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New Technology Set to Create Higher Crop Yields and More Resilient Plants

By Mary Ryan Howarth

New research done on the plant hormone, salicylic acid, demonstrates how it can improve disease resistance in plants and help tolerate external stressors like extreme temperatures and rapidly changing weather.

Salicylic acid has been used before to repel pests and various pathogens that cause disease, but is known to create issues in crop growth. However this new method separates growth reduction from the defense response in salicylic acid, where the plant can grow and withstand external factors.

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Learning to Wrench From Dad the Hard Way

Video: Learning to Wrench From Dad the Hard Way



Harvest is a week out and the farm picked this week to fall apart. The truck needs a battery, the barn curtain's got a problem, and the corn and beans are telling us we're out of time to get it all fixed.

So it's a full day of wrenching. Tork supervises while I get the truck back running, then we're out at the hog barn where one rusted up part has the whole curtain system hung up. Ladder work, cable work, and a little dad-and-son disagreement about the right way to do it. We close it out walking the fields, shelling beans and checking corn, because whether everything's fixed or not, harvest starts when harvest starts.

Chapters: 00:00 Everything breaks the week before harvest 01:00 Tork supervises while I fix the truck 12:30 Out to the barn to find the curtain problem 14:30 One rusty part hung up the whole curtain 20:00 Running the curtain cable from the ladder 24:00 Walking the beans and corn before harvest 26:30 Wrapping up

We're a 6th generation family farm in southeast Iowa showing the real ups and downs of pig farming and row crop farming. No script, just the work. Subscribe and follow along.

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