"Jim Webster" wrote in message
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"Oz" wrote in message
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Jim Webster writes

what does amuse me, in a darkly ironic way, is a lot of people are
getting
all excited about an Indian crop failure who never gave a tuppenny damn
about india, crops or weather before GM. I wonder how many of them ever
bothered posting when a conventional Indian crop fails?

Hang on a tick though.

Last season they had unusual extensive droughting because the monsoons
didn't reach west. There was extensive crop failure to the extent that
it was on UK news.

cannot have happened otherwise Marcus, with his eagle eye on Indian
peasant
farming conditions would have told us all about it

World grain prices even bumped up on the back of it.

Hmm, isn't one of the problems with maize that drought during flowering
kills pollination?

Mind you, claiming from the seed house is a nice trick if you can wangle
it.....

too right.
Not only that but it is soo easy to kick up a fuss, get it run in all the
worlds media so the company will pay you to shut up. They are no fools
them
lads

I have a good deal more experience with dry weather than you do on that side
of the pond. When you are moisture limited it is very difficult to evaluate
anything on a single years result. The moisture stored in the soil, the time
of planting in relation to when it rains later in the year and a stray
thunder storm can make a great deal of difference.

Cotton in particular is very sensitive to planting date in dry conditions.
Several winters I worked at the cotton gin and when the farmer got his crop
ginned we would figure what it made and what day it was planted. There was
nearly always one day that was the best day to plant. Yields would increase
slowly approaching that day and then fall of rapidly. The trick was to make
it to the first August rains. The risk of waiting that late plant was there
was no chance to replant if you lost a stand. Every year I would end up
planting some very late for some one and it would generally be the best
cotton I planted.

Corn responds worse to hot dry weather than cotton. Cotton will close the
opening in its leaves and wilt in the hottest part of the day if it get
short on moisture and it does the same at night both to conserve moisture. I
would start irrigating when the cotton started to wilt at 2:00 pm. Corn has
no such moisture monument mechanism it just sucks it up until it is gone and
quits and has shallow roots so it can't reach subsoil moisture that cotton
can. If corn ran out of moisture when it was tasseling it would not make
much if any seed. I expect that heavy continuous rain during pollination
would also cause a nice plump ear and no seed.

In the 50's we had a variety of wheat that really looked good. The three
years before it was released it did well all over the state and it did real
well for 4 years and the 5th year it failed all over the state but the
Panhandle which is a lot higher and cooler. They still grow it out there.

GM crops are local varieties that have had the trait introduced. They are
not new varieties of crops. Nobody takes that kind of risk.

Gordon