Jim Webster writes

what makes you think I give a damn any more. Just play your silly word
games

Although not initially, just lately (and I only have his quotes in your
post) percy sounds like an AI.

--
Oz
This post is worth absolutely nothing and is probably fallacious.
Note: soon (maybe already) only posts via despammed.com will be accepted.

"Oz" wrote in message
...
Gordon Couger writes

That report gives me an idea or the scale of irrigating in the UK.
200,000
hectares or 772 square mile or a block 28 miles on a side. The size of
small
county in Oklahoma. We have 2 people that work part time on irrigation
for
230,500 hectares

Oz faints

http://www.nass.usda.gov/census/cens...-36/ok1_41.pdf
about the same amount of irrigated land as the UK on it's biggest year
but
we have a lot less rain fall and lot higher temperatures.

Remember that even where irrigation is available there are years when
it's never used. Equally in a really dry summer (which were common in
the 90's) they may apply 4" or even 6" to susceptible crops.

I probably ought to add that many root crop farms are on sand. That is
almost entirely true of commercial carrot growers and very many potato
growers.
==================
A great deal of Oklahoma's irrigation it on sand for peanuts and one or two
potato farmers. Also the whole Red River Valley is a 30 to 50 mile wide bed
of worn out water and wind born sand.
http://www.couger.com/microscope/carl/sand.jpg
http://www.couger.com/microscope/carl/sand35xpol.jpg
http://www.couger.com/microscope/carl/sand35zplain.jpg
That fills the basin and the river runs under it. There are just verying
sizes of it with varing amouts of organic matter and some silt and a very
little clay now and thin. There is water on a red bed at 0 to 80 feet the 0
to 30 feet from the surface in formations that will give up from 2 to 800
gallons a minute. The quality varies from salty enough to kill on contact to
good enough for contionus furrow irrigation. There is no subsoil it is just
diffet grades of this stuff.

There are also a couple of aolial areas in the mid southwester part of the
state where they grow penuts. I am not familure with the subsoil structure
there.


The reason for this comes in the harvesting, which typically happens in
october when winter rainfall is high. A free draining sand allows east
harvesting even in high rainfall years when on a clay harvesting may be
impossible. A couple of years ago 30% of the UK potato crop was
unharvested and much of what was harvested resulted in severe field soil
damage.

Also important are quality constraints of straight roots (that haven't
bent round stones) and low cleaning costs (stones in spuds and damage).

Come to that even leeks and winter brassicae are increasingly falling
into the same pattern, with very large farmers preferentially buying
irrigated sandland in order to produce to contract for supermarkets.

The rest of us rely on rainfall. Getting an irrigation permit is
impossible and even a winter storage scheme not guaranteed to be
allowed. Since there is sod all you can do about rainfall, no water work
is ever done on rainfed crops.
==================\

Our laws that every thing below the ground goes wiht the place make a would
of difference. Most places we don't need a permit we just have to obey well
spacings for the aquifer.

There are probably going to be some changes in fossil water some day. Water
rights in the west are getting to be a very big deal. California is using
more water and power than it produces and won't produce the oil and gas in
its own state and off shore. Some day the rest of us are going to get really
****ed about it.

In the case of Red river and the land in West Texas and excess is just
circulating the aquifer. We are not using fossil water. We could in west
Texas but there is only 30 feet of it and the pumping costs for the farmer
are a lot higher and it dropping at a foot a year. It's not a linear
relationship a well into it would probably last 40 years or so but the 150
foot wells are local recharge and aren't dropping, cheaper to pump and
cheaper to repair. The did cost more to drill in the first place becase it
took 6 wells

Gordon

"Jim Webster" wrote in message
...

Gordon Couger wrote in message
...
Going thorough them carefully all I could find that could apply to the
UK
was done some were else. The UK doesn't seem to do a damn thing for
the UK.

What do the fellows that you have hired to do agricultural research do
anyway.

Gordon

very little. Most agricultural research relevant to dairy farming in UK
is done in Ireland and New Zealand.
Funding for research in UK determines what the research is. UK
government doesn't care so the universities get funding where they can.

Same here. Are the universities replacing retiring faculty?

Gordon

"Jim Webster" wrote in message
...

Gordon Couger wrote in message
...

What do you pay the ag researcher to do any way?

what ag researchers?

that is probably too cynical. Remember we have got to the stage where in
the UK most agricultural colleges in the UK still offer courses in
agriculture, but equine, conservation and golf course green keeping are
probably bigger earners.

Anything that would produce money is "near market" and the government
will not fund it.
When I was doing search of calf feeding I never bothered with the Defra
site, I just ran a google search and came up with stuff from Ireland,
Australia and the US. When I was looking for stuff on cattle handling
facilities a google search got me a lot from the US colleges which was
fascinating but not really suitable for the sort of cattle I run
(domesticated :-)))

There isn't all that much agricultural research on increasing
agricultural profitability in the UK because it isn't a government
priority.

I was talking to the lads who went to South Dakota and they came back
most impressed. What really impressed them was that the State equivilent
of the Minister of Agriculture actually dropped round to see them and
talk to them, AND he understood agriculture. They had never met a
politician who understood agriculture.

We have some that understand agriculture but not enough. Texas, Oklahoma and
the farm states usualy have a couple of them in there some where. Our
secretary of treasury was Waggoner Ranch's http://www.waggonerranch.com/
financial guy under President Johnson. That's the ranch next to my mother
folks place. They got the second choice on the land and picked the land with
oil http://www.waggonerranch.com/prod03b.htm under it. All we have is better
grass and land. Being first ain't all it's cracked up to be.

I think he ended up in jail.

Gordon

"Oz" wrote in message
...
Gordon Couger writes

Going thorough them carefully all I could find that could apply to the UK
was done some were else. The UK doesn't seem to do a damn thing for the
UK.

To be honest irrigation is very much a minority use and confined to a
bunch of potato producers and a few specialist vegetable growers.
Furthermore the main problem seems to be crop loss caused by heavy
rainfall after irrigating, which is highly site-specific. The highly
variable climate and topography in the UK also makes general statements
of precipitation and transpiration pretty useless. It really is rather
common to find farms a mile apart with rainfall differing by 10" and
soiltypes can vary erratically from heavy clay to sand to gravel in a
single acre of land.

What do the fellows that you have hired to do agricultural research do
anyway.

The universities basically no longer do any. A few have farms but this
is used for income (not any more) and research into plant and animal
physiology and to assist their vet schools.

The government used to have a whole string (perhaps 20) experimental
husbandry farms that did do very useful work. These have been either
sold off or merged with the local university (see above).

There are a few (like two?) independent crop research organisations. As
you know I belong to ARC. They do stonkingly useful work for a modest
fee, but unsurprisingly do not hand it out for free (ie the results are
confidential). If they did they would loose many farmer members (who
would get it for nothing).

Then we have the HGCA (and a dairy one the MDC). These contract work to
be done using a levy on all sales of grain (or milk). They produce quite
useful work, but never freely publish the full paper or experimental
details. They are mindblowingly inefficient, costing much more than ARC
to produce 1/100th of the number of results inadequately reported to
their contributors (and sometimes downright misleading).

That's a God dammed short sighted attitude by all involved. The idea of
building on the work of others has proved its self in every feild there is.
We have the same kind of check offs but the work is published to the public.
We also have several private research centers that publish all their work.

The more I learn about the EU and UK the more baffled I am by the way they
do things. You sit on an island and twice in the last century your food
supply was nearly cut off by the Germans and you don't consider agriculture
important to support a minimal research effort. In this country baring a
volcanic eruption that distorts the climate for 2 or 3 years or a drought of
biblical magnitude we have no problems with food security and we put a petty
high value on agriculture research and cut the farmer a lot more slack than
he really disserves.

Gordon

Gordon Couger wrote in message
...




What do the fellows that you have hired to do agricultural
research do
anyway.

Gordon

very little. Most agricultural research relevant to dairy farming in
UK
is done in Ireland and New Zealand.
Funding for research in UK determines what the research is. UK
government doesn't care so the universities get funding where they
can.

Same here. Are the universities replacing retiring faculty?


honestly don't know. Staff in agricultural colleges are worried as the
courses change towards golf and equestrian. I suspect that we have so
few universities that do agriculture (Reading, Newcastle, Wye,
Nottingham, Bangor are the ones that spring to mind but I haven't looked
at a prospectus for a generation) that they can fund themselves with
foriegn research. I know Reading used to take an awful lot of students
from Africa and the commonwealth.
--
Jim Webster

"The pasture of stupidity is unwholesome to mankind"

'Abd-ar-Rahman b. Muhammad b. Khaldun al-Hadrami'


Gordon

"Oz" wrote in message
...
Gordon Couger writes

http://www.weihenstephan.de/pbpz/leach/leachen.html
Here is one for Bavaria, Germany the temperature and humidity should not
require too much extrapolation.

Hardly. Bavaria is continental and significantly affected by local
mountain ranges.

The model should work. Temperatures and humidity are in the same ball park.
I wouldn't want to try and take an Oklahoma model an have any faith in give
anything that resembled reality over there but one form the continent or
Oregon would not be a big stretch.

Gordon

Gordon

"Oz" wrote in message
...
Gordon Couger writes

http://www.life.uiuc.edu/plantbio/wimovac/newpage11.htm
This model should work any where.

A splendid piece of work, pulling together a whole lot of useful stuff.

Getting the required parameters for a single UK field for a single year
of weather, though, would be a bit of a mission. If I were one of the
huge carrot growers on sand (eg round newmarket) I would get these guys
in to do soil analysis in depth for each field on the farm and install
remote weather equipment for each field or block.

Then a simple computer model would give me day-by-day information on the
irrigation need. Of course nobody else in the UK would be aware it was
even being done, let alone get a sight of the data.

There is work being done that will do just that. It is probably possible to
do it right now. The difficult part is the soil moisture sensor. For sandy
land I can make one that works but I don't think I can make one that doesn't
require individual calibration. It is a rather simple concept. A Whetstone
bridge wiht a thermosister in a substance very similar to the soil it is
buried in the solid and allow to come to equilibrium with the moisture in
the soil. It is powered up and the curve of tememerture plotted over time as
the resistor heats up with current going through it then shut it down. I
have built one and it works. But calibration is really bad news. The rest of
the parameter except humidity are real easy and humidity can be done.
Probably only soil & air temperature and moisture would be measured at the
remote sites. The central site would do all the other stuff you need unless
it was a really weird feild.

What we had in mind was use a 4 or 6 inch PVC pipe and bury it in the ground
with enough batteries to last a season and sense the soil conditions 4 or 5
times a day and transmit once or twice a day with a antenna on a light half
inch PVC pipe supporting an antenna that would go through a combine or any
other machinery with out damaging if some one forgot to pull one up at
harvest.

With today technology the cost of components would be about $200 USD. per
unit. I don't know what it would cost to do the design and implantation. It
depends on who does it.

There are defiantly people thinking about it.

Gordon

Gordon Couger writes

There is work being done that will do just that. It is probably possible to
do it right now. The difficult part is the soil moisture sensor.

In the UK, this isn't really a problem. All soils reach field capacity
at some time during the winter (or in jim's case are permanently there).
After that it's merely a matter of monitoring transpiration and knowing
how much deficit you can get away with.

--
Oz
This post is worth absolutely nothing and is probably fallacious.
Note: soon (maybe already) only posts via despammed.com will be accepted.

Gordon Couger writes
"Oz" wrote in message
...
Gordon Couger writes

http://www.weihenstephan.de/pbpz/leach/leachen.html
Here is one for Bavaria, Germany the temperature and humidity should not
require too much extrapolation.

Hardly. Bavaria is continental and significantly affected by local
mountain ranges.

The model should work. Temperatures and humidity are in the same ball park.

!!!!

Not at all. Bavaria has *summer* and can grow varieties of maize that
wouldn't even reach tassling in the UK.

Heck, france grows varieties of maize that we can't grow here.

--
Oz
This post is worth absolutely nothing and is probably fallacious.
Note: soon (maybe already) only posts via despammed.com will be accepted.

Gordon Couger writes

The more I learn about the EU and UK the more baffled I am by the way they
do things. You sit on an island and twice in the last century your food
supply was nearly cut off by the Germans and you don't consider agriculture
important to support a minimal research effort.

This is so. That's because 99% of the population are more than 3
generations away from any farming activity. I am, for example. Food is
what you buy in a supermarket, and it's always overflowing with produce.

And always will, right?

In this country baring a
volcanic eruption that distorts the climate for 2 or 3 years or a drought of
biblical magnitude we have no problems with food security and we put a petty
high value on agriculture research and cut the farmer a lot more slack than
he really disserves.

Maybe. Sounds like nirvana to me.

--
Oz
This post is worth absolutely nothing and is probably fallacious.
Note: soon (maybe already) only posts via despammed.com will be accepted.

"Jim Webster" wrote in message
...

Gordon Couger wrote in message
...




What do the fellows that you have hired to do agricultural
research do
anyway.

Gordon

very little. Most agricultural research relevant to dairy farming in
UK
is done in Ireland and New Zealand.
Funding for research in UK determines what the research is. UK
government doesn't care so the universities get funding where they
can.

Same here. Are the universities replacing retiring faculty?


honestly don't know. Staff in agricultural colleges are worried as the
courses change towards golf and equestrian. I suspect that we have so
few universities that do agriculture (Reading, Newcastle, Wye,
Nottingham, Bangor are the ones that spring to mind but I haven't looked
at a prospectus for a generation) that they can fund themselves with
foriegn research. I know Reading used to take an awful lot of students
from Africa and the commonwealth.

Our hydrology department was nearly half Chinese grad students once.

Gordon.

Thanks
Gordon
"Michael Percy" wrote in message
...
Gordon Couger wrote:

With today technology the cost of components would be about $200 USD.
per unit. I don't know what it would cost to do the design and
implantation. It depends on who does it.

There are defiantly people thinking about it.

If you are interested in soil water sensing, perhaps you would like to
join the Soil Water Content Sensors and Measurement mailing list
http://www.sowacs.com/subscribe/

It is not a high volume list, but good for contacts and info.

Mike
--
On the eighth day God installed Microsoft. On the ninth day he cursed it.
That is how that goddamned operative system was created.

"Michael Percy" wrote in message
...
Gordon Couger wrote:

That report gives me an idea or the scale of irrigating in the UK.
200,000 hectares ..

Well, considering the scope of the report, it definitely should!

That paper is a nice over view of the situation. There is very little
in it that would be of practical value to some one putting in an
irrigation system.

Well, considering the scope of the report, it definitely shouldn't!

The guys I used to work wiht at Oklahoma State have
a good deal more that can help with decisions but the extension people
on the Texas high plains and the High Plains Water District can tell
you every thing you need to know in an hour if know the questions to
ask if you don't they can walk you though anything you need to know.
They are used to working with crop share landlords that just inherited
an irrigated farm and don't understand the way it works.

He certainly looked like he could need some help, lol, when he stood
there, blessed with the chance of his lifetime.... what he had been
wishing for: to manage a 10" perfect irrigation source freely delivered
to otherwise rainless fields. That way he would be producing massive
yields and with never a worry, he said....

and he should get away with that without a waterbudget, of course.

This is SO very reasonable, because he never made waterbudgets before and
they are foreign to uk anyway and the data is not quite right and the ag
researchers in uk are sleeeping and there is not much irrigate done in
england and yadayadayadayada. Christ!

Why should you expect research on specially irrigation when your government
won't support basic agricultural research at third world level?

Gordon

"Oz" wrote in message
...

This is so. That's because 99% of the population are more than 3
generations away from any farming activity. I am, for example. Food is
what you buy in a supermarket, and it's always overflowing with produce.

And always will, right?

That's the way it is here too, and in most countries with any economy. That
doesn't excuse the lack of forethought on the part of the government.

M