- Author: Michelle Leinfelder-Miles
In early June 2019, I visited some contiguous garbanzo bean fields in southern San Joaquin County, at the request of the grower. The grower observed that plants were yellowing and dying (Fig. 1) and wondered what might be causing the problem. The grower did not figure that he would be able to do anything about the problem in this year's crop, but he was thinking ahead for future cropping. He doesn't have reliable water at this site, so his cropping options (i.e. rotation options) are limited. He would consider growing garbanzos in these fields again next year unless diagnostics revealed a disease problem.
My observations of the field were that there were patches of several...
- Author: Michelle Leinfelder-Miles
- Author: Brenna J. Aegerter
We are getting prepared for our second year of a three-year project evaluating a warm-season legume cover crop between winter small grain crops. We are conducting the trial in a commercial field on Staten Island in the Delta. We are comparing soil health characteristics, greenhouse gas emissions, and grain yields between the cover crop treatment and the standard dry fallow. While cover cropping, particularly in the warm-season, is not a typical management practice in the annual crop rotations of the Delta, it is a management practice identified in the Healthy Soils Program of the California Department of Food and Agriculture as having the potential to improve soil...
- Author: Michelle Leinfelder-Miles
- Author: Daniel H Putnam
- Author: Rachael Freeman Long
A question came to me from a crop consultant. His alfalfa grower asked him how he could increase crude protein (CP) in his alfalfa. The buyer of the alfalfa, for the most part, is happy with the hay. For example, the buyer is happy with the total digestible nutrients (TDN), but he would like to see a little higher CP. The consultant said that the grower is generally on a 28-day cutting cycle and is generally cutting the hay pre-bloom. He wondered if nitrogen (N) fertilizer would help to improve CP.
The best way to improve CP is to: 1) cut early, 2) choose a more dormant variety (but give up yield), and 3) manage the harvest to retain the leaf fraction. Since this grower is already cutting pre-bloom, and since...
