Harvest is always a busy time and weather and mechanical delays are to be expected. But if all is going reasonably well and you've got several fields ready to harvest all at once, have you ever thought about the best way to prioritize harvesting one field over the other? Right now, there are still soybeans... Read More
Category: Crop Production
According to Dow Jones Newswires, CME Group has agreed to buy the Kansas City Board of Trade for US$126 million. CME already owns the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT). By purchasing Kansas City, CME would then offer wheat contracts for both soft and hard wheats, along with several other agriculture commodity contracts. While it's not... Read More
Fall is a great time to do a few things: soil test, research soybean varieties for next year and test for soybean cyst nematode (SCN). The three tasks can actually be done simultaneously. As Albert Tenuta, field crop plant pathologist with OMAFRA, explains in this video, now is a great time to test for SCN.... Read More
It was the bumper crop that almost was. Late in the summer, farmers watched helplessly as ripe canola ready for swathing or swaths waiting for the combine were tossed around and blown into trees, shattering on to the ground bushel after bushel of seed. Some estimate that as much as 10 bushels an acre was... Read More
According to the Canola Council of Canada's press release, president Patti Miller has urged the Standing Committee on Finance to "sustain the momentum of Canada’s canola industry by supporting strategic investments and policy direction in three priority areas – research, market development and market access." Her comments are in regards to up-coming potential changes to... Read More
Better timing of manure application with in-crop needs was the motivation behind developing a new low disturbance, shallow injection manure application toolbar. The Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Initiatives (OMAFRA), along with industry partners, developed the multi-coultered toolbar to try and find a made-in-Canada solution for in-crop manure applications for not just pastures... Read More
Larger discs sure do look menacing. They also require far more horsepower to pull, but they wear out more slowly than smaller-diameter discs. But there are two very important considerations when choosing planter disc size. The first is trash management (guess which one cuts through straw better? You may be surprised) and the second is... Read More
Many of the typical downgrading threats at harvest were a non-issue this year. There were no early frosts and very little rain to stain and sprout kernels. As such, much of the 2012 crop is testing very well with high germination rates and low weathering. The news is not all good, however, as extremely hot... Read More
The feel-good message about how healthy pulses are for us isn't new, but those who struggle to eat beans, peas, lentils and chickpeas in their whole form may be able to include more of them in their diet without changing the foods they already eat. That's the scope of a four-year pulse flour milling and... Read More
Dormancy or hard seed counts in peas is not a new phenomenon, but, interestingly, pea germination samples last year and again this year have had higher than usual hard seed counts. Hard seed is seed that has an impermeable seed coat — the seed is impermeable to water or the exchange of gases that occur... Read More