What you won't hear about the connection between acid rain and farming.

As soon as you think you have things "figured out" with growing a certain crop, a new thing pops up. This year, it was striped leaves.

Looks cool, doesn't it? Looks are deceiving, let me tell you.

Before you start getting all goofy on me, this is NOT a GMO/franken-food thing. Remember what assuming does? Makes an a** out of 'u' and 'me' (assume=ass-u-me).

Anyway, these stripes are a sign of a nutrient deficiency, similar to how nail chipping can be a sign of nutrient deficiency in people. We know the culprit is sulfur, which we've discovered through research (i.e. conferring with agronomists and googling credible resources) and tissue/soil sampling (we go out in the field to collect soil and a bunch of leaves and put them in separate bags and taken them to a nearby lab).

The cool thing about it is why sulfur is becoming a deficiency in the soil now.

Wait, are you getting goofy on me again, assuming it's because of our terrible farming practices? Don't assume...

It's actually because our country is doing better at not polluting the air as much. Remember "acid rain" that we all learned about and how terrible it is? The acid rain was caused by too much sulfur dioxide in the atmosphere, and is bad for lots of things. However, it was actually good for the soil and plants, within reason. Did you know that the goals of the regulations to clean up acid rain were met in 2007, which was three years ahead of schedule? I didn't, although I was out of the country for half of that year...

Back to our striped corn. Now that emissions have been "cleaned up," the soil isn't "naturally" getting sulfur anymore. So now we apply it in a regulated manner. Contrary to what some might think about farmers "dousing" their fields with different things, we're quite frugal by nature (as I think most farmers are). We only want to apply what will be used by the plant and therefore turn into cost benefit. We don't like waste.

Good thing for us is that we had a couple isolated areas with this deficiency last year. So we planned to include sulfur in the fertilizer program this year. The reason we had some striping is that the plant's roots hadn't reached granule yet. About a week after the above photo was taken, the leaves turned a nice dark green.

So cheers to the air being cleaner!