The University of Guelph is on the hunt for a new winter wheat breeder following a major announcement this week. Grain Farmers of Ontario, SeCan and the university have partnered to create a new tenure-track position to focus on the crop, Ontario's third largest acreage crop after corn and soy. In this interview, Bern Tobin,... Read More
Category: Crop Production
Rust in cereals, and especially stripe rust, is a disease that it can be easy to allow to drop off the radar. After all, the spores are carried by wind and may not reach your growing region in time to really cause an issue. What's more, decent varietal resistance exists for many races of rust,... Read More
To say it was a tough winter is perhaps an understatement. High feed costs, cold weather and the dollar at par or better weighed on the cattle market well into the spring. Add the misery of more stringent COOL requirements, and there have been some grumpy faces in the cattle market these days. Brian Perillat,... Read More
A cool start delayed corn planting in the U.S., so much so that there's a rumoured 78 million acres of soybeans in the ground down south. A late start means the critical pollination period of the crop — a huge factor in determining yield — into the typically hot weeks of late July. While the... Read More
This spring I listened in on the Saskatchewan Ministry of Agriculture’s Alfalfa Weevil Webinar. I assume I’m not the only farmer out there who had little knowledge of the alfalfa weevil before the webinar, let alone any idea of how much of a problem it is becoming. Let’s just say that if you have yet... Read More
To say that big machinery gets noticed at a farm show is understating that fact just a little. It seems each company is trying to out-do each other every year. While it may not have been their intention, the SprayFlex sprayer dwarfed just about every other piece of equipment at Canada's Farm Progress Show. With... Read More
Farmers and analysts alike will be watching Friday's USDA report for several reasons, and one of them will be the soybean acreage number. Poor planting weather in many corn-heavy U.S. states has many thinking the shift out of corn and into soybeans puts the total acres somewhere north of 77 million acres. If it's below... Read More
Pricing new crop is rarely a low-risk venture — the crop is a long way from made and there's a mountain of weather information, seeded acreage reports and variable demand to distill down into an opinion on price direction. It's exactly that type of distilling that Moe Agostino, with Farms.com Risk Management, does on a... Read More
It's that time of year where we transition from killing weeds to protecting our crops from diseases. Growing conditions across much of Western Canada have been good, with adequate moisture (to too much moisture!) and warm temperatures; this is excellent for the crops, but also creates a conducive environment for diseases to thrive. Scouting: As... Read More
Not only does the CX-6 Trident row unit have some flashy colours, but the product also made a real splash at Canada's Farm Progress Show and was awarded the people's choice award for innovation. The word "innovation" gets thrown around too often, it seems, but the row unit, developed by B.C.-based Clean Seed Capital Group,... Read More