Category: Crop Schools

The layers of a soil profile are like a biography, telling the long-term history of a soil, but they also tell a shorter-term story about what happens with water and plant nutrients as crops are grown each year. This Soil School episode takes us not quite six feet down in a soil pit in a... Read More

Planting winter wheat on time is the most cost effective way to increase winter wheat yields in Ontario. That's the key message Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs cereals specialist Joanna Follings has for growers as winter wheat planting gets underway in the province. "Timely planting is so so critical to optimizing your... Read More

European corn borer wreaked havoc for decades in cornfields across North America before the adoption of transgenic traits (Bt) in the late 1990s effectively punched out the pest. Earlier this year at Southwest Crop Diagnostic Days at the University of Guelph’s Ridgetown campus, Ontario ministry of agriculture entomologist Tracey Baute noted that the yield-robbing insect... Read More

There are many different approaches to harvesting edible beans, from typical combine setups used for other crops to harvesters designed specifically for beans. Specialized bean combines have historically been pull-type designs, but a new machine harvesting beans on a farm in southern Manitoba is believed to be the first factory-built self-propelled bean combine in Canada.... Read More

It hurts RealAgriculture agronomist Peter Johnson to talk about broadcasting winter wheat seed into standing soybeans, but growers have been peppering him with questions about the practice. Johnson would rather see growers plant wheat with a drill but with many Ontario soybean fields "green as grass" as the calendar turns to September, in some areas... Read More

Palmer amaranth, the aggressive and highly competitive pigweed species that U.S. farmers have been tussling with for almost 30 years, has been found in Ontario. Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs weed specialist Mike Cowbrough says DNA testing has confirmed that a plant found in a Wellington County field is palmer amaranth. He... Read More

How can farmers diagnose soil fertility issues? What tools can identify nutrient deficiencies and best manage variability across fields and farms? On this episode of RealAgriculture's Soil School, Bernard Tobin visits Southwest Crop Diagnostic Days at the Ridgetown College campus, University of Guelph, to report on three soil testing and mapping technologies — GroundWork, SoilOptix... Read More

Picture this: You're headed out to the sprayer and the wind starts to blow. The knee-jerk reaction is to cancel all spraying operations for that particular time, right? Not necessarily. There is definitely such thing as too much wind to spray; however, some wind turbulence is not all bad. So says Tom Wolf, founder of... Read More

Small plot research has its place, however, there is a need for field-scale research, too. When you take research to field scale, it allows for genetic and environmental interactions that may not show up in small-plot results, says Jagroop Kahlon, of Alberta Pulse Growers (APG). Kahlon presented about the APG Plot to Field program at... Read More

There's plenty of crop management data available to growers in our mobile, connected world and it moves at ever-increasing velocity. On this episode of the RealAgriculture Corn School, AGRIS agronomist Dale Cowan looks at simple ways growers can tap into this data to make in-season management decisions and also run field trials to evaluate how... Read More