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Re: Research ideas



>In a message dated 12/6/96 7:47:09 PM, judd@scr.siemens.com (Stephen Judd)
>wrote:
>
><<Here is the most important first question:
>If ALL the seeds could be killed, what would that save the farmer
>per hectare in the following season? (i.e. How much will he pay
>to have a solution?)
>If 90% could be killed, what would he pay?

I may have the details wrong, but Oregon is the source of much of
the world's grass seed.  The harvest has to be very pure, with only
a small number of weed seeds in the product (for obvious reasons).

The farmers used to burn the fields after the seeds and straw were
removed to kill all plants and seeds, then immediately till and replant
with next year's crop.  The burning caused smog and poor road visibility,
leading to one horrific zillion-car crash on Interstate 5, and now
most of the burning is done with tractor-pulled wide-swath propane
torches.

Once the new grass is established, sheep are kept on the fields until
summer, when the grass is allowed to head up for the harvest.

I'm not sure of all the niggling details, but it strikes me as a
very sensible way of going about things.  Using flames instead of
herbicides means that any runoff you'd get after harvest would be
of soot, not weird chemicals (and the harvest is in the dry season,
anyway).  The fields are not left bare over the winter.  Another
crop (sheep) is run right on top of the growing crop.  And the
resulting grass seed is very pure.

I don't know the costs per acre for flaming, but I know it is not
a trivial expense.  But perhaps the most significant feature is that
the ground is replanted with a dense stand of SOMETHING immediately
after harvest, preventing erosion and denying weeds an opportunity
to become established.  I have yet to see a book on agriculture that
doesn't go out of its way to praise cover crops as the lynchpin
of sensible farming.

	-- Robert
-- 
Robert Plamondon, President/Managing Editor, High-Tech Technical Writing, Inc. 
36475 Norton Creek Road * Blodgett * Oregon * 97326
robert@plamondon.com * (541) 453-5841 * Fax: (541) 453-4139



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