Thanks for posting this!
Detasseling season has begun, so I was out until 11:30 last night.
I read this article over the radio to everyone that was out working. I also texted this article to my friends that are also in the Ag business.
We were all laughing our asses off at this article.
It's funny to see the utter bullshit that gets spread around my industry sometimes.
Unless you had a forward-thinking plan for the last several years preparing for these lean times, no one's making any money in farming this year on the producer side.
If the allegations are absolutely true (I have some SERIOUS doubts), then the problem lies with the seed salesman and distributor, not the Stein Corporation. The Stein Corporation is being sued because they are the people with the most money in this story.
The logistical costs involved with trying to separate good seed from bad, and trying to make sure that only black people got this bad seed makes this a ridiculous notion in and of itself.
This paragraph right here betrayed the truth of the matter:
"why is it then that white farmers are buying Stine seed and their yield is 60, 70, 80, and 100 bushels of soybeans and black farmers who are using the exact same equipment with the exact same land, all of a sudden, your seeds are coming up 5, 6, and 7 bushels?"
There's another reason that a crop can yield horribly despite its seed quality, it's rainfall, or pestilence.
Soil quality. In that area of the country they've been farming the same soil for almost 150 year. Everything your crop needs you will have to put into the soil yourself before you plant. If a farmer fails to do so that's referred to as "mining the soil", taking nutrients out of the soil without replacing them afterwards.
I suspect that the farmers who are suing the Stein Corporation all applied anhydrous ammonia to their fields for the last several years. I suspect from years and years of anhydrous ammonia use, there soil is now so hard that they have a difficult time putting a disc in the ground.
We have a farmer in my county that does this exact practice, my brother and I drive by and laugh at his field every few weeks. He's applied so much anhydrous ammonia to his fields, that the only way that he can knife in more anhydrous, is to actually turn on his pivot. He has to water his bare soil just to soften it up enough to knife more anhydrous into his soil. His beans on that field look like absolute dog shit this year, and he's applied 6 inches of irrigation water trying to get his crop up. Anhydrous ammonia is a cheap source of nitrogen, but it kills all biological life in your soil. This means that you have no microbes that can break down micronutrients and make them more available for your plant.
My grandfather always said "You make you money off your creepy crawlies in the soil".
