The line-ups at elevators in Ontario are continuing to slow down the corn harvest. With corn harvest happening all at once due to the wet weather dryers are having a hard time keeping up. According to Peter Gredig, the additional contributing factor to the long dryer lines is that the yields have generally been higher... Read More
Category: Crop Production
It's the nasty phytoplasma that took many Prairie farmers by surprise in 2012 — aster yellows. Carried on the aster leafhopper, aster yellows can infect over 200 species but took a particularly heavy toll on canola this year. The irony is, canola isn't even a preferred food source, as the leafhopper tends to prefer grasses.... Read More
Lentil struggled in some areas this year, as areas of Saskatchewan still had a excess moisture or the hangover from it to deal with. Still other areas were very dry, or suffered from extreme weather. Of note, fields with tight lentil/wheat rotations certainly suffered lower yields versus fields with at least one year of an... Read More
An increase of fusarium incidence in Alberta, combined with a very hot summer, has left some farmers unsure of what's wrong with some sample of wheat seed. In a very dry year, drought stress can shrivel kernels and cause them to look similar to fusarium damaged kernels. From a marketing perspective, knowing the difference and... Read More
In a good news/not so good news scenario, the 2012 corn crop is showing very low incidence of ear molds. That said, there are likely to be areas with higher numbers, and farmers are reminded to scout or test each field for possible infection, especially if the crop is destined for feed use. In this... Read More
The 2012 canola crop is not just smaller than expected, it's also light on oil content. According to the Canadian Grain Commission, this year's crop is averaging a mean oil content of 43.5% (on a 8.5% moisture basis, No. 1 grade). That's down quite a bit from last year when it was 45.2%. The 10-year... Read More
One of the most frequently asked questions I get concerns dormancy — what causes it and how it impacts crops destined for seed use. Dormancy in cereals is the most common of all, and it can be quite troublesome in certain years. This year, growing conditions have been excellent and very little dormancy has... Read More
This semester at the University of Guelph, Ontario Agriculture College, Francois Tardif and Mike Cowbrough's Crops 4240 - Undergraduate Weed Science students were given the assignment of making a weed identification video for a weed commonly found in Ontario. The objective is for the students to discuss identification at different growth stages and methods of... Read More
As farmers approach the mid-way point of the Ontario corn harvest (and quickly surpass it, we hope), preliminary reports suggest decent yields in spite of challenging conditions. That said, it most certainly wasn't an ideal growing season, and farmers aren't likely to see their highest ever production this year. What a challenging year does allow... Read More
13.4 million tonnes of canola is, historically, a big canola crop. For 2012, however, it's a total tonnage figure that disappointed many Western Canadian farmers. As we reported earlier this year, the swaths looked like a 35 bushel crop but yielded closer to 20. Many were shocked by the significantly lower Statistics Canada production number... Read More