Changing Seasons, Changing Times

Falling temperatures and falling leaves, it’s not hard to figure out how this season came to be known as “fall”. Turning back clocks and getting some field work done. We don’t see much fall plowing anymore but we do see spray rigs and fertilizer trucks in the fields. Fall weed control programs are now a part of the cropping system. It used to be plow, disc, plant, cultivate, harvest and fall tillage if you had heavy black ground. It was a routine, but not really a crop production system. Weed control was mostly done with a cultivator; young farmers today may have never spent a hot June afternoon trying to stay awake while plowing what seemed endless rows of corn and soybeans. Then herbicides began to appear with 2,4D – the first broadleaf control for corn. It wasn’t long after that we began to have trouble with foxtail, and the list began to grow.

Today we are playing a different game. Crops with traits for insect control and herbicide tolerance are combined with weed control programs that may include several passes across the field. There are fungicide applications for disease control. Computers control everything from rates to populations, driven by uploaded maps that are also computer generated. That is why you will hear me talking about cropping systems; we now must consider fertility, multi-pest complex, hybrid/variety selection, weed control as a program, disease control and the market or end use of crops we produce as inter-connected parts of a production system. With all that, the objective is still unchanged—to produce a crop that feeds, clothes and fuels the world and provides a living for our families.

That is why we have become “One Syngenta” because we have the capability to do all of those things under our roof. As a coach would say, the Syngenta team has a “deep bench”.