Noxious Weed Seeds In Iowa Oats and Red Clover Samples

T The present study is based on the occurrence of noxious weed seeds in oat and red clover seed samples submitted to the seed laboratory by Iowa farmers for seed testing. Extension workers and farmers may find this information helpful in planning local weed control programs. It may also be of value to seedsmen and farmers who purchase local seed, but wish to avoid seed lots containing noxious weed seeds

Test Your Seed Before You Plant or Sell

If you\u27re selling seed, the Iowa Seed Law requires you to test. But a seed test is good business too for the farmer planting home-grown seed. Here\u27s information on tests and costs and on sampling and mailing instructions

Depth of Planting Soybean Seed

Research shows there\u27s good reason to plant all soybeans no deeper than 2 inches. But with some varieities, planting depth is even more critical. All the answers aren\u27t known, but findings so far provide farmers with good guidelines for planting

A comparison of methods and blowers for the purity analysis of Kentucky Bluegrass seed

Three methods for conducting purity analysis of Kentucky bluegrass seed were compared. They were: (1) hand method-preliminary separation made with a blower and the final differentiation of questionable florets by hand, (2) standard method-separation with a blower using the same pure seed criteria as for the hand method and (3) climax method-separation with a blower at a level which gives the maximum pure live seed percentage. Three blowers (the Ottawa, Erickson and Ames) were included in the study. Four laboratories cooperated in the investigation. Variations within laboratories were compared; variations between laboratories were not considered

Make Sure Your Seed is Best by Test

The cost of a seed test is small compared with your investments in land preparation and harvest. Seed tests are required by law if you sell seed. But it\u27s also important to know what to expect when you plant home-grown seed

Good Seed Costs You Less

It\u27s the field performance of the seed you plant that counts, and the field performance of high-quality seed is definitely superior to that of low-quality seed. This article shows why good seed costs you less

Factors relating to the uptake of interventions for smoking cessation amongst pregnant women: a systematic review and qualitative synthesis

Introduction The review had the aim of investigating factors enabling or discouraging the uptake of smoking cessation services by pregnant women smokers. Methods The literature was searched for papers relating to the delivery of services to pregnant or recently pregnant women who smoke. No restrictions were placed on study design. A qualitative synthesis strategy was adopted to analyse the included papers. Results Analysis and synthesis of the 23 included papers suggested ten aspects of service delivery that may have an influence on the uptake of interventions. These were: whether or not the subject of smoking is broached by a health professional; the content of advice and information provided; the manner of communication; having service protocols; follow-up discussion; staff confidence in their skills; the impact of time and resource constraints; staff perceptions of ineffectiveness; differences between professionals; and obstacles to accessing interventions. Discussion The findings suggest variation in practice between services and different professional groups, in particular regarding the recommendation of quitting smoking versus cutting down, but also in regard to procedural aspects such as recording status and repeat advice giving. These differences offer the potential for a pregnant woman to receive contradicting advice. The review suggests a need for greater training in this area and the greater use of protocols, with evidence of a perception of ineffectiveness/pessimism towards intervention amongst some service providers

Lawn Seed or Grass Seed- Which Do You Buy?

Only about a third of the lawn seed and grass seed mixtures offered for sale for lawn seeding purposes last year in nine of the state\u27s larger cities were suitable for establishing even-textured, fine-leaved lawns

A Robust Classification of Galaxy Spectra: Dealing with Noisy and Incomplete Data

Over the next few years new spectroscopic surveys (from the optical surveys of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and the 2 degree Field survey through to space-based ultraviolet satellites such as GALEX) will provide the opportunity and challenge of understanding how galaxies of different spectral type evolve with redshift. Techniques have been developed to classify galaxies based on their continuum and line spectra. Some of the most promising of these have used the Karhunen and Loeve transform (or Principal Component Analysis) to separate galaxies into distinct classes. Their limitation has been that they assume that the spectral coverage and quality of the spectra are constant for all galaxies within a given sample. In this paper we develop a general formalism that accounts for the missing data within the observed spectra (such as the removal of sky lines or the effect of sampling different intrinsic rest wavelength ranges due to the redshift of a galaxy). We demonstrate that by correcting for these gaps we can recover an almost redshift independent classification scheme. From this classification we can derive an optimal interpolation that reconstructs the underlying galaxy spectral energy distributions in the regions of missing data. This provides a simple and effective mechanism for building galaxy spectral energy distributions directly from data that may be noisy, incomplete or drawn from a number of different sources.Comment: 20 pages, 8 figures. Accepted for publication in A

Oat Yields Depend on Seed Quality, Too!

Cost of the seed itself is a minor part of the cost of producing a crop. Once planted, it costs just as much to produce and harvest a poor crop as a good one. It\u27s part of good management to start with high-quality seed