Observations all along the line - Kimball & the Southern Panhandle First

Articles written by Mark Watson


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  • No Till Notes

    Mark Watson, Columnist|Jan 10, 2013

    There are several educational meetings scheduled for January and February, 2013 that producers in our area should plan to attend. I’ve been going to no till crop production meetings for over 20 years and I have always felt that attending as many of these meetings as possible has always been time well spent. These educational meetings are a great way to meet and visit with other producers about their no till crop production practices. These meetings always include speakers that cover a variety of topics on soil health, economics, crop p...

  • No Till Notes

    Mark Watson, Columnist|Jan 3, 2013

    As 2012 winds down I thought a little reflecting back would be a good thing to do. Sometimes it helps to look back on your successes that you were a part of over the past year and take a hard look at your failures to keep you humble and to continue the never ending learning process. Continuing education is important in every business and agriculture is no exception. I feel it is very important to be flexible in your decision making and embrace the changes that are inevitable. Mother Nature really threw agriculture a nasty curve this past year.... Full story

  • No Till Notes

    Mark Watson, Columnist|Dec 27, 2012

    I hope everyone is able to spend the holidays with friends and family spreading good cheer throughout our region. We have the results of our cover crop biomass sampling back and the cover crops performed about like we thought they would. I think we could justify the cost of planting the cover crops with the benefits we’ll see from producing them, but I do have some concerns with producing cover crops. Our sampling from the cover crop field showed some interesting results. We sampled a square yard of the field that we felt was pretty c...

  • No Till Notes

    Mark Watson, Columnist|Dec 20, 2012

    In the past couple of articles I’ve talked about how we have added diversity into our cropping rotations to diversify markets and improve soil health. We have added field peas into our dry land cropping rotation which has allowed us to diversify our herbicide rotations, improve and diversify our soil microbial populations, and add a legume in our crop rotation for nitrogen fixation. Our crop rotation is now winter wheat, followed by corn, then field peas and back to winter wheat. I also talked about the possibility of adding forages as part of...

  • No Till Notes

    Mark Watson, Columnist|Dec 13, 2012

    My trip to Pierre, South Dakota went well considering the wintery conditions I drove through on my way there. We had a couple of inches of snow here in Alliance and as I drove north through the Hay Springs and Rushville area they had significant snow on the ground, six to eight inches. Fortunately the wind wasn’t blowing so the roads were in good shape. The band of snow lasted until just north of Martin, S.D. It was good to see some old friends at the Ag Horizons conference. I hadn’t attended this conference for a few years and after vis...