A farmer's weed philosophy

Charlie Johnson of Johnson Farms has thoughts on crop rotation and weed control. We operate an organic, large scale grain operation. We grow corn and alfalfa. We farm about 2500 acres total, 1600 of which is in tillable for row crops. We've been certified organic since the early 1980s. We control and farm it in general. It's an ongoing process. There's no such thing as a weed free farm. With our rotation, we divide our tillable acres up into about six equal portions, which means there's about 300 acres in each part of that six year rotation. We grow alfalfa hay for two years and then after that we go into row crops for three years. What I really like about our rotation is, is that roughly half of our ground is always in what we call cover crop. We've known, especially with the emphasis on alfalfa in our rotation and it's a perennial and it's a some other crop is that we pretty much eliminated Canada Thistle as being a weed pressure on our farm. And so that's been helpful. But the one way that we tend to still tackle yet on an annual basis is the annual FOXTAIL. We don't base our cropping or planning decisions based on organic corns bringing more this year or wheat or some other commodity. We let common sense and agronomy drive our decisions and not necessarily the market. Speaker1: Just wanted to share with you a farmer's philosophy which appears to be working pretty well for Mr. Johnson.