It's late September and Peter Johnson, cereal specialist with the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs, can't understand why a harvested pea field is bare. "This (pea field) is the ultimate place to plant wheat...this should have been planted two weeks ago!" Johnson adds that research proves planting winter wheat early results in... Read More
Category: Agronomy
With a challenging harvest underway, it's probably not be a high priority, but now could be the time to lock in prices for some of next year's nitrogen fertilizer. Lower crop prices will place an extra emphasis on managing input costs for the 2015 crop, notes Mike Jubinville, president and senior analyst with ProFarmer Canada,... Read More
A cool, wet summer has left many Ontario soybean fields with some level of white mould infection. The fuzzy white stem rot could be seen in patches across many fields by late summer, sometimes causing large areas of loss in a field. A key element of controlling or avoiding this disease is understanding how it... Read More
In the world of precision agriculture, the CX-6 Smart Seeder from Clean Seed Capital Group stands alone in its ability to customize the rates at which seed and fertilizer are applied to each row in a field. The CX-6 can meter up to six different products right above each row opener, explains Colin Rosengren, vice-president... Read More
For the lucky soybean growers who still have maturing and not frosted soybeans on their hands, this post on pre-harvest management of the crop is for you! (And for you farmers in the east stung by the September frost, we're sorry, and maybe keep all this info in mind for next year.) There are solid... Read More
With all the excitement about the use of unmanned aerial vehicles in agriculture, it’s important to understand the reliability of information collected by UAVs. Can we trust their accuracy to make farm management decisions? Beyond that, could UAV data tell us something before we see it on the ground? Researchers in North Dakota are evaluating... Read More
Last Friday's frost over much of eastern and central Ontario has knocked back the corn crop, and has left the soybeans looking rough. Top pods are worst hit, as is to be expected, which could mean overall yields won't be as impacted as feared, depending on how deep into the canopy the frost penetrated. The... Read More
With the increasing push to use more cover crops in Ontario, particularly red clover in winter wheat, producers are looking for tillage options for managing the cover crop stand. The tillage demonstration at Canada’s Outdoor Farm Show last week focused on conservation tillage options for red clover, as outlined by independent agronomist Pat Lynch in... Read More
The Ontario corn crop's "slow stagger to maturity" wasn't helped any last night by an early frost. Lows of -2 degrees C and colder were reported across a large swath of eastern Ontario this morning, though official temps and final area impacted by the frost has yet to be released. (See map below from Weather... Read More
We bring you "This Week on Real Ag" for September 18th, as Kelvin Heppner recaps some of the bigger ag stories from the past seven days. This week's podcast includes updates on harvest, railway and government relations, grain markets and COOL, as well as some dialogue about A&W's new egg marketing campaign. Oh and of... Read More