"Jim Webster" wrote in message
...

"Gordon Couger" wrote in message
news:3eae212a_3@newsfeed...



read it again and try and comprehend the reality, RR has allowed a 1
or
2
year rotation

now stop playing silly debating games for points and try to discuss
practical agriculture

Jim,

I am not talking about 1 or 2 year rotations but 5 or more years. We
have
been doing continuous no till corn since the 70's. The first started
working
with it in the middle 60's.
Cotton and beans are sensitive to almost all over the top broad leaf
weed
killers and there are weeds that preplant and preemergence weed killers
won't get. Before Round Up resistant crops you could only get away with
no
till for a year or two before resistant weeds gave you a problem. Only
then
if you have a lot wetter weather then I do. Many of the post emergence
herbicides for cotton don't work very well unless the get some moisture
on
them in a week after they are put on. If you were raising cotton on clay
soils where you have to rotate at least every three years because of
Texas
Root Rot you could get away with it conventional chemicals with out too
bad
a weed problem because you have to rotate out for 2 or 3 years anyway. I
don't know how long that fungus lives in the soil but it was still there
on
place I farmed that hadn't had cotton on it in 20 years.

The mixes of herbicides used for no till before Round Up were persistent
in
the soil as well.


trouble is this is way past anything in his experience, because he is
restricted to what he reads. hell, even I sit back and listen when I get
practical people talking about dry land farming, something which is almost
incomprehensible to me :-))

I note that Oz has been keeping his ears open and obviously I can see some
of these techniques (probably not the actual irrigation) might come into
play in his circumstances

One of the methods of dry land farming in the low rain fall areas is summer
fallow or growing a crop every other year. We often skip a crop when going
form winter to summer crops or the other way round.

In west Texas we have a little monsoon rain in July and August maybe 4 or 5
inches. That just fits perfect with cotton. When I crunched all the numbers
I could the most significant one was 1 inch of rain in July and August made
80 pounds of cotton in southwest Oklahoma. It does better that than in west
Texas because of the lower temperatures and a clay subsoil that hold
moisture better than the soil in Oklahoma. In Oklahoma Red River is a basin
about 30 miles with filled with alluvial and aloeles sands that worn down
smooth setting on a red bed down about 40 feet. There is not a lot of
difference in the top soil and the soil 30 feet down but organic matter and
the dust that the grass caught over the eons. It is one of the oldest
features in the world. The soil is pretty unique. Red River actually fills
that whole basin but just comes out of the ground at the river.

I can't see how you raise cattle in that much rain. My experience is wet
weather and cattle are a poor mix. I am sure your cattle are acclimated to
different conditions than ours. As a rule here you never ship cattle east to
wetter conditions if you want to make money on them. We buy cattle from the
south east and they do great here. Some how the vet school got some mountain
cattle in from Colorado and had pure hell keeping them alive.

Torsten is a good target. He doesn't give up. It would be nice if knew
enough about agriculture to grow a garden and get some practical experience.
Slugs eat up everything he plants but wheat. I guess there are no organic
solutions for slugs.

Gordon