Beans in the high teens?

A rather rare soybean field in Buffalo County, Nebraska

On Monday, I was driving from Des Moines to visit my family's farm in Nebraska. I jumped off I-80 just west of Grand Island and took the backroads northwest through the Platte River valley and then into the hills of Buffalo County.

At one point, buzzing down a gravel road, I had a strange feeling. I realized I had been driving through wall-to-wall corn on both sides of the road for a long stretch. I looked down at the odometer and started to measure. Went about six miles before I spotted something besides corn--a smallish bean field, like a punctuation mark, then back to corn.

On our little plot in Buffalo County, we planted all beans this year, though. That's them in the photo above, looking pretty good on a 98-degree day. When I walked up the hill there to look at the pivot, all you could see was corn, except for our dryland patch of beans across the road.

I realize Nebraska farmers grow a lot of continous corn, but they know how to grow beans, too. Go big red, the state has the second highest average soybean yield in the U.S, tied with Indiana, a half bushel behind Iowa. So, man, where have all the soybeans gone, long time passing?

USDA reported this month that farmers planted the fewest acres of beans this spring since 1994. Nationally, soybean production declined 15%, versus a 19% jump for corn. Soybean acres fell by more than a million acres from last year in Indiana, Minnesota, and Nebraska, USDA said.

Anyway, this image of a corn-covered landscape stuck in my head for the whole trip back and forth to Nebraska. And, every day I keep thinking this volatile grain market wants to say more and more about soybean prices.

Okay, so I'll just get to the point. Our markets editor, Mike McGinnis, dropped by the office today, leaned in the doorway, and shot me a sly grin. A little birdie, who prefers to go unnamed, told him that beans could go to $18 at some point in the next sometime, Mike said. The little birdie is a well-known markets analyst.

I'll not go into all the bean numbers here. A lot smarter people than me do that every day 0n our Web site markets pages. But, you can just see the drama with your own eyes in one certain part of Nebraska. Beans ain't competing this year.

Ron and Susan Mortensen in their Agriculture Online column last week, on a much more conservative note than our little birdie, put it this way: "The basic fact for soybeans is that they must do much better in 2008 in the fight for acres.... Price must do a better job of attracting soybean acres...."

Would $18 get the job done?

Search for your health's sake

Farmers have special health issues, which is why rural health long has had frontline coverage in Successful Farming magazine and on Agriculture Online. And it's one reason why our editors were pleased to learn that Meredith Corporation, the owner of SF and AGOL (and a passel of other media products) has acquired Healia (www.healia.com), a health information search engine.

Healia is a new tool designed to help consumers and health professionals find the "highest quality and most personally relevant search results," Meredith said in a statement about the acquisition.

Healia differs from Google and other general search engines. It uses what it calls a Quality Index Score, which helps glean the best health information from the Web. Healia enables you to personalize findings with "personal search" filters. These can include your gender, age, and race. The engine uses "advanced semantic technology" to improve the effectiveness of the search.

In some experimenting with the site, I searched for info on use of a newer medication for high blood pressure. One of the features allowed me to sort the findings by "dosage," "uses," and "side effects." Each Healia listing included a description of the "attributes" of the source, including whether it's basic or advanced reading, whether it's professional information, and if it is from an HONCode Site.

Comparing Healia and Google searches on the same keyword for the blood pressure medication, I saw some differences. Google turned up about 409,000 results, while Healia with its more focused search gleaned 923 listings. The top three listings on Google were from the manufacturer of the drug; on Healia it was a Federal Drug Administration source, WebMD, and a drug information database called Druglib.com. Two others of Google's top ten listings were from the same source, Drugs.com, and two were from FDA. Healia's top sources were more varied, and included a drug encyclopedia, the Mayo Clinic, and a pharmacists' organization.

The result of my little experiment is that I know a great deal more about treating high blood pressure with this particular drug. Both Google and Healia led me to a mix of credible sources. But in the end, I felt that Healia worked harder, sorting and labelling information in a more creative way.

Anyway, next time you need to research a health issue, check out Healia and the Rural Health section of Agriculture Online.

Farming with an iPhone

Reviews of Apple's new iPhone have been mixed, and the devices are pretty pricey, but I still want one. Its integration of a phone, iPod, Web browser, e-mail, camera, photo organizer and everything else reminds me of the same kind of innovation that accompanied the invention of the graphical Web browser, and we know what that's meant to the world of agriculture.

If you're wanting to window shop, the "guided tour" of the device on the Apple Web site shows off a device that appears to be intuitive and fun to use. I can see farmers having a smart new tool here for keeping in touch with the world, and entertaining themselves, while out in the field and barn.

After the bugs are worked out of the thing, I have a sense that comparing iPhone type of technology to what came before is going to be like tractors to horses.

Cost is an issue for many consumers, according to a poll on News.com, in which nearly 20% of respondents say they will wait to buy one when the devices drop to under $200. $200?

A farmer posting on Agriculture Online agrees on the price issue: "600 bucks is a lot of benjamins to be dropping in the manure or oil bucket," he says.

Yeah, the iPhone is a bit expensive. But, for a farm tool that's a Swiss Army knife of communication? Anyway, I still want one.