Gardening in July

The garden is full of weeds, but we have had buckets of beets, beans, carrots, tomatoes, and the pumpkins are basketball sized. We have been invaded by squash bugs and borers though. We had to spray because almost every plant had egg masses. We lost some sections of the patch, but they seem to be recovering somewhat. Next year we will have to try something to get rid of them or avoid them early. Any ideas? Has anyone heard anything about how to get rid of squash bugs?

My paper is in press

Applying quantile regression to analysis of AFIS cotton fiber distribution

by

Brian W. Gardunia, Chris Braden, Eric Hequet, and C. Wayne Smith


Varying fiber length distributions of cotton, Gossypium hirsutum L., impacts its spinning performance. Advanced Fiber Information System (AFIS) facilitates the analysis of the length distribution of individual fibers in cotton. Quantile regression is a variant of standard regression with which conditional quantile values can be calculated by minimizing weighted sums of absolute deviations across the entire distribution. Quantile regression was used to analyze AFIS fiber length distribution among five genotypes of upland cotton grown at the Texas Agricultural Experiment Station Research Farm near College Station, TX during 2001 and 2002. The shape of the distribution of ‘CAMD-E’, a short-staple variety, was actually similar to ‘Acala 1517-99’, a long staple variety with good spinning quality, even though CAMD-E had consistently lower fiber lengths. ‘FM 832’, and ‘TAM 94L-25’ had similar mean fiber lengths to Acala 1517-99, but their distribution shape was less skewed. ‘TTU 202’ had high cross entropy values, but little difference was detected in distribution shape by quantile regression. Year had a significant impact on distribution of fiber lengths, affecting distribution scale and location, which may be due to lower fiber fineness and maturity in 2001. Quantile regression was found to be an effective method for analyzing AFIS fiber length distributions, although further testing with a larger set of genotypes and environments with spinning data is needed.

Abbreviations: AFIS, Advanced Fiber Information System • HVI, high volume instruments • IFC, immature fiber content • Ln, length by number • Lw, length by weight • MAT, fiber maturity • UQLw, upper quartile length by weight

http://crop.scijournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/48/4/1328

Emily's Baptism

I can't believe Emily and I are old enough for her to be baptized, but it is true. She was baptized on her 8th birthday on July 8, 2008.


It was a great day. One of the best of my life, certainly the best baptismal service I have ever been to. I don't really remember much of my own baptism, except that my dad was mad because I forgot to bring a second set of underpants and had to sit on a towel in the car. The spirit was so strong at Emily's. I had to baptize her three times though because she kept going all stiff. The last time I had to hold her down deep to get her toes and head to be under at the same time.

Canoeing the Sugar Creek

Matt, my friend from work, is in charge of the Friends of Sugar Creek association. They organized a canoe trip and we went along.



Aleah is there too, she crouched down behind Emily holding on to the gunwhale. She was a little freaked out the whole time and wouldn't let go or relax, although she did fall asleep, whiteknuckled and kneeling in the water.



We saw a bald eagles nest with two juvenile bald eagles. We looked for fossils and shells along the sandbar during lunch. Just a nice stressfree trip.



I have a strip of sunburn on each knee though because I put sunscreen on while standing up, but sitting in the boat my shorts rode up some. Aleah has a little strip on her back where the sun hit while she was hunkered down.

Pictures thanks to Matt.

Pictures up finally

I finally wrestled with the dial-up at home enough to load some pictures. Here are some other ones Emily took that I just had to post.

Crazy summer thunderstorms

A storm blew in after lunch today with strong winds, hail, and near an inch in rain in just a few minutes. It looked like a hurricane out of my office window with the rain coming almost parallel to the ground and then dime sized hail. It was dark enough that it looked like night. The lightning was a flashing strobe light. Cars pulled over and stopped because visibility was too low to drive. And then as soon as it came, it was over. The last few minutes were eerie because the rain was still coming down but the sun was coming out in the west.

The corn looks a little ragged, but I hope it will grow out of it.

Leila says at our house 5 miles away it was just a light shower.

Crazy Indiana weather.

A month!

A month has gone by in an instant!

At first I delayed updating this because quite honestly I liked the pictures that were up. This is my homepage on my work computer and so I left it sitting there like a screensaver almost.

Then, time seemed to speed up and now a month is eaten up and I don't know where it went. I really don't seem to have done much but age.

Emily, Leila and I each took pictures of the garden and I will put them up when I get home. It is growing almost as fast as the weeds. We have lucked out again with bugs so far (cross your fingers, knock on wood, spit spit).



Emily has her own little flower garden.



We planted way too many beets because I got the seed packets mixed up and thought I was planting spinach but it was more and more beets.


(My beet pictures didn't upload, so here are some strawberries)

lettuces,



broccoli,



and pumpkins!





Leila wanted to have a u-pick pumpkin patch at our house and we have started this year thanks to the Svedin's that loaned us their rotatiller. We were able to till up a large patch and have planted 10 different kinds of pumpkins. I didn't get my Indian corn patch planted, but next year the plan is to have more pumpkins, the indian corn, and some food for animals: alfalfa, turnips, sorghum. We hope to get it all planted this fall in winter rye or a new early variety of hairy vetch. Then we will plant into the winter crop and use it as a mulch to reduce our weeding in the spring.

Indiana Primaries

I know the primaries are over here and the presidential candidates are all glad to be out of Indiana but it was exciting to be in the midst of the hoopla. Leila and I went to Hillary Clinton's speech here in Lafayette, but we missed out on rollerskating with Barack Obama.





I haven't been a big fan of Hillary Clinton, that's her in pink holding a microphone, but she gave a great speech. It was the first time I had listened to a whole speech from any of the candidates. The worst thing about our ad driven 24 hour soundbite news coverage is you never here the whole thing, just "Hillary said 'gas-tax' and now our paid commentator will tell you what he thinks." (Do you ever notice that she is usually called Hillary, Barack is Barack or Obama, but John McCain is never John?)

I think all three candidates are better than Kerry vs. Bush. I remember watching Barack Obama speak at the democratic national convention and thinking Wow - that guy should run for president. I don't know that any of them can fix Iraq. John McCain sounds like he will scale it up. Obama and Clinton want out. I think we need some serious help to make it better before we leave, but we've got to help improve things there.

I hope that John (McCain) will come here also so I get the chance to hear him speak also. But now that Indiana's 15 minutes are over, it will be doubtful.

Pets

This is our new dog - Sam. He is no coon killer, in fact the coons got past him and killed two chickens while he was tied up right outside. He didn't even bark. But, he will fetch anything you throw - yesterday he brought me back the brick I threw at a raccoon. He is also super gentle around the girls, especially Aleah. Aleah spends hours a day with him while she picks flowers - lots of purple ones in honor of her new hero - Daphne from Scooby Doo.



We played vet this last week also. Sam had parasites - tapeworms. Ugh. Leila got him some regular worm medicine as well as tapeworm medicine. We forced him to eat the worm medicine with some treats and the tapeworm medicine I dissolved in a can of tunafish. National, the cat went missing and came back dehydrated and half starved. She wouldn't eat or drink for 6 days. Leila went next door and Kim, the vet, showed Leila how to put in an IV and gave us worm medicine and a bag of saline.



She has pulled through and is back eating and seems OK. Weird. We don't know what was wrong or why she got better.

Shrooms

Mushrooms are a big deal in Indiana. Morels bloom in the early spring and last until the dandelions set seed in May. There is a mystique to how to find them, where they are, and what to do with them once you find them. Every patch of woods has cars parked outside it with salivating mushroom hunters. They are a little bit like hobbits in that way. Whenever they talk about their mushrooming adventures I think about Farmer Maggot and Frodo. Last Friday it was too wet to plant corn so we took a little break and went looking through the bit of woods on the farm for mushrooms.





We found some yellow morels! They look soft and spongey, but are firmer than they look. They were growing around the base of a dead elm. Tara and Doug Cook promised if we found any that they would cook them for us. Oh, they were good. So good. The hollandaise sauce, apple smoked bacon, onions and asparagus helped. As did the rosemary chicken, wild rice cakes, peach pie, and mint ice tea.

It's been a wierd week

First, I was helping the girls get ready for bed and we found a tick in Emily's hair! It was attached to the crown of her head and swollen. I found another crawling around the kitchen. I think the cats must be carriers. I hate ticks. We pulled it out and then burned it.

Then, Wednesday night Leila and I were watching Battlestar Galactica when we looked out the window and there were five bright white lights in the eastern sky that moved in an arc across the sky. They were close together and as they moved the last one in the line winked out and another appeared on the other side. There were no blinking red or yellow lights and it didn't move like an airplane. The next day on the news they said that a lot of people had reported a UFO but not to worry it was a meteor bouncing off of the stratosphere. The day after that they said that it was fighter jets practicing maneuvers with flares. Either story sounds like a cover up from the X-files. That's right folks - UFOs!

Friday morning I awoke early ~5:30 and decided to get ready for work and be here early. When I got here Max says, "I guess it took an earthquake to get you here early." I had no idea but we had a 5.2 magnitude earthquake rumble through. It must have woken me up, but I didn't realize. I felt one of the aftershocks at work, but just a small tremor.

Saturday when we got up there were two lonely chickens wandering the yard. A raccoon or a possum got in during the night and slaughtered the rest. It was hard to ID the murderer from prints left in the blood, but I think that it was one of the two. I was so frustrated and mad that we went to the pound and brought home an 80 lb chocolate lab named Sam. Chica our stray dog that we took in ran away with a stray black lab a few weeks ago. Sam is a good dog for the kids, but he is not trustworthy around chickens. When I brought him home I fed the chickens that were left and he quickly lunged and grabbed one in his mouth. Not a bark, not a warning, just a bite, but on command he let it go and it lives, but is much more nervous than before. Oh, and it limps.

On a positive note we are going to try again with the chickens and leave them locked up with Sam tied up outside at night. We also have a good start on the garden. Hopefully we will have it all in by the first part of May and then we will start working ground for the pumpkin patch.

Does anyone else think that the economic stimulus plan is a bad idea?

The economic stimulus checks are coming to you and to me. In fact to everyone that filed a tax return. This is not a tax break. You get it even if you didn't actually pay any taxes. In fact I get more because I have three kids. Now more money is hard to say no to and I don't plan on sending it back.

But, how is this supposed to stimulate the economy? The economic woes we have are because we spend more money than we have. That is the core of the problem, not that we are short a thousand bucks. It is too easy to get credit. I get credit card applications that are preapproved every day and when we bought our house they told us that we could get a loan for over 200,000 with only pennies on the dollar down.

If I ran my personal finances this way it would be equivalent to taking out extra credit cards every time that my car broke down. I guess under a consumption economic model it is best if we all drive new cars, buy new houses, eat off of paper plates, drink bottled water, soda, and eat out every meal. Gee fun, but really expensive.

I think that the answer to our economic troubles is to change the consumer economy to a sustainable economy where consumption is balanced by production. I think we should be discussing how to get America out of debt and how to get consumers saving money not spending it. I think that increased federal debt is a bad idea by the same logic. Tax cuts during a time of war seemed just as bad of an idea. We need to live more frugally, spend less, use less, and produce more.

We are so rich, yet we don't ever have enough. We are consumption addicts and we need to stop. There is enough and to spare, but only if we are not resource gluttons.

Google April Fools 2008

Custom TIME - never have an email arrive late again!

Emily the bookworm

 

Emily read these three chapter books in one afternoon. She is a great reader, even flying through all of the Therefores and archaic language in the scriptures with relative ease.

Oh and she a slimey one too

 

Guess who is 6 months old?

 

Colleen has jumped suddenly from sleepy infant to a chubby, mobile, graham-cracker-eating, communicating-by-screeches-and-lunges, and machine-gun-laughing person. She can push herself around, at least backwards and turn herself around. She laughs like a machine gun - all gutteral and loud. And best of all for me she is a Daddy's girl!

Omnivores Dilemna - Part two

OK, I can't just let go.

I think about the issues of sustainability and the environment and agriculture a lot because of my job and our hobby farm.

I work at a seed company developing popcorn hybrids. I am directly involved with the industrial agriculture community. I find it is full of people that are trying hard to make a living but also make it in the best way they can. There are a lot of chemicals used - pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, and seed treatments. Mostly to prevent yield loss from pests, weeds, and diseases. We also grow some plots without most of the chemicals and it is such a difference. Weeds are the main problem. Controlling weeds without herbicides is a definite pain, with a lot of hand weeding, hoeing, and cultivating with the tractor it is doable, but difficult. It would sure be hard to farm 1000 acres that way.

I need more experience with organic production because my impression is that it is not feasible on a large scale and many of the rules are artificial. Their angry refusal to consider transgenic plants I also find hypocritical. They spray large amounts of Bt - bacillus thurigensis, but are opposed to transgenic Bt because it might be a health and environmental risk? I just don't get it. Morally you could say that it is because we don't want to mess with nature, but breeding already messes with nature.

At home we have a small acreage. I don't want to have 5 acres of grass to mow and so we have debated how to handle it. Last year we boarded some horses for our friends the Nef's. I think we may this year for a time also, but long term we would like it to be productive. This year our plan is to raise 25 chickens - a rooster, 12 brown egg layers, and 12 from the "Rainbow egg layers" - I am a sucker for reduced price mixes. We are also going to raise 3 pigs. Leila is going to have a huge pumpkin patch with 4 species and 6 varieties of pumpkin. We hope to have a U-pick pumpkin patch and plan to sell them for ~3 dollars each. We also have increased our garden patch and have started a small orchard.

That is our answer to the Omnivores Dilemna - we want to try a sustainable production at home. The question that still remains is whether we can pull it off. Chickens last year didn't go so great - we lost most to predators. Weeds are always a problem. We are going to try using the pigs to "rotatill" the plots for the pumpkins and we are going to spray herbicides.

Review of the "Omnivores Dilemna"

During my trip to South America I brought Michael Pollan's The Omnivores's Dilemna. It is supposed to be a moral meditation on food, agriculture, and the environment. The author investigates the origins and implications of four meals:

1. A McDonald's fast food meal
2. A homemade meal made entirely of organically grown ingredients
3. A small farmer pasture-fed meal of uber-organic ingredients from Polyface farms
4. A hunted-gathered meal from the "wilds" of California

The first part of the book exposes the industrial and factory origins of fast food and organic food alike. By far this is the best part of the book. He purchases a steer from a feed lot and goes to visit the feed lot as well as a disgruntled corn farmer.

Frankly, there is nothing appetizing about feed lots. The cows are crammed in together with little to no room and there is a "lagoon" of fermenting urine and manure to complete the odorous landscape. So much corn is grown in the U.S. to support this industry as well as the hog farms where they are just as crammed together in specialized barns with slatted floors so that the thousands of pounds of pig waste can flow into their huge lagoons prior to spreading on local fields. Chicken production is also just as industrialized. Workers have to wear special breathing apparati to go on the lower level and if the fans stop working the whole house full of chickens dies from the fermenting waste below them. So many animals are crammed together that the feed is doped with antibiotics and strict biocontrol measures are used to keep the herds healthy.

Organic farms have similar conditions, just organic certified feed and no antibiotics. In my opinion they are just as bad, although they try harder to be environmentally friendly.

Farms like POlyface remind me of my Aunt Sandra's place in Texas or the Amish family that I buy pork from. They have an integrated approach to agriculture that relies on pasture, rotation, a mix of species, and agressive management. They definitely seem like an idealic yeah even pastoral solution to the environmental problems posed by traditional agriculture.

The last section about the hunted gathered meal is just annoying because it seems like it is crescendoing to be some great solution, when to me it seems the least sustainable. How many of us own woods where there are wild boar and mushrooms? How much time was spent? How much environmental damage would there be for Los Angeles to decide they are all going to eat gourmet pork and mushrooms every day?

The problem though unrecognised by the Omnivores Dilemna is outlined in the first chapters. The average farm supports ~180 people. That means 179 people don't have to actually work growing their own food. It magically appears in the grocery store and the rest of us are free to be accountants, bank managers, computer programmers, and artists. The guy left on the farm is left with the ever daunting task to remain commercially viable. Food price increases rarely reach the farmer in the field and so the average farmer is forced to do whatever possible to increase yields and productivity. More acres are needed. Less time is available to spend moving cattle daily to new pastures. Cows need to be milked by the thousands every day. Mechanization, fertilization, specialization and industrialization of agriculture didn't happen because that is how the farmers wanted to do it. There is no conspiracy. They just wanted to survive.

Brazilian popcorn fields

Regularly people will ask me what is it that I do. When I tell them that I am a plant breeder, I usually get a blank look. When I tell them I am a geneticist at a popcorn company they just look confused, especially when my international trips come up. I go at least once a year to South America - Brazil and Argentina.



This is what I do: I look at the popcorn, that is really it. We have 50 hybrids that we test each year in South America and when we go we look at all the commercial hybrids to see what problems they may have in farmers fields. Then we look at the experimental hybrids to see how they compare for yield, pests, diseases, plant type. Then we talk about them with customers and collaborators to get their opinions about the new hybrids as well as needs in future hybrids.



It is a pretty great job, it's not rocket science, but it never stays the same. There is always a new disease and new problem. Keeping up in yield with the competition is a challenge as well as remembering pedigrees, relationships, and performance of all of the different hybrids and testing material each year.

 

Emily's mad