated 15.6 million deaths making measles vaccine one of the best buys in public health.
Measles vaccine generally no longer has thimerosal

Pneumonia is the leading infectious cause of death in children worldwide, accounting for 15% of all deaths of children under 5 years old.
Pneumonia killed an estimated 935 000 children under the age of five in 2013.
Pneumonia can be caused by viruses, bacteria or fungi.
Pneumonia can be prevented by immunization, adequate nutrition and by addressing environmental factors.
Pneumonia caused by bacteria can be treated with antibiotics, but only one third of children with pneumonia receive the antibiotics they need.

Pneumonia vaccine sometimes still contains small amounts of thimerosal as a preservative to prevent contamination and subsequent infection.

How many deaths did Thimerosal cause? The answer is that except for a few documented cases of massive thimerosal overdose in the 1930's (unrelated to MMR vaccine), there have been no documented cases of death as a result of the amount of thimerosal found in vaccines.

Thimerosal is only one of the mercury based suspense that is being pinpointed by most and that is why I brought that one up.
The problem is not as much the infection but the damn shelf life the pharmaceutical companies want to increase.
These bastards (and they are bastards to a certain level) want to have freaking unrealistic shelf life. Well something has to give.
SO they will increase mercury or whatever the stabilizer agent is in the given suspension.
I am not a chemist nor a doctor I can only speculate and not even educated guess things.
So now we are looking at suspensions being manipulated to gain shelf life.
They won't even resemble the original formula.
I just wish things were more transparent and not being run by the money in the background.
I am sure you will agree to the fact that we have had sooooo many medicine out there that were hailed as the new wonder drug just to see them being the subject of class action suits.
I am not much of a "oh just take it you'll be fine" guy.
Hardly ever take anything as a matter of fact. I do however appreciate the medicines that work well. But they all got to where they are by trying them out on people and most of them don't even know that they were walking Guinea-pigs.
I am amazed still about the number of autistic children turning up in the last decade or so.
What is it than?????

Again, everything is about risk versus benefit. Nothing, including thimerosal is zero risk, it's just that thimerosal is clearly a VERY LOW risk compound. We get far more environmental exposure to organomercurials like thimerosal, than we could ever imagine getting from thimerosal in vaccines - which our bodies actually simply excrete in our baby poop. When it comes to the dollar incentive for drug companies - standard vaccines are simply not on their radar - there is very little money for any drug company in any drug that is no longer under patent due to generics etc.
There are hundreds, thousands, of pollutants in our every day environment that either alone or cumulatively could be responsible for the increase in autism and other diseases. Despite the fact that thimerosal is no longer in MMR vaccines, autism still occurs and supposedly is still increasing.
There is hardly a single product associated with human activity that does not result in pollution of our environment - whether it's farming for food, making our clothes, providing our health care, driving our cars and flying our gyros.
Most here deny the effects of carbon based energy for example on our environment, and our health; yet the scientific data supporting these effects, far outweighs the data of adverse effects of thimerosal. Yet the same people are up in arms about nasty drug companies creating autism due to thimerosal. Go figure.

I would love to see some real data coming from China.
If anywhere in the world that would be the perfect study case.
Their pollution is so extreme it would be a real indicator if there is really carbon based pollution to be blamed for anything.
But than again we exhale carbon
So once the EPA declared our "exhaust" as a pollutant....you see where I am going with this?
The answer to why people are blaming Big Pharma?
Do you think that lawyers have anything to do with it?????

Everything is toxic, the only difference between the least toxic (like water) and the most toxic like botulism is dose.
Carbon is the same, as is plastic in our environment, or pesticides or thimerosal, whatever. Small amounts, no problem - too much, big problem. Too many people (especially lawyer people) - now there's the real problem.

So, to fix the world.... maybe we should exterminate lawyers?

Sounds reasonable (unless you are a lawyer)