There are plenty of acres in Western Canada that are seeing significant drought stress. Much of Saskatchewan started the growing season with adequate amounts of precipitation, but then came the heat, and the taps turned off. 85 per cent of the province's cropland and 92 per cent of hay and pasture land in Saskatchewan is... Read More
Category: Western Canada
Growing a new crop can be tricky for a number of different reasons. There are so many unknowns, and at the end of the day, a farmer needs to know they will make a profit off the crop. Robyne Bowness Davidson, pulse specialist at Lakeland College, has been working with lupins for 20 years. The... Read More
Two farm groups that generally have opposing views on many agriculture policy files have joined forces in calling on the Canadian Grain Commission to halt changes to grain grading that are set to take effect on August 1, 2023. The National Farmers Union and the Wheat Growers Association (previously known as the Western Canadian Wheat... Read More
If you've ever had a sunflower seed snack that left a terrible taste in your mouth, you can thank lygus bug for that. More commonly a pest of broadleaf crops, such as sunnies and canola, lygus made an early appearance in spring wheat this year in Manitoba. For this video, Kelvin Heppner asks entomologist with... Read More
Sclerotinia is predictably unpredictable. Always lurking but not always a problem, so making the call to protect canola flowers can be a tough one in dry years. To talk sclerotinia (also known as white mould of soybean and dry beans) prevention and management, special guest host Kelvin Heppner is joined by Jeanette Gaultier of BASF,... Read More
Agronomic strategies that maximize fertilizer efficiency should be good for a farm's financial bottom line and the environment, but specific decisions about how fertilizer is applied should be made with the overall outcome in mind, stresses Marla Riekman, soil management specialist with Manitoba Agriculture. The 4Rs — the right source at the right rate, right... Read More
How low can you go? When it comes to silage, a lower harvest height can add real tonnage to the final yield tally. Kayla Slind, acting general manager with the Western Applied Research Corporation (WARC), says that harvesting close to the ground requires land rolling to protect the harvester from damage due to picking up... Read More
Maizex Seeds has announced it will sell and promote both its corn and soybeans under the Maizex brand for the 2024 seed year and marketing campaign. When Maizex launched a joint venture with Sollio Agriculture five years ago, it sought to maintain the companies' legacy brands, marketing corn seed as Maizex while soybeans were sold... Read More
Some technology is adopted because it becomes the only real option — like needing an email address or running tractors instead of horses. But plenty of technology is a "nice to have" not "need to have" and the defining line between the two usually hinges on the return on investment (ROI). In farming, ROI can... Read More
Cattle and calves on feed in the U.S. for feedlots with capacity of 1,000 or more head totalled 11.2 million head as of July 1, 2023. The inventory number was two per cent below year-over-year, according to this USDA, falling in line with trade expectations. Anne Wasko of the Gateway Livestock Exchange says this trend... Read More