More farm talk.

I'm thinking about the corn crop on my farm this coming growing season and came across the Corn Suitability Rating (CSR) concept for valuing agricultural land based on its potential to produce cash crops like corn.

It was developed in Iowa to rate each type of soil for its potential row crop productivity. Corn Suitability Ratings are based on soil properties, average weather, and the inherent potential of each kind of soil for corn production, so are considered more reliable estimates of the crop value of land than average crop yields because the yields are affected over time by new diseases, insects, and weeds.

This led me to find the Web Soil Survey Database online. With a little bit of patience, (and your dial-up would be too slow, Randy), you too can look up the composition of the soil where you live. The information isn't for just agricultural areas, because here are the soil types represented on my land here in the mountains:

-- Cypher-​Ratake families complex, 5 to 40 % slopes
-- Typic Haplustolls-​Cathedral family-​Rock outcrop complex, 40 to 150 % slopes
​-- Bullwark-​Catamount families-​Rock outcrop complex, 40 to 150 % slopes
-- ​Pachic Argiustolls-​Aquic Argiudolls complex, 0 to 15 % slopes
Landforms: Stream terraces, Alluvial flats, drainageways (in other words, it's along a river in a floodplain)

For contrast, here is farmland:
Colby loam, 1 to 3 % slopes
Colombo clay loam, 0 to 5 % slopes
Haverson loam, 0 to 5 % slopes
Nunn clay loam, 0 to 5 % slopes
Wiley-Colby complex, 0 to 5 % slopes

The only name I recognize is "Nunn" because there is a small town in eastern Colorado by that name. It'd be interesting to know where the rest of the names like Haverson and Argiustolls/Argiudollscame from.

By the way, this is a photo of the 'typic argiustolls:'



But what I find so interesting, and this is what I want you to take away from this: look at these big words that soil scientists have to learn, and they have nothing to do with those geological periods like Jurassic and Paleozoic, it's a whole different area of study from geology. Soil may have started out as rocks, but there is a lot more to it than that.

By the way, it's snowing here tonight, probably 2 to 4 inches by tomorrow morning. We needed this to lessen the fire danger, and the farmers are dancing in their fields.