DDC_AgMag_Winter 2023

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WINTER 2023

HarvestingSoybeans HIGH OLEIC VARIETIES

with Chris Gould

A Publication of

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DeKalb County

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EL NIÑO

Could mean warmer winter for Midwest

HARVESTING SOYBEANS

Chris Gould on growing high oleic varieties

HO-KA TURKEY

Family ends long-time turkey operation

ROOTWORM

Pressure rises in Northern Illinois

NIU PROJECT

Focuses on climate impact

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DeKalb County

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Could mean warmer winter for Midwest

By Jeannine Otto • AgriNews Publications

N

orthern Illinois and the entire Midwest could be facing a warmer, drier winter, thanks to a patch of warm water near the equator.

But there is no need for snow lovers to panic — or for summer lovers to break out the patio furniture.

Victor Gensini, associate professor of meteorology at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, said that even though the El Niño weather pattern could influence winter toward a warmer trend, snow and cold still will make an appearance.

“Are we going to have cold spells? You bet. Are we going to have snow and cold shots of air from Canada? Absolutely,” he said.

El Niño, also known as ENSO, or El Niño Southern Oscillation, is a climate pattern due to warmer waters in the equatorial Pacific Ocean, off the coasts of Ecuador and Peru. Those warmer waters influence the jet stream over North America.

“The reason we look at ENSO and this El Niño, when you have an El Niño, your jet streams typically go on steroids. When you have a lot of warm water there, you get a lot of thunderstorm activity,” Gensini said.

“That thunderstorm activity juices up the jet stream and you get a very strong, fast, subtropical jet stream, in the northern hemisphere.”

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The U.S. Midwest plunged straight into what Gensini described as a strong El Niño, from three years of La Niña, in which the waters of the equatorial Pacific Ocean are colder than normal.

He said that while El Niño may get the headlines, other factors influence winter weather across the Midwest and in northern Illinois.

In the Midwest, La Niña winters tend to bring more snow and colder temperatures.

El Niño winters in the Midwest tend to bring more moisture and temperatures that trend warmer.

“There are other things that can happen. It’s not just El Niño. El Niño is kind of the loudest instrument in the orchestra, but it’s only one of the instruments in the orchestra,” he said.

Victor Gensini, Associate Professor of Meteorology at Northern Illinois University

The last strong El Niño was in 2016, and before that, the winter of 1997-1998 was the last strong El Niño winter.

“When we have El Niños, we typically get a little more mild here in the Midwest. Mild can mean a few things. It can mean warmer, with less snow, but you still get the same amount of precipitation, just more of it falls as liquid instead of solid. You get more rain instead of snow. That is the biggest thing for our area,” Gensini said.

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Gensini said that forecasters use El Niño and weather records from El Niño years to get a general picture of what the winter ahead may be.

“Even though we are in an El Niño and we would expect a warmer winter, not every single El Niño in the database did produce mild conditions. It’s just that a vast majority of them do,” he said.

“If you were wanting to know what this winter would look like across the Midwest, you would err on the side of a more mild winter, just based on the historical precedent.”

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n 2023 HARVESTING SEASON n

Harvesting Soybeans High Oleic Varieties

By Martha Blum • AgriNews Publications

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hris Gould started harvest combining his Plenish beans and is pleased with the results for the first time he has grown the high oleic soybean variety.

“We finished our Plenish beans about three hours ago and that was our first 450 acres,” said Gould, who grows corn, soybeans and wheat with his wife, Dana.

There are several features of the John Deere 780 combine that Chris Gould really likes, including the PowerCast, which has an improved residue spread.

“This field two years ago did 80 bushels, but we’re not going to make that this year,” the Maple Park farmer said. “I think they had some white mold, and where you see the patches of black plants, those beans were dead before they filled the pods.”

The actual production history for this field is about 75 bushels, Gould said.

“They were planted first and they were the shortest season, so I’m not surprised they were ready to go first,” he said. “They were mid70s (bushels per acre), and knowing what I saw from mid-May to June 24, I’m very happy with that yield.”

“But part of that is when we had hogs this field was in a four-year rotation of corn, corn, beans and wheat, so it was out of beans for four years,” he said. “Now it is a corn-bean rotation, so the pressure of white mold and other stuff starts building.”

Gould has two combines running to harvest soybeans.

Moisture of the beans was at 13%.

“We traded a John Deere 680 for this 780 and we thought we got it just barely in the nick of time, but it turns out we had two weeks to work on it because the beans didn’t want to get ready,” Gould said.

“I rather they be too wet than too dry because we can dry them in the bin,” the farmer said. “Thirteen percent is perfect, but probably on a day like this they’ll be at 11% by the end of the day.”

“We did some personalization on the combine by adding tool boxes, cross auger clutches and YieldSense,” he said. “This combine is a big improvement from what we had for technology and creature comforts.”

Gould has two Brent grain carts with tracks.

The PowerCast is one of the features that Gould really likes.

“Look at the residue spread compared to the other combine,” he said. “I tell the combine the first time which way the wind is from and it automatically flips at the end to account for the wind.”

This is even more important for no-till fields.

“The residue can screw up your nitrogen program for the young corn plants,” Gould said.

For the first field of commodity beans, yields were below expectations.

“The scale indicator is very handy, especially for two combines, because I can’t keep track of what he’s putting in,” he said. “If I save one overweight ticket, that feature is paid for.”

Tracks on the grain carts are another feature that is important to Gould.

“I love the tracks on the carts — I think I would like tracks on everything,” he said. “When we went to a 32-row planter and 16-row corn head, that corn head is really heavy, although the footprint on this combine with singles is much bigger than the duals on the other combine.”

Although Gould typically doesn’t have responsibilities as the District 1 director for the Illinois Corn Growers Association during

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Last year, Chris Gould bought an All-Wheel Steer head mover. “It is awesome because it trails perfectly which makes it possible to pull behind the combine,” he says. the harvest season, he took some time on Oct. 9 to go to the CHS grain elevator near Maple Park during a special event organized

by Illinois Farm Families, which represents all of the commodities across the state.

Illinois Farm Families and Casey’s partnered to celebrate National Pizza Month with a pizza giveaway at five grain elevators in Illinois.

“We handed out 96 pizzas for the ‘We are the 96%’ campaign,” Gould said.

The campaign salutes farm families who own and operate 96% of all farms in Illinois.

The next event for IL Corn will be the group’s annual meeting during the week of Thanksgiving.

“That is usually not a problem with harvest, but this year I’m not so sure,” the director said. “But with reasonable weather we’ll be done.”

Gould uses different fall tillage methods based on the crop rotation and fertilizer needs of the field.

“If it’s beans going to corn or corn going to beans, we hit it with a high-speed disk to get some of the residue buried,” he said. “If it’s bean ground that needs fertilizer, we’ll strip-till it and the corn-oncorn fields get disk chiseled.”

However, all of those decisions can be trumped if Gould decides to no-till the field.

“I’m doing a lot more no-till next year because when we were planting this spring there is a sensor that goes in the seed trench that detects soil temperature among other things,” Gould said.

“There were several cases where the tilled ground was colder

Chris Gould tightens the straps on the head mover in preparation to travel to the next soybean field on his farm in Maple Park, Illinois.

He started harvest this year on Sept. 30, about a week behind most years. than the untilled ground and that surprised me,” he said. “Half the reason we’re doing tillage is to get the ground dried up and warmed up faster, but if it is warmer under the residue blanket then we should leave the blanket on.”

For the last few years, Gould has tried to hit fields with the highspeed disk in the fall and then do nothing in the spring for tillage.

“But it’s not smooth enough to plant, although it’s an ideal seedbed because the soil is mellow and moist,” Gould said.

“The field we just finished looks perfect — I could plant it now,” he said. “So, maybe I won’t do anything in the spring, but we’ll have to see.”

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Family ends long-time turkey operation

By Martha Blum • AgriNews Publications

T

he Kauffman family has been raising and selling turkeys for 90 years, but the family started the farming operation many years prior to that near Waterman.

“We’ve had turkeys since 1933, but this has been the family farm since my greatgrandfather came here when he mustered out after the Civil War in the late 1800s,” said Robert Kauffman, owner of Kauffman Turkey Farms. “This is the original 120-acre tract with the original farmhouse.”

Kauffman’s dad received a full scholastic scholarship to attend the University of Illinois, where he studied agriculture and graduated with honors.

“They wanted him to stay and become a professor, but he said he was going home to farm,” Kauffman said.

While in college, W. Howard Kauffman wrote a paper about the possibility of making money raising turkeys.

“He started his first flock in 1933 with 300 birds, and at that time, it wasn’t uncommon to lose half the flock,” Kauffman said. “I think turkeys are one of the more difficult farm animals to raise, but they make money.”

The Kauffmans dressed the turkeys at their farm.

“I think they dressed them in the basement of the house and then he would put the turkeys in the back of a Model T and drive into the city,” Kauffman said. “I’m assuming he went to Fulton Street, and he would tell me if he got a good price, he would buy a bottle of whiskey and a bag of cream drops.”

The turkey farm continued to grow in size and incorporated during the 1940s.

“He was well on his way to being as big as Tyson, but then they had a patch of really bad luck in the late ‘60s with low prices and disease,” Kauffman said.

“Also, he had farmed here for so long the corn had drawn the selenium out of the soil, so there was no selenium in the feed ration and the turkeys started dying,” he said. “He wanted to add selenium to the ration, but he was not allowed to because somebody thought it was a carcinogen, but years later they allowed selenium and apologized.”

HO-KA Turkey Farms worked with area farmers to raise some of the turkeys.

“When I grew up, my father was extremely successful and at one point he had a quarter of a million turkeys,” Kauffman said.

“He owned 20 acres by Route 23 and it was a two-day haul to walk them back to the farm for processing.”

At that time, the turkeys were Bronze with black feathers.

“Bronze was considered the good eating turkey and then the breeders produced a turkey that was white which was a mutation,” Kauffman said. “They started breeding that turkey until they got them all white and they made sure the flesh was white with no blemishes.”

“I also think that helped with the heat in the summer, but it was more about the appearance of the flesh,” he said. “So, the turkeys’ underlying genetics is Bronze.”

A lot of people were breeding turkeys and W. Howard Kauffman was getting turkeys from California until that farm went bankrupt. In the 1960s, he started a breeding operation and hired a farm manager to do that work.

The breeding operation was located two miles from the home farm.

“We had hens and studs, and when you milked a tom, you had to use the semen immediately,” Kauffman said. “I understand they can store it longer now.”

Robert Kauffman also studied at the U of I, initially in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

“I wasn’t sure what I was going to do and I didn’t like it,” he said. “I took an ag econ class and I loved it, so I transferred to the College of Ag and decided I really liked working on the turkey farm.”

In 1978, W. Howard Kauffman died while cruising on the Queen Elizabeth.

“After I graduated from college, I came back to the farm in 1982,” Kauffman said.

“The ‘80s were the golden era for poultry — prices went up because everybody wanted to eat healthy.”

The turkey poults arrive at the Waterman farm when they are one day old.

“They are shipped by trucks that are very expensive pieces of equipment because they must have continuous air movement, they must keep the oxygen levels up and they have to be warm or cool,” Kauffman said. “They get the turkeys here as fast as

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they can and everything has to be ready — buildings clean, prepped and warm.”

When the poults arrive, the farmer must do everything a mother hen would do.

“We keep the house at 85 degrees and under the brooder stove it could be up to 105 degrees,” Kauffman said. “A ring is placed around it and they stay inside the ring for a week and then we take the rings out and the turkeys get the whole house.”

flock and teach them to kill, so I’ve lost as many as 200 turkeys in a night.”

The turkeys are grown to 10 pounds and up and then dressed in a federally inspected plant on the farm.

“Some people want 30-pound turkeys so we make sure we’ve got a few of those and the biggest turkey we sold was 50 pounds,” Kauffman said. “I really like the 18-pound hens.”

At five weeks of age, the turkeys are ready for range.

In addition to the store located on the farm, HO-KA turkeys and products are sold mainly in the Chicagoland area to butchers, “That can either be going outside to a wheat independent grocers and small chains, field that we’ve harvested or moved to a including Sunset Foods. building,” Kauffman said.

“My father established a relationship with “It is more stressful outside because of Sunset Foods in 1937, when they had three weather and predators,” the farmer said. stores and now they have five stores,” Kauffman said. “They have a store in “Turkeys have excellent eyesight so they can Highland Park and turkey is very popular in see birds or planes flying over and they have the Jewish community.” a warning call sound that they make,” he said. “Then they all huddle together and that In addition to whole turkeys, the farm sells can be stressful.” many other products, including breasts, thighs, wings, drumsticks, bratwurst, The turkeys can also be visited by coyotes, breakfast sausage, Cajun sausage, chorizo hawks and owls. sausage and breast meat pie.

“I don’t worry about hawks and owls too much because they’ll take a bird,” Kauffman said. “Coyotes are problematic because a female will bring the cubs with her to the

“We bought a grinder in the ‘80s to make ground turkey because we couldn’t move thighs,” Kauffman said. “Boy, did the ground turkey sell and we’ve put thousands of tons

through that grinder.”

In recent years the family farm has been raising about 60,000 turkeys annually, but that ended this year when Kauffman made the decision to retire from the turkey business.

“It’s getting harder to do this and probably the deciding factor was I couldn’t get liability insurance,” he said. “My father dressed turkeys until he passed and I didn’t want to do that.”

Not having any turkeys on the farm this year after nine decades has been really interesting, Kauffman said.

“But it has been nice to not have to plant crops or worry about the weather,” he said.

Although there are no fresh turkeys available for sale, Kauffman is selling his remaining stock of frozen products.

“We are hoping to be sold out of everything just before Thanksgiving,” he said.

An auction will be held Dec. 1-2 at the family farm to sell farm equipment on the first day and the turkey processing equipment the following day.

For more information about Kauffman Turkey Farms, go to www.hokaturkeys.com, or call 815-264-3470.

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Rootworm pressure rises in Northern Illinois

By Jeannine Otto • AgriNews Publications

E

ven as harvest wraps up throughout northern Illinois, farmers already have their thoughts turned to spring planting.

That includes the management of pests, from insects to weeds, that can harm corn crops and cut yields. One of those pests that have made a comeback is the corn rootworm.

Northern and western corn rootworms have plagued corn growers throughout the Corn Belt. But the introduction of the Bt corn hybrids helped reduce rootworm populations.

But in recent years a variety of factors has contributed to the corn rootworm making a comeback in the Corn Belt.

“It certainly is increasing in northern Illinois and in DeKalb County,” said Nick Seiter, a field crops entomologist with University of Illinois Extension.

As the name describes, the corn rootworm feeds on corn roots, and in northern Illinois, there are a lot of corn roots to be found during the growing season.

“The biggest contributor to that is the relative lack of crop rotation compared to central and southern Illinois. When you look at those areas of the state, they are traditionally more heavily rotated than the northern part of the state,” said Jim Donnelly, DEKALB Asgrow technical agronomist for northern Illinois.

“Productivity is good in northern Illinois and that aids corn. Livestock usage is another big part of that. People just like to grow corn up here and that is a big portion of it. That naturally keeps the rootworm populations higher.”

Environmental factors play a role in rootworm populations. Dry springs tend to favor the survival of large numbers of rootworm larvae in the soil, where cold, wet springs can drown those larvae, reducing the numbers of adult beetles.

In recent years, a major factor in the resurgence of corn rootworms is resistance to existing traits.

“We launched a couple of new traits, SmartStax PRO and VT4PRO, so brand new modes of action for rootworm, which we haven’t had in a while,” Donnelly said.

“We haven’t really had a brand new mode of action for Bt rootworm control in quite some time, and over that span of time, efficacy has waned a little bit in terms of controlling rootworm with the Bt traits.”

Fields that are not in a corn-soybean rotation tend to present the biggest challenges for growers in controlling corn rootworm.

“In Illinois, we’ve gone back to the scenario where the vast majority of our rootworm problems are in continuous corn,” Seiter said.

Jim Donnelly

“We haven’t seen a lot of impact from rotation resistance in recent years. Most of our problem areas and problem fields are areas where we have a lot of continuous corn.”

In 2022 and 2023, major seed companies, including Bayer and Corteva, announced the introduction of varieties with the RNAi and Cry3Bb1 and Bt technologies to combat corn rootworm.

But even with new seed technologies, Seiter cautioned that those technologies need to be managed to keep them effective for the long term.

“One thing to keep in mind with that RNAi trait, it’s going to be more effective than SmartStax in scenarios where you have a resistant population, like a population that’s resistant to Bt. But keep in mind that those trait packages have the same Bt proteins in them that SmartStax does, they just have an additional RNAi trait,” he said.

“It’s a tool to be used, certainly, but a tool to be used judiciously. It’s something that, if we’re not careful, we could really run through that in a hurry if we throw it into situations where you have a really highly resistant rootworm population.”

Seiter said that while lodging at the end of a season can indicate issues below ground, by the time lodging occurs, the rootworms have become established.

“By the time you see lodging at the end of the season, you are actually several years into a problem at that point. It’s just that it’s big enough that you can see it above ground,” he said.

“I always encourage farmers to dig up a few roots from every control technology that

Nick Seiter they are using and see what is happening in terms of pruning, in terms of larval injury to those roots. If you want to catch this problem early, you really need to be looking below ground at the roots.”

Donnelly said crop rotation remains the biggest management tool that growers can use to control rootworm populations.

“The things that we promote are, No. 1 is crop rotation and, really, No. 2, 3, 4 and 5 are crop rotation. That is the easiest thing you can do to reduce your issues for next year and reduce your numbers long term,” he said.

Donnelly agreed with Seiter’s caution on using and managing the new seed technologies carefully.

“Nothing is going to cause resistance issues faster than repeated use of the same trait with the same crop, year after year. It’s getting to the point where some of the older traits aren’t working either so rotating to some of the older traits isn’t really going to help you at all,” Donnelly said.

“It’s more about utilizing the new traits, but rotating to soybeans or wheat. It really is about using a comprehensive approach and not just relying on one mode of action.”

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NIU project focuses on climate impact

By Jeannine Otto • AgriNews Publications

A

two-year research project at Northern Illinois University is taking a deep dive — and a big listen — into farming and the impacts of climate change on farming in northern Illinois.

“At the end of the day, agriculture is one of the most sensitive economies to weather and climate and here, especially in northern Illinois, but across the Corn Belt,” said Victor Gensini, associate professor of meteorology at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb.

impacts of climate change on a field-byfield basis.

“The major driving force of why this project was selected is we are generating some very novel high-resolution models for the future of perils at field scale. Those types of projections don’t exist currently,” Gensini said.

A major part of the funding for the project is being used to develop those models.

communication between researchers who are focusing on weather and climate and those who are actually out there, putting the seed in the ground and harvesting the crops. Those are two completely different camps that generally don’t talk to one another,” Gensini said.

Gensini said that one aspect of the project will be talking to farmers themselves — when the time is right.

“We have presented a couple of times at the DeKalb County Farm Bureau.

We have some leads in terms of stakeholders who are putting us in touch with local farmers.”

A research project that will focus on communication with farmers and others in the ag industry and also develop high-resolution computer modeling of the impacts of climate change on any given farms and fields was selected to receive $660,000 in Community Project Funding as part of the passage of the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2022.

“

The funding for the program came through the office of former congressman Adam Kinzinger, a Republican who represented Illinois’ 16th District.

“We are one of the largest producers of corn and soybeans in the world. Small shifts in a potential future climate, of temperature or rainfall, would have pretty significant impacts on the growing season, the ability to sustain yields for particular crops. Changes in temperatures and precipitation also cause changes in pests that affect corn and soybeans,” Gensini said.

Gensini said the project is focusing on farming and impacts to farmers on a local level.

“We need to understand what is going on, what the potential for change is at the local level. That includes at your field. What is the potential for change in precipitation or temperatures?”

On a technology level, the project’s goal is to create modeling that can show the

We are asking some very basic questions right now. We are not orchestrating or trying to lead people down a path.

–Victor Genisini “We are generating these very highresolution simulations so we can better answer the question — what does climate change look like for my field at this specific address? Those are the questions we will be able to ask and answer because we have that very high-resolution information,” Gensini said.

Another outcome of the project will be the development of best practices documents that outline how farmers receive weather and climate information and how scientists can best offer education and information on weather and climate.

“How can we educate them on the future potential changes tin weather and climate?

How to engage and how to speak the same language as one another is something we are learning right now,” Gensini said.

That part of the project is aimed at improving communication between scientists and farmers.

“We want to create a conduit, a pipeline of

“

Gensini and Walker Ashley, an atmospheric scientist and disaster geographer in the NIU Department of Earth, Atmosphere and Environment, developed the project, “Understanding and Mitigating Future Weather and Climate Risks to American Agriculture.”

The reach of those conversations extends beyond row crops, like corn and soybeans.

“We are talking to local farmers, not just family farms, but folks who are doing much larger, commercial-scale farming and people who are doing non-traditional farming, folks who have done traditional farming, but who are now doing orchards,” Gensini said.

“We are asking some very basic questions right now. We are not orchestrating or trying to lead people down a path,” Gensini said.

“We want to know what they know and how they know what they know. Where do they receive that information? How do they make decisions based on weather and climate information? That is going to allow us insight into their thought process.”

Gensini said those questions include asking whether farmers trust the concept of climate change.

“There are people in this district, constituents, farmers, who do understand climate change. They see it impacting their yields on a year-to-year basis and the ability to run their operations,” he said.

“I think that is especially true with family farms, the farms that are going to be passed down generation to generation and farming is in their blood. They realize that these longer-term time horizons and the changes in these variables is going to affect maybe not this year’s yields or next year’s yields, but certainly the yields of their children.”

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