Category: Crop Production

For years, Tim Williams has dutifully planted crops to the edge of the trees and bush that line the fields he farms near Petrolia, Ont. Every year, he looks at his yield maps to see the same red line indicating no crop yield in these areas that hug the bush and woodlots. But today there... Read More

Spring 2019 was certainly a challenge for Ontario corn growers. With more than double the annual spring rainfall, many growers kept hoping the rain would stop and a planting window would emerge, but in many cases that opportunity didn't arrive until June. For Maizex agronomist Greg Stewart, it was the most delayed planting season he's... Read More

Bayer is removing two hybrids from the marketplace, after an extensive review of the performance of DEKALB DKTF 92 SC and DKTF 94 CR. Based on "inconsistent performance" in 2019, the company says that these two hybrids did "not meet Bayer's expectations." 2019 was the first year the two hybrids were in commercial production. Bayer's... Read More

It's been a week of wild weather: extreme cold in the west, and warm and very wet weather in the east. Understandably, overland flooding in Ontario has many farmers asking about the impact on the wheat crop. Peter Johnson has the answer you need in this week's Wheat Pete's Word. Johnson shares some of the... Read More

Corteva Agriscience, Bunge, Botaneco, and Protein Industries Canada have announced a canola breeding project worth more than $27 million. The canola hybrid program will be the first of its kind, as it is the first commercial breeding project explicitly focused on protein quality improvement of the oilseed. Higher protein canola meal will result in new,... Read More

The bulls and bears are fighting for dominance in this fresh calendar year — and there are some major factors at play weighing down some markets, but fuelling others. Wendy White, grain marketing manager with Viterra, says there's no shortage of news and reports feeding in to the grain markets. From last week's WASDE report,... Read More

In 2015, Willard Jack was gearing up to tackle herbicide resistant Canada fleabane on his Belzoni, Mississippi farm. Five years later, that weed is just an afterthought as Jack is fully engaged in a fight with a much tougher resistant weed "monster" — Palmer amaranth. At the SouthWest Agricultural Conference (SWAC) last week at Ridgetown,... Read More

The Canadian Wheat Research Coalition (CWRC) is pledging more than $9.6 million over the next five years to a core breeding agreement (CBA) with the University of Saskatchewan’s (USask) Crop Development Centre (CDC). The funding will go towards the development of spring wheat cultivars and provide expanded “core” support for the CDC’s wheat breeding programs,... Read More

Are Ontario cash crop growers making effective use of tissue testing to enhance yield and crop performance? The answer requires a little perspective says Jack Legg, agronomist with Guelph-based SGS Agri-food Laboratories. Tissue testing, which provides an accurate measurement of the nutrients within a plant at a given time, has traditionally been used to confirm... Read More

Grain markets ended the first full week of trading in 2020 mostly higher as the complex ignored some of the bearish data that the USDA presented in their monthly data dump, and instead, focused on the trade war deal expected to be signed by China and the U.S. next week. The main reason grain markets... Read More