I’m pursuing more IT focused projects so I don’t know if this blog will be updated again. For now it will be left up for reference purposes. All the best!
Joel
Despite what legal descriptions suggest, fields are not perfectly flat, perfectly square, and perfectly featureless. Most fields have at least one pothole, a clump of trees, or an old grain bin that must be worked around. One of my projects this summer involved calculating just how much such an obstruction costs.
The legal term for negative effects of working around an obstruction are called the tangible portion of adverse effect. This contrasts with the intangible portions, which might be how ugly that patch of weeds in the pothole looks or how your heart skips a beat when your kids turns the corner a little too tightly around that old shed.
Some
of the difficulties that might arise from farming around an obstruction are soil compaction, uneven applications of seed, herbicides, and fertilizer, crop missed in harvest, lost efficiencies in the auto-steer system, ongoing weed proliferation, and extra equipment and machinery costs.
The overlapping of seeding, spraying and fertilizing equipment leads to wasted inputs. Overlaps can also cause uneven maturity, lodging, chemical burn, chemical residual, stunted crops, and higher levels of dockage. Extra operating time results from the field obstruction; extra care and attention are required in all field operations in the vicinity of the pothole.
Factors Used for Calculating Adverse Effects
There has been some work in the oil industry on quantifying the adverse effects of having an obstruction in a field. These calculations consider crop loss and weed control for the obstruction area, additional operating costs due to overlaps, and additional input costs due to overlaps. For instance farming around a 3 acre well site can cost around $1200.00 per year when the site is located away from the edges of the field.
This is an estimate and each site is different. Still it might be worth hiring a backhoe to bury that old rock pile so you don’t have to work around it any more.
I recently toured a greenhouse that’s growing over two acres of cucumbers. White flies are a big problem for greenhouse cucumbers, but not for field cucumbers. Out in the fields, white flies are quickly devoured by predatory insects, so they rarely cause any significant damage to cucumbers. The most cost-effective solution for controlling white flies in the greenhouse is to bring the white flies’ natural predators in.
Something that was really driven home to me this summer is the importance of predators in controlling pests. I walked fields that had a lot of soybean aphids and a lot of ladybugs. Soybean aphids are native to Asia. In North America they over-winter in the North Central United States and fly or are carried by winds to Manitoba. The aphids were below the economic threshold, so I advised not spraying. As I walked the fields through the summer I saw more and more ladybugs and fewer and fewer aphids. The natural predators had prevailed and the farmer was saved the cost and hassle of application.
Most pesticides are not very selective. They will kill pretty much any kind of insect. This can lead to situations where you spray for a pest that’s devouring your crop but you wind up killing its predators instead. This leads to a friendly environment for the pests and a bad situation becoming worse. There are some more selective pesticides out there, but most of them are still in the early phases of development.
One reason for waiting for the economic threshold is to avoid this kind of situation, where a pesticide application not only costs you the expense of application but also costs you yield. By knocking out the predators you’ve made your field friendlier for the pests. There is a Blackberry app from Ontario that has you enter the number of aphids and the number of predators to calculate a customized economic threshold.
There will always be more pests than predators, for the same reason that there are more deer than wolves. If you only see one ladybug for every thousand aphids, the populations are in balance. An adult ladybug can eat up to one thousand aphids per day.
It’s usually not worth the expense to bring in predators. Gathering enough ladybugs to have an effect on a field scale is a pretty big job. In Manitoba, the economic action threshold for soybeans is 250 aphids per plant with an increasing population. Target soybean populations are generally over 180,000 soybeans per acre. With the aphid population doubling in about a week, you’d need 45,000 ladybugs per acre to keep the levels down. I found prices for ladybugs online at $17 per thousand. Even if you could buy enough ladybugs, you’d be paying $765 per acre for ladybug control of aphids. Then there’s the problem of distributing all those ladybugs…
The biggest thing you can do to encourage natural predators is being very careful with pesticides. Walk your fields frequently, keep an eye on the economic thresholds, choose your pesticides wisely, and apply them carefully.
One of our clients planted two different varieties of soybeans side by side in a field. At harvest time he saw a huge difference in yield from one strip to the next. He estimated that planting the lower-yielding variety cost him half a million dollars across his farm. How can he prove that it is a variety issue and not some other factor?
First, he has a clear question he wants answered: “Does variety A outperform variety B on his farm?” This question is simple and can be answered objectively.
The second step is to plan how you will test this. You’ll want to pick a field that’s as uniform as possible, then divide it into at least six plots for each treatment. In this case, the treatment is pretty simple – variety A versus variety B replicated six times. Keep the width of your equipment in mind when planning out the plots. If you have a 50-foot air seeder and a 25-foot combine, don’t do 33-foot plots! If the field has a slope, plots should run up and down the slope and not across. Pair the plots so that you have variety A next to variety B, and make sure that variety A is not always on the left or right side. You want the plots to be randomly assigned across the field. This planning stage should be done well ahead of time – maybe on a quiet afternoon after a holiday meal.
In spring, it’s time go out into the field and mark the plots. Be sure to check the plots throughout the growing season and take notes on the growing conditions. If variety A on plot 5 gets run over by reindeer, it could skew the results. When it’s time for harvest the yield difference for each variety in each plot is measured with a calibrated yield monitor or weigh wagons.
Now that you have solid data to work with, it’s time to analyze it. I won’t go into the formulas here, but the key number is the Least Significant Difference (LSD). The LSD is the minimum difference needed to show that the difference is not due to chance. For example, if there is a yield difference of 1 bushel per acre between variety A and B and the LSD is 5, then the differences are probably because of other factors. If the yield difference is 10 bushels, there is in fact a yield difference.
In closing, here is vital advice from the Illinois On-Farm Research Guidebook:
“Keep in mind the three Rs of research: Replicate, Randomize, and Request help. Even professional researchers seek the advice of statisticians at any or all stages of the research process. If you’re not sure about anything, seek help. Better to take a few minutes to make sure you’re doing something correctly than to find out later that it was done wrong and the extra time and energy you spent were all for nothing.”
Tone Ag Consulting will be doing research plots for seeding rates, starter fertilizer, and other treatment trials with funding from the Manitoba Pulse Growers Association in 2012. Please phone if you are interesting in participating on your farm.
Fall is a great time to apply fertilizer. When the fields are ready to seed in spring, the last thing you want to do is delay seeding while you put down fertilizer. In fall, there’s usually plenty of time between when the crop is off and snowfall to put in fertilizer. Fertilizer prices are usually better in fall than in spring and if you apply it right away you don’t have to worry about storing fertilizer through the winter. The soil is generally much nicer to work on in fall than in spring – most falls you won’t leave big ruts and mess up your seedbed.
So why not just apply fertilizer in the fall and relax?
The biggest problem with fall application of fertilizer is that the longer the time between application and plant uptake, the less fertilizer remains available to the plant. Nitrogen fertilizer is especially vulnerable to losses. The primary cause of loss is denitrification, where the nitrate converts to nitrogen gas and blows away.
The top factors that affect denitrification speed are soil temperature and moisture. The cooler the soil, the less denitrification. The rule of thumb is that you should wait until soil temperatures go down to 10 C before applying nitrogen fertilizer. Like all rules of thumb, this is a rough guide – the biggest factor to consider is the weather. If you wait too long, you many not get all your fertilizer into the ground before freeze-up. Even at low temperatures, denitrification can continue if soils are wet. With this fall’s dry conditions, it would take about 3 inches of rain to get to that point.
With anhydrous ammonia, the goal is to have the fertilizer overwinter as anhydrous before converting to nitrate for use by the crop. For granular fertilizer, there are products that delay the release of nitrogen and reduce the losses from denitrification, e.g. SuperU and ESN. So far these products are promising, however they do tend to be more expensive than the same amount of conventional fertilizer.
If you get a warm, wet spring where soil moisture and temperatures are high for a long time prior to seeding, you may lose your nitrogen fertilizer. At that point you may end up fertilizing your field twice with the expense and extra work that entails. Don’t fall apply to fields that are likely to be too wet to seed in early spring.
If you’re applying manure on your fields, these considerations also apply. To get the maximum return from the manure, it should be injected or worked into the soil as soon as possible to discourage denitrification.
Current regulations state that fall fertilizer application must be completed by November 10, so if it’s a long warm fall you may not be able to apply fertilizer in time.
By timing fall fertilizer application carefully, you can get the same yields as you get by applying the fertilizer in the spring and take advantage of more time, better prices, and a better seedbed.
I hadn’t heard of the Rodale Institute before, but their Farming Systems Trial comparing organic and conventional agriculture looks interesting. It looks as though they are comparable in terms of yield, but the organic system commands a price premium and saves energy. My big question right off is whether the personnel costs were included for both systems. It’s definitely something worth keeping an eye on.
With the large number of unseeded acres this year, many producers are considering hedging their bets for next spring by planting some winter wheat. Here are 8 tips for maximizing your winter wheat production.
Remember that to be successful you have to pay attention to the details!
Winning Winter Wheat
One thing we’re seeing a lot of this year is spray drift on fields, particularly Roundup on Liberty Canola.
Here’s an article I wrote up on damage for the Agri-Post.
Dealing with Damage
Something awful has happened to your crop.
Spray drift from the neighbor’s has killed half your crop, cows have wandered over and munched their way through your plastic silage cover, strips of the field were missed, that low-flying plane sprayed your trees, or the wrong herbicide was put into the sprayer tank. Whatever the cause, things are looking ugly.
The key is: Write it down
The more information you record, the better prepared you are. Post-it notes or the back of a seed bag are fine for quick notes on the spot, but make sure those temporary notes get transferred to something you’re going to be able to find and read in two months.
Here are some suggestions of things to write down.
Take lots of pictures. If you can, line up a shot showing a damaged area next to an unaffected area. Pull out a couple damaged and undamaged plants and take a photo of them against a neutral background. Be sure to write down notes describing what each photo is showing.
Collect samples. We’re lucky to have an excellent Crop Diagnostic Centre here in Manitoba where experts examine agricultural samples at no charge. The standard procedure is to collect several plants with the damage symptoms, clean the soil off the roots, put the plants into a plastic bag, then ship them to the Crop Diagnostic Centre as quickly as possible. As always, write down details for each sample.
Mark damaged areas. Get some flags and outline at least one of the damaged areas. If you have a GPS, get coordinates for the damage. If you decide to go through to harvest, harvest damaged areas separately so that the yields can be compared to yields of undamaged areas. Write down a description of the marked areas.
If you want definite proof that a particular chemical was sprayed on your field there are several laboratories that analyze plants for traces of herbicides. This kind of analysis can cost at least a couple of hundred dollars per sample depending on the analysis required. Analysis usually needs to be done very soon after spraying. Depending on the plant and chemical even a delay of a couple of days can mean that the chemical is no longer present in the plant. Contact the lab for specific instructions before sending a sample.
If you have crop damage, you should retain a qualified agrologist as quickly as possible. Delays in getting a qualified professional to assess your situation can be costly.
Whenever possible, try to settle things amicably with the person responsible for the damage. Mistakes do happen and maybe next time it’ll be you that’s at fault. Remember the Golden Rule!
I recently attended a webinar on Managing Fusarium Head Blight Risk using WeatherFarm.
Key Principles for managing Fusarium Head Blight by Dr. Jeanie Gilbert of Cereal Research Centre (Plant pathologist for AAFC).
Using WeatherFarm’s online tool for FHB management decisions – Mike Grenier
Alison – Other WeatherFarm site tools
The Canola Council had an interesting webinar presented by Tom Wolf of AAFC: Spraying Tips for 2011. You have to submit an email address to register, but it’s free otherwise.
Here are my notes.
Ongoing dilemma is matching drift control versus coverage.
Spray Drift Tips
Efficacy and Coverage Tips
Quick Summary
