With harvest getting underway or very near in many parts of the prairies it is an exciting time for many farmers and industry individuals. Even though the most important information — yield — will be in your hands soon, there is still a lot of other pieces of data that you can learn from the... Read More
Category: Agronomy
After harvest is a great time to get out and scout soil conditions and start planning soil management passes for the fall and spring. One of the tillage questions that often comes up at field days is depth settings on implements, like a soil ripper. The answer to how deep you need to go is... Read More
There's a lot you can learn from late season scouting of canola. Not only is this prime insect feeding time, it's also when disease development reaches its peak. Prematurely ripened areas in a field should be a giant red flag to any farmer or agronomist. What are you looking for? It could be sclerotinia, blackleg,... Read More
It's mid-August and if you're not already swathing or combining winter wheat, you're checking canola fields daily for insect feeding or seed colour change. First off, high fives all around, because that's what you should be doing now — insects like lygus bug and bertha armyworm can be causing serious damage this time of year.... Read More
The summer of 2013 is turning out to be nothing like the last two years, which may prove problematic for several first-time soybean growers in the province. While 2013 soybean acres likely did not hit the massive 1.3 million mark once estimated, there are likely about a million acres of the nitrogen-fixing crop out in... Read More
The canola crop across Western Canada can be summed up in one word: variable. Ranging from full flower to swathed, the bulk of the crop is creeping through maturity after several weeks of cool summer temperatures. As a late summer push of warm weather descends, farmers need to be vigilant in protecting the turning crop... Read More
Choosing nozzles, comparing spray patterns and carefully setting water volume are all ways to improve the efficacy of products applied in-crop. Add to this GPS-equipped sprayers and variable rate application programs, and spraying can be one precise business. Until you reach the end of the field or spray zone and nozzles continue to spray even... Read More
Herbicide spray drift gets all the attention, and for good reason — the impacts are visual and nearly immediate. Does that mean drift doesn't occur with other products? Absolutely not. It also doesn't mean it's OK to skip steps to minimize drift of fungicides or insecticides. The reasons for doing so are financial, agronomic, environmental... Read More
Perhaps the only thing more irritating than a plugged run at seeding is a blocked nozzle at spraying. While proper sprayer maintenance can help decrease the incidence of plugged or broken nozzles, nozzle monitoring systems are a great way to instantly know whether you're over or under applying product. At this year's Farm Progress Show,... Read More
In a perfect world, all canola fields would have uniform maturity and one large, heavily podded main stem, making swath timing decisions easy peasy. The reality, of course, is that emergence problems, hail events and heat stress can all cause maturity variability, excessive branching or yield-heavy secondary stems that need to be included in the... Read More