If farmers want to supersize their corn yields, they have to challenge conventional thinking and become students of the crop. That was the main message National Corn Growers Association yield contest champion Randy Dowdy shared with hundreds of farmers at the 2016 SouthWest Agricultural Conference in Ridgetown, Ontario earlier this week. In 2014, Dowdy set... Read More

In this week’s Word, Peter Johnson, resident agronomist for RealAgriculture and host of this weekly podcast, gives us the highlights of the SouthWest Ag Conference, and manages to squeeze in a few questions around cover crops, fungicides and soil sampling. Have a question for Wheat Pete? Call 1-888-746-3311, send him a tweet (@wheatpete), or email... Read More

If you’ve been attending agricultural conferences in the past few years, you’ve likely heard the phrase “social license to operate.” It essentially boils down to the approval of a certain industry by local communities and public stakeholders. With new regulations affecting farms, maintaining social license has become a priority for modern agriculture. At the 2015... Read More

The application of “big data” in farming makes sense in theory. More data enables better decision-making, but at the individual farm level it can be difficult to accumulate a large enough sample size for actionable agronomic analysis. Variety XYZ performed well on one field last year, so should you grow more of that variety next... Read More

David Lobb, professor in the department of soil science at the University of Manitoba, and senior research chair for the Watershed Systems Research Program, has been studying the effects of tillage erosion for over twenty years. Tillage erosion is the process whereby soil is moved down slope, to convergent areas of a field. It causes... Read More