Category: Crop Schools

There's a lot you can learn from late season scouting of canola. Not only is this prime insect feeding time, it's also when disease development reaches its peak. Prematurely ripened areas in a field should be a giant red flag to any farmer or agronomist. What are you looking for? It could be sclerotinia, blackleg,... 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

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

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

Abiotic — or "nonliving" — stresses can cause significant yield loss in canola. And, unfortunately, symptoms like sterile and distorted pods, flower blast and pale petals are not unique to one stressor, making misdiagnosis very common. For example, extreme heat, nutrient deficiency and herbicide injury can all result in very similar damage in canola plants.... Read More

The decision to swath or straight-cut is one you will ultimately have to make on your own. It may depend on a multitude of factors: the number of people available to help, the plant stand, how many acres you have to harvest etc. etc. But, what if you gave it a shot? Would you commit... Read More

A visual assessment of pulse crops isn't enough to know how well or poorly your inoculation program worked this year. What's more, it's important to track nodulation to ensure enough time to go in with a rescue nitrogen application, if warranted. So how do you know if your pulse crop is fixing enough N? Time... Read More

As the canola crop moves out of flower and into pod fill, farmers start to notice misshapen pods. Some curl from thrips damage, others may have insect feeding damage, but it's the tell-tale bladder-like pods of aster yellows that will make many farmers — hit hard by last year's infection — cringe when they see... Read More

If you're relatively new to growing soybeans, you're likely checking on the crop more often than others. That's good, of course, as scouting is rarely a waste of time. What you may be seeing at this time of year is leaf damage — insect feeding on leaf margins or in a "shot" hole pattern. What's... Read More