Farmers tend to get itchy in the spring and fall when it comes to tillage. Some joke about needless recreational tillage that just occupies a farm's boredom. Below is acute video addressing the serious disease called "restless tillage syndrome." Enjoy and happy harvest!!! If you cannot see the above embedded video, CLICK HERE
Category: Agronomy
The canola crop is ripening at an incredible pace — should you wait and straight cut or try and swath ASAP? How fast is too fast to combine canola, in either scenario? These are questions that come up every year, but the trade-off between swathing and straight-cutting are especially important this year as the canola... Read More
If you're still seeding wheat by "about two bushels per acre", it's time to revisit your seeding strategy. Not only does the old bushels per acre rule-of-thumb not take into account a targeted plant population (the cornerstone of the crop year), it also ignores seed lot differences of size and weight. While varieties may perform... Read More
Pulse crops are prime targets for harvest dry-down applications, if only because of their indeterminate growth. Add in some less-than-stellar weed control at times, and a desiccant or pre-harvest application of glyphosate can be a great harvest management tool. There are a few things to keep in mind, however, in order to maintain top yield... Read More
Air seeders can be tough on seed — the amount of air needed to push seed and fertilizer all the way to the openers can be tough to get just right, and, to avoid plugs or bridging, can sometimes run a little high, causing seed to bounce out of the furrow. Dutch Industries has developed... Read More
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
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