BASF has completed the acquisition of Becker Underwood from Norwest Equity Partners, a U.S.-based private equity investment company, for a purchase price of US$1.02 billion, according to its press release. With the acquisition, BASF is now a global provider of technologies for biological seed treatment as well as seed treatment colorants and polymers. BASF has... Read More
Category: Crop Production
Welcome to what I hope will become part of your regular reading — The Bug Counter blog, here on RealAgriculture.com. As Insect Management Specialist with Alberta Agriculture and Rural Development my role is largely to count insects. Along with my technician, Shelley Barkley, and in-season help from summer students we have set out to create... Read More
Sometimes you just need more than germ and vigour seed testing. There are a variety of reasons why you may need a variety test, for example, or perhaps you need to know the parts per million of vomitoxin levels in fusarium damaged grain. Whatever the question or problem, there's a seed test for it. In... Read More
Do you know how many pounds per bushel of phosphorus and potassium corn pulls out of the soil? Nitrogen gets all the attention in crop production, but these two nutrients are also very important to corn production, and, in years of decent yields, the total pounds per acre of P and K drawn out of... Read More
Graze it. Use it as a cover crop. Use it instead of iron to break up hard pan. It would seem no matter what your cropping system, farmers in Western Canada could find a use for Tillage Radish. Nature's own plow, the massive tap root that the crop grows in a very short amount of... Read More
Soil is a magnificent thing. It's the medium that makes crop production possible. It's also rather mysterious. Even now, scientists are just beginning to scratch the surface of naming all the microbes that live in soil and understanding their functions and interactions. There's also much we do know and understand about soil and its ability... Read More
The very dry conditions in Ontario this summer have left many livestock producers very short on forage. The Hay East initiative (www.HayEast2012.com) is still looking for donations from the west and now has widened the request to include Ontario farmers with a little extra to spare. Jim Hair (@OFA1) posted this tweet this morning: #HayEast... Read More
Wheat midge feeding on kernels can cause significant damage, downgrading the crop and eating into yield. One of the big trip-ups for many farmers is timing a spray application — is anthesis too late? Do you wait for the entire head to emerge? (Hint: Anthesis is getting too late -- more on ideal spray timing... Read More
Let's put the gong show of a canola crop that was 2012 behind us and look ahead to 2013. Except that we can't entirely, because much of what plagued the crop this year is likely to be a factor next year (the one wild card being aster yellows). Clint Jurke, agronomist with the Canola Council... Read More
The drought conditions in Ontario this year squashed the potential of what was looking to be an exceptional corn crop. A number of producers suffered crop failures in some of the hardest hit areas. It wasn't just corn that was affected. The extreme heat took it's toll across a number of different crops. The damage... Read More