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
Category: Crop Production
Saving time on seeder and planter fills can translate to covering a good chunk of more acres in a day, plus there's the added bonus of fewer man hours needed per day, if you can get your planting set up just right. Meridian Industries' 1050 Seed Tender is one piece of equipment that was designed... 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
If you've been watching U.S. corn and soy acreage estimates closely, Monday's production and acreage downsizing of the soybean crop may not come as a surprise. In fact, many farmers and analysts were scratching their heads at earlier figures given the poor growing conditions and late start both crops had. Still, when the USDA numbers... 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
Even if you were never the type to peek at your Christmas gifts early, there are few farmers who can help themselves from trying to get a bead on the corn crop coming. Luckily, assessing corn cob development is a useful task at this point in the growing season, as it offers up not only... Read More