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Ronald Lee Cartwright (1946-2025)

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Ronald Lee Cartwright (1946-2025) At the age of 79, Ronald Lee Cartwright passed away peacefully on June 16, 2025. Ronald was born in Williston on April 1 st of 1946 as the third child into a growing farm family of Alva and Myrtle Cartwright outside of Dagmar, Montana.   Growing up as a farm kid suited the young lad perfectly.   The joy of accomplishment a boy experiences in executing daily chores, successfully raising livestock, plus managing land for hay, pasture and crops gave Ronald confidence to tackle almost anything in life.   Ronnie’s second passion came naturally as a young teenager in honing his skills as an athlete.   The stories were told numerous times of playing baseball in the family sheep pasture with his siblings and neighbor kids, as well as trying to beat his older brother in basketball in the loft of the family barn - supposedly Ron was winning one of these contests, but John terminated the game early due to the winter cold naturally deflatin...
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Daylight Savings Time History

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  Most of us know the basics around Daylight Saving Time (DST), and the fact that it started in the WWI era as a method to save energy since more natural light would be available for evening work and after work activities in the summer months.    On this 106 th  year of DST implementation in the USA, we will take the opportunity to review a few facts and figures related to DST: Benjamin Franklin in the mid to late 1700’s was one of the first people to come up with the idea to reset clocks in the summer months to conserve energy.    However, many others are also noted with thinking of the concept as well Germany was the first country in the world to implement DST.    It was during the early parts of WWI (May 1916), and many European countries soon followed The official date of US Congress’ implementation of DST occurred on March 9, 1918 Today, only 40% of the world’s countries observe DST.    For countries closer to the equator, daily sun...
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2023 ReturN-OS spring grain Performance by PivotBio

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Hybrid Wheat - What's taking so long??

  Hybrid Spring Wheat to hit the Northern Plains Syngenta has announced their intentions to release hybrid spring wheat in our region.    The target is somewhere between 5,000 to 7,000 commercial acres for 2023 planting.    Bayer, BASF and Corteva are also working on the venture to bring hybrid spring wheat to North American farmers and plan to have hybrid releases available for sale at some point during the next 10 years. Now most newsletter authors would probably just stop there, but since I have a well-educated audience, the question will inevitably arise, “why has hybrid corn been around since the 1930’s and we are just now getting hybrid wheat - almost a full century later in history?”    Well, let’s have a little fun by diving into the challenges of making hybrid wheat and how it’s vastly different than breeding hybrid corn – I promise to try and keep it simple and concise! Hybrid wheat will differ from conventional wheat with the pollination or ...
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Leap Year

Obviously, in the year 2024 we had the fortune of another day added to the yearly calendar in February.    Leap Year is obviously due to the fact that the number of earth’s daily revolutions does not fit evenly into the time frame the planet takes to fully orbit the sun.    We all know that there are 365 days in the year, but to be exact it’s somewhere around 365.2425… days as the gravity of the moon continually influences the earth's daily rotation and yearly orbit durations. Therefore, once every four years, we add an extra day to the Julian calendar to make up for the remainder.    If the extra day had not been added every four years over the past 2000 years, we would currently be between 16 and 17 months ahead on the calendar and needless to say our agricultural and seasonal rhythms would be out of sync. Even under the current system, an extra day every four years creates an over-allowance of approximately 0.03124 days or 45 minutes per four years. ...
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Spring and Autumn Equinox

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This Sunday, we have the first official day of Autumn 2024.  Here are some interesting facts and figures around the autumn equinox: * Although we designate an entire day for the equinox, the instance will occur at the exact same moment of time for every location on earth.  For an autumn equinox, that time will be the moment the sun crosses the celestial equator – the imaginary line above the equator – from north to south      * For September 2024, the autumn equinox moment will occur at 7:43am CDT on Sunday the 22nd      * The exact date and time of the equinox will vary from year to year since the earth’s yearly orbit is not complete in a whole number of days, but rather in a fraction of whole days (365.24).  The fall equinox will occur between September 21  and 24   depending on the various time zones across the planet.      * A September 21 st  equinox can be rare for North America.  The last equinox on S...
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Falling Numbers and Vomitoxin - '24 Spring Wheat

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  Well, the last time we had significant widespread issues with grain quality in the Northern Plains was during the harvest of 2019.  While the falling numbers (FN) values for this year’s 2024 wheat crop are most likely better on average, the vomitoxin is more of a concern in places for 2024 than it was in 2019.  Therefore, we should take the time to review why FN numbers and vomitoxin are important, as well as discuss how to accurately blend various lots of FN grain to enhance value for the seller and end user. The FN measurement is actually an indirect analysis of the alpha-amylase activity.  Wheat grain with high alpha-amylase activity (a low FN value), will have quicker starch degradation resulting in more of a clear and watery bread dough mixture that will not produce a quality loaf during baking - see diagram picture below.  The measurement is actually done in seconds - the time it takes a stirrer to fall through the bread dough mixture - ...
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